A thing I like to say to my students, maybe too often, is expectations ruin everything.
That’s the good news.
Also, the bad news.
It’s good news when we are trying to build adversity—or in memoir, when we’re puzzling out why everything went wrong—because expectations are a great place to look.
I interviewed a marriage therapist once who said that unspoken expectations were the chief cause of strife among her married patients. They carried beliefs into their marriages—sometimes subconsciously, sometimes acutely aware of them—about how they’d celebrate Thanksgiving, or who’d be responsible for cooking dinner. But they never talked about them. When their new spouse failed to live up to those expectations? Disaster.
So when things are going off the rails for your characters, and you’re not sure why, look to their expectations. Are the characters even aware of them? In my memoir classes, students often discover that they’d held unarticulated hopes and beliefs. That they were secret from everyone, including themselves, created anguish and chaos, often for everyone involved.
But there are other expectations working on us when we write — those we anticipate our readers will hold. Those can sometimes be helpful, when they’re things like, “Don’t bore your reader.” Or, “Readers expect the beginning of the story to grab their attention.”
More often, though, what we think our readers expect from us, or what they actually do expect, can be unhelpful, to say the least.
Author Brit Bennett said of her debut novel, The Mothers, that, after it came out, readers seemed to think her characters would adhere more to stereotypes.
“It’s a book about Black characters, but I think there’s a way in which people are reacting to the characters — and their not conforming to what is expected — which has been very telling of what people think or expect about Black narratives,” Bennett told Electric Literature. “Black people are as diverse as any group of people, which should go without saying! But it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that that’s shocking or surprising to people in a way that I just didn’t think it was.”
You want to resist falling into that trap, unless of course, you’re going to use it to surprise the reader. [Spoiler ahead!] Think of the ending of the movie Frozen, when it seemed like the movie’s happy ending would be the same as most other Disney princess movie happy endings, with Anna marrying her paramour, Kristoff. Instead, the ending of the movie reveals that the love of Anna’s life is her sister, Elsa, and vice versa.
For writers, I think the most insidious way expectations ruin everything is when we set them for our own stories, creating in our minds the idea of how a story will resonate, or read, or succeed.
I wrote about that expectation recently, so I won’t repeat myself, except to quote, again, Gotham teacher Teresa Wong:
“To exist, [your story] has to be a little bit flawed,” Teresa said. “But then at least it can be shared, right?”
Kelly Caldwell
Dean of Faculty