Lasagna & Layer Cake: On Reader Expectation

2/5 stars, wasn't what I expected

TOPIC | Revision, Technique

PROJECT STAGE| Pre-planning, Revision

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Foods with Layers

Let’s imagine you’re at a very fancy restaurant. For months you’ve been reading reviews and hearing glowing reports from your friends, and finally, finally, your reservation has come up. You are more than ready to experience this restaurant’s famous house specialty, a decadent lasagna.

Oof. You can smell it the moment you enter the restaurant. Who doesn’t love the scent of garlic and onions doing their thing? After you’re seated at the table, you barely look at the menu. You already know what you want. The lasagna, the lasagna, the lasagna. It was enough to see that their famous lasagna is featured front and center on the entrees page.

“I’ll have the lasagna,” you tell the server.

Minutes later, your meal arrives. Faster than you expected!

And what’s this? It’s not lasagna. It’s a huge slice of chocolate cake.

Objectively, it’s a more attractive plate than a pile of lasagna would have been. The slice is symmetrical, topped with edible gold flakes. The interior is black as coal-dust and partially obscured by a wondrous frosting that seems to combine the worlds of buttercream and ganache. Really, it’s the most beautiful slice of chocolate cake you’ve ever seen. A diner at the table behind you whispers that the cake is not only the most beautiful they’ve seen, it’s the most delicious they’ve tasted in a long time.

Are you happy?

You wanted lasagna. You were promised lasagna. Yes, lasagna and chocolate cake both have layers, but that’s where the similarities end.

Where’s your lasagna?

2/5 stars. Cake was good, but not what I expected.

If you went to a restaurant for the best lasagna and got the best chocolate cake instead, it wouldn’t matter if the cake was stunning.

One of our most important jobs as writers is to understand make sure we don’t spend all our time perfecting our chocolate cake recipe when our readers were waiting for lasagna.

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You Made Me Promises, Promises

Reader expectation is king in the chess game of writing. It’s the piece that beats everything else. Remember that lovely chocolate cake? It doesn’t matter how skillfully it was made if the diner was expecting lasagna. If you wrote a beautiful horror novel, it won’t matter if the reader who bought it thought the first chapter was promising a romantic romp. Everything that makes the cake a great dessert makes it a lousy pasta; everything that makes your horror a great mind-bender makes it a lousy comfort read—without changing a single step of the recipe or final product.

You can write an amazing book, but if it’s not the book the reader has been told to expect, they won’t like it, even if it was done well.

Consumer expectation changes the meaning of everything you have done.

A reader begins to develop expectations the moment they pick up a book. The cover and title suggest genre and tone. A well-known author’s name on the cover suggests a reading experience similar to that authors’ previous titles. The bookstore section suggests possible subject matter or story scope.

Even early hype drives expectation. Think of the last time you picked up a “hyped” book. Suddenly you have a different expectation; the book isn’t successful unless it’s great, unusual, buzz-worthy. What if it turns out to be just a perfectly nice, quiet novel? Doesn’t matter; it’s a failure in the consumer’s eyes. It was supposed to be the best lasagna ever, and it really wasn’t any better than what they could make at home.

Obviously, these sorts of expectations are often outside the author’s control. But I’d rather think about what we do control in the expectation department, since the answer is: rather a lot. In fact, a lot of expectation-mismatches are accidents. A writer doesn’t realize they’ve made promises, so the writer doesn’t know to keep them. Or a writer doesn’t realize they’ve made the wrong promise, so they writer can’t correct the misconception before it’s too late. Instead, they write their way into a novel with a prologue or first chapter sequence that doesn’t match the novel they end up telling. The novel goes out with a meet-cute opening (oh, a romantic romp! just what I’m in the mood for! thinks our innocent reader) and ends in a bloody climax of mindfuckery (oh GOD thinks our innocent reader, longing for brain bleach and vowing to never pick up one of your novels ever again).

A good writer’s job is to control these expectations. Great commercial* writing makes a promise, and then keeps it. Our writerly choices tell readers, as soon as possible, what genre to expect. The mood they can expect to be in. How action-packed it is, what age it is for, how dire the stakes might get, where to direct their eyes in all the narrative noise. A successful reading experience is often far less about giving the reader exactly the kind of book they normally like to read and more about saying “this is what you’re in for” and then making good on that promise every step of the way.

The promise: lasagna. The book: lasagna. It doesn’t matter if you found out you have a great cake recipe along the way. You said you were giving them lasagna, and you do what you promise.

*stories that are accessible to the broadest audience possible

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Ariel’s Horror Grotto

Have you seen The Little Mermaid? The Disney one? Man, I loved that movie when it came out. I was, like, eight or something, and just discovering my true genre love: stories about alienation.

The Little Mermaid is an old story, of course, and the original, as the alt-goth-the-folktale-was-better-than-the-movie sorts are keen to say, was much darker, with our Disney princess dissolving into sea foam in the end rather than landlubbing it forever with an Eric with a C. The underlying stories, however, are not that dissimilar, if you take them down to absolute bare bones. Lasagna and chocolate cake both have layers, after all.

But it’s painfully obvious to anyone who has watched the movie that you couldn’t have the red-headed Ariel turn into sea foam at the end of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Not because the magical system is slightly different, but because every other decision in the movie promises an entirely different sort of story. There’s singing sidekicks, playful quips, mirthful songs, a surface-level treatment (that’s an ocean pun) to everyone’s troubles that promises the viewer how deeply into reality one can expect to dive (another ocean pun). On the one side, Flounder the Plucky Friend establishes just how child-friendly and light the film will be. On the other, the Sea Witch—ominous, but not truly horrific to behold—establishes how dark the film will get. All of these characters swim and splash in warm, well-establish genre romance waters.

Every step of the way, it does what it promises.

In order to end up with a tragic or even just bittersweet ending, viewer expectations would have to be adjusted at every stage in the game. No. There was never going to be sea foam.

There’s a setting in The Little Mermaid that perfectly demonstrates everything the film promises: the grotto where Ariel stores her human treasures, objects from the surface world that have made it down to her. She keeps them in a museum that her friends tolerate with various levels of kindness and suspicion. What are these objects? Silverware, mirrors, corkscrews, jewelry. Innocent. Playful. Operating perfectly within the parameters set by all the other story decisions.

But in another version of this story, we might have been made more aware of how these objects came to be in her possession. We might have been made to think of shipwrecks, of death. We might have even been made to consider the legends of mermaids singing these ships to their doom. Possibly the objects might not have been simply relics but rather skeletons. Yes! A museum of human remains. Maybe a step further. Maybe corpses, flesh still rotting off them, as she had collected them so recently. Or it could have gone a different way, not darker, but deeper: Ursula the Sea Witch collects voices, perhaps Ariel might have collected drowned sailor’s memories, or something that formed a more direct but ethical parallel. Right? Wrong? Neither. Just different versions, all requiring different promises.

You can write rotting skeletons into Ariel’s grotto if you like—but ultimately, the rest must match. You must have promised this is a kind of story that might produce that level of grit.

2/5 stars. was not expecting horror grotto.

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Beginnings and Ends

I generally think about my reader at the beginning and end of my writing process—not so much in the middle, when I’m careening through the draft, barely in control of my brain and hands. At the beginning, while I’m brain-storming, I think about how I want the reader to feel, and then pick narrative toys I think will serve that end in my toy box for later use. And then, when I’m revising, I again think about the reader: ok, am I telling the story I meant to tell? Which part of this draft seems the most like that, and how can I make all the rest of it promise that?

A great way to study expectation-making is to use that great old textbook: a novel you love. Better yet, ten novels you love. Better yet, ten novels you love and five that you felt eh about. Open them up and study how they promise the story you’ll find within. Also study how they don’t. Think about how a mismatched cover or title makes you have to reconfigure your expectations as a reader. Think about how a mismatched prologue makes you have to be very patient to get to the book you actually remember loving. What doesn’t work is as teachable as what does. Look at prose. Look at the content they choose to show you, at the things they shy away from and the things they don’t. Think about how a character’s wretched decision on page one acts as shorthand to tell the reader what kind of wretched decisions they might expect later. Think about how a casual swear tells you what age range it might be aimed at. And so on and so forth.

This is the kind of story I’m telling you, the prose style says. This is how scared you can expect to be, whispers the anecdote that follows. This is what my protagonist is most afraid of (and you can bet I’m going to make them confront it later), the prologue shouts. This is why this main character is worth looking at, hisses the killer on page five, although readers do not find out until later that it is the killer.

Beginnings and endings are the most crucial bits. Of novels. Of chapters. They should match. One should promise the other. You want in all instances for the relationship between them to feel not predictable, but inevitable. Your reader might not have predicted that the magical king your characters were looking for was dead all along, but they probably guessed that all the tonal decisions that came before indicated there wasn’t going to be an easy, wand-waving fix to the emotional and physical turmoil at the end of it all.

Do what you promise. And if you find, on the reread of your draft, that you haven’t, easy peezy: go back and work on your promise.

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MY KIDS HAVE PAWS!?!?!?!?

I saw this today:

Cute, right? Probably? At least, it was surrounded by other cutesy sayings. But as I looked at it, thinking about how I was going to return to Stiefvaterland to write this post, I thought about how in another circumstance, the words on the plaque could have instead felt quite sinister:

MY KIDS HAVE PAWS!?!?! Paging Dr. Moreau . . .

Again: reader expectations morph the meaning of your story. The series of events doesn’t change; the interpretation does.

Let’s conclude this thing by imagining an otherwise neutral scene: A girl goes into a late-night Walmart, buys a bottle of cleaning solution, a bucket, and a fringey decorative pillow before getting into a truck and driving away. With our tools for adjusting reader expectations, the events can skew sinister or hilarious or piteous. We can make the readers hold their breath, fearful for what happens next. We can make them laugh until they cry. We can promise a horror, a comedy, a romance, a literary coming-of-age. We can accomplish all this with the tiniest of moves, leaving the actual series of events unchanged. And we can do it by accident, which is why first readers are so crucial.

How does it change the meaning of the scene with these different opening lines?

“It was the worst night of her life.”

“Nothing a little bit of bleach couldn’t get out, her mama used to always say, and also, always buy yourself something a little nice on a bad day.”

“No one could say he didn’t have it coming.”

“The night the aliens landed to clean up the universe, she was doing a little bit of house-keeping herself.”

Good? Bad? You can’t actually judge these openings without knowing what novel you intend to write. The best opening is not the most skillfully or beautifully or wittily written opening. The best opening is the one that most truthfully and tantalizingly promises the novel to follow.

Lasagna, it says, and then gives you 400 pages of lasagna.

(and possibly gives you the chocolate cake as a separate e-book extra later).