Anatomy of a WHAM MOMENT, Part III (or, Slowing Down and Sticking the Landing)

Greetings, Readers and Raptors!

At last we have reached the end of our series on the ever-important WHAM MOMENT! (Click here if you missed Part I or Part II.) And we’re wrapping things up with what may be the trickiest kind of WM to pull off: the Savvy Wham Moment.

Now before we get started, I just want to clear something up. You may be thinking, “What’s the point of a WM if it isn’t a surprise? Isn’t the idea supposed to be that the moment sideswipes us because we aren’t expecting it?”

You’re right: the surprise is part of what we value in Naïve WMs. But that’s not to say that Savvy WMs are somehow lacking in storytelling oomph. They can pack a powerful punch if done correctly, because they get their energy from the audience’s hopes or expectations surrounding an anticipated moment.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here—let’s start with the basic ingredients:

1. A Reveal

Shocking! Simply shocking!

Naïve WMs, as we know, require a secret—something the writer is deliberately hiding from characters and readers so that when the secret is finally divulged (after the proper sprinkling of clues and red herrings, of course), the reader and POV character both fall down on their butts in shock.

Savvy WMs, on the other hand, take a different tack. In this circumstance, the content of the secret is still astonishing to the characters in question. However, we readers get special readerly-privileges. Whether it’s through omniscient narration or POV-hopping or even the careful way that the author directs our attention to certain points, we are expected to know the secret in question before it is ever revealed. Which means that (in contrast to a Naïve WM) in a Savvy WM, the power lies not in the secret, but in the moment of truth itself…

…which leads us to our next point:

2. The Tease (optional)

Yes, the audience may know the secret in question, but it’s up to you to make the most of that knowledge, and while it may not be appropriate in every circumstance, you can often milk these moments for all they’re worth. Whether it’s misleading us with some overly-vague language, a blatant Ship Tease (e.g. a Moment Killer), or just generally toying with the audience’s expectations, you can have a bit of fun tricking your readers into thinking the reveal is about to happen before pulling the rug out from under them.

Also, be aware that you can indeed “tease” your readers by making it seem as though things are going to go in a very different direction from what they expect. That said, such red-herring teases do tend to have the effect of confusing/deflating audience expectations, which could negatively impact reader response when the actual WM happens. Such an example (in my opinion) from the Harry Potter universe is Harry’s relationship with Ginny—while Ginny has a huge crush on Harry at a young age, she eventually gets over him and starts dating other people. Thus, indicating that Ginny and Harry would probably not be an item = red-herring tease. It isn’t until a couple of years later that Harry begins to find Ginny attractive. While this might be a realistic depiction of how such things happen in real life, I found it emotionally unsatisfying and felt that it made their relationship harder to believe, simply because Ginny wasn’t really in the picture all that much during those intervening years (in contrast to, say, someone like Hermione or Luna). If Ginny had had more of a presence in the story and had seemed more like a legitimate romantic option, and if the teases over the years had pointed more towards her than away, then the pairing would have felt less forced to me. (And no, I don’t think Harry should have ended up with Hermione or Luna—just that it would have been more understandable if he had.)

Oh, and of course, rhythm is also important in making a tease seem credible (i.e. as though it could actually be the real McCoy)—see Rhythm section below.

Spoiler: this 'ship does not go down.

(Note: these example tropes I’ve just pointed out do tend to be slightly comic and related to romantic relationships, but a tease doesn’t have to be funny or romantic in nature. That said, Love Confessions or the Big Damn Kiss tend to fall into the Savvy WM category because it’s often fairly obvious to the audience if characters have feelings for one another. Thus, the resulting teases for those kinds of WMs will probably be of a romantic nature. *coughRonandHermionecough* Hence why I am yet again using Harry Potter examples in order to avoid spoilers.)

3. Rhythm (semi-optional)

So you’ve got your reveal all picked out and have (possibly) psyched your readers out at some point thinking it was going to happen. Now, as you’re going in for the kill, rhythm comes into play. As you may recall, rhythm is also one of the key components of a Naïve WM; however, there is (in my opinion) a noteworthy difference in the rhythmic patterns of these two types of WMs:

• Naïve WMs tend to occur either in fast-moving, exciting moments or in calm, peaceful moments in order to create a maximum shift in the rhythm of the scene.
• In Savvy WMs, on the other hand, you need to build up to the moment that the audience has been waiting for (or dreading, as the case may be). Which often means slowing down your pace. Slowing waaaay down. Time goes to a crawl, and the POV character is acutely aware of little details that s/he might not pick up on otherwise. And then…BAM. WM hits!

Again, as with the tease, this is not a strictly necessary part of a Savvy WM, but it will probably make the moment much more satisfying for the audience…

…which leads us to our final point:

4. Sticking It

Kittehs alweyz stikz landins

You’ve made it to the reveal. Your character has just said or done something that has irrevocably altered his/her relationship with the other character(s). Now you have to follow through and strive for what Olympic gymnasts aim for: sticking your landing. If you rush through the WM without giving your characters and readers a moment to fully experience and process what just happened (for better or for worse), you’ll risk losing the emotional impact of the moment. This advice is useful in the case of Naïve WMs as well, but not as crucial because the reader’s surprise does some of the work for you. In a Savvy WM, on the other hand, you’ve got readerly expectations to meet. After all, if you’ve done your job properly, your audience has spent a bit of time pondering how/when this moment was going to occur, and no matter how you make it happen, you’ve got a bit of an obligation to your readers. So don’t drag through it, but don’t rush past it either. Just land—boom—and let the moment sink in, however briefly. For added weight, put the WM at the end of a paragraph, or better yet, make it its own paragraph. Simple, straightforward sentences are good tools as well.

Then move on and let the story roll forwards.

And there you have it: the Anatomy of a Wham Moment! I hope you learned something, or at least that you found it interesting to take a few minutes out of your day to think about the mechanics of storytelling. It’s something I enjoy pondering, if you haven’t noticed. And a few questions for you, as always:

1) Once again, do you agree with my overall WM sketch? Disagree? Think I left out something crucial? 

2) Is there some other aspect of storytelling you’d like me to examine? Leave a comment and let me know!

Anatomy of a WHAM MOMENT, Part II (or, Where the Hell Did That Come From?)

Greetings, Readers and Raptors!

In Part One of this miniseries on Wham Moments, I began by defining a WM and outlining the two types (Naïve and Savvy, in case you’d forgotten). It was a basic anatomical overview, if you will, but now that we’ve got that out of the way, we get to delve into the precise musculature of the first type.

Hail the Queen of NWMs! All hail!

Also, I must warn you that, for the purposes of this post, I’m going to be using a couple examples of Naïve WMs from the Harry Potter series. This is for a couple of reasons. One is, of course, that J.K. Rowling is indisputably a master of the Naïve WM. The other is that it allows me to be specific without worrying that I’m spoiling things for you guys (though if you’re one of the rare souls with no exposure to HP, you might want to give this a pass).

So without further ado, I give you the anatomy of a Naïve Wham Moment! Let’s start with the major structures, shall we?

1. Secrets

This is the glaringly obvious one (hah, ironic). All WMs depend upon there being something to reveal, but secrets are particularly crucial where Naïve WMs are concerned because the secrets need to be just as much a surprise to the audience as they are to the characters. Which means you’ll need to build you secrets into the story with a great deal of care. Such secrets can be:

• suspicions being confirmed, but with an added twist of unsuspected information
• information that is totally unknown to (and unexpected by) the characters and audience
• stuff that’s been covered up by red herrings (i.e. X turns out to be Y instead of Z)

I don’t know that I have a lot of advice on this particular point because the type of secret will depend on the plot and the type of story, but ideally you need to make sure you have something with some weight to it. If you spend all this time and energy building up a WM only to have the reveal be comparatively weak, then you’ll be dancing with that dazzlingly disappointing beast known as “Anticlimax”. Trust me, you don’t want that. He has two left feet.

2. Clues

And here I thought clues were supposed to be hard to find...

In my opinion, the best WMs are preceded by at least a couple subtle hints scattered throughout the story. I think there are a few basic types of clues:

• things you’d like the reader to notice so that the WM doesn’t come completely out of the blue, even if it is a surprise
• very subtle tidbits you want to hide in the story solely for the benefit of the reader who rereads the book and goes, “Ohhh, THAT’S what that meant!”
• things that seem innocuous/random enough at the time, but which turn out to have great significance later in the story (also known as Chekhov’s guns)

As mentioned above, one of the major benefit of clues in a story is that when the reveal does happen, it doesn’t leave the reader going “WTF?? Where did that come from?” Some secrets are so huge that they really do need some foreshadowing in order to not feel like an ass-pull. It’s a fine line to walk, though. On one hand, you’ve got to plant the clues in subtle ways so that they don’t seem noteworthy—but on the other hand, the foreshadowing can’t be so obscure that nobody notices it, or so obvious that the reader figures out the twist too soon. This is the type of clue that I use the most often in my own writing, and the kind that I struggle with. How much is too much? How much is too little? The only real way to find out is to run it by some beta readers, and even then, some readers will pick up on your hints and others won’t.

Somehow, I don't think this is the kind of gun that Anton Chekhov had in mind. Pavel Chekov, on the other hand...

I’ve basically come to the conclusion that there’s no perfect way to do this. My friend Casey (of The Bookish Type) and I have had this discussion several times about a certain book (that shall remain nameless) in which she got the full benefit of the author’s WM because she didn’t recognize a couple of key details as clues. I, on the other hand, immediately made the connection between the two tidbits of information and then spent the rest of the book being annoyed at the protagonist for not figuring it out sooner. As a result, the WM fell flat for me. It’s not that I’m a more astute reader than Casey (there’s another book where our situations were reversed), but just that, for whatever reason, those pieces of info stuck out to me as significant. And most of the time, that’s not something you can really engineer. (More on this under Red Herrings.)

The problem with clues is that the necessary Conservation of Detail in fiction means that including a detail about something sets the reader up to expect that that detail might have significance later on. The trick is to bury the detail, preferably in a pile of red herrings. For example, none of us thought much of the collection of items Harry scraped together in the Room of Requirement when trying to mark the spot where he’d hidden the Half-Blood Prince’s book: a stone bust sporting a wig and an “old discolored tiara”. It’s a throwaway reference to some random objects. Only much later do we discover that the tiara was in fact the Lost Diadem of Ravenclaw.

But on the other hand, sometimes that WTF sentiment is precisely the feeling you want to leave us with (I’m looking at you, Chapter 12 of Mockingjay), particularly if it comes at the end of a chapter and compels the audience to keep reading. Again, it just depends on the plot and the kind of story you’re writing. Thus, it’s probably wise to give some thought to the sort of reaction you’d like to get out of your readers and to plan accordingly. (More on this under Rhythm.)

3. Red Herrings

Closely related to clues are red herrings, or false clues to throw the reader off. Sometimes, the red herrings may simply be extraneous details (as in the aforementioned Diadem of Ravenclaw example). Sometimes, these may come in the form of explicit information that turns out to be false. Such an example in the HP universe might be the Ministry of Magic’s firm belief that Sirius Black was responsible for the death of the Potters.

Such deceptive little fish they are...

In other circumstances, red herrings may take the form of information that is interpreted one way by the characters but which turns out to mean something else entirely, and it is the characters’ interpretation of the information (rather than the information itself) that serves as the red herring. One of my favorite examples can be found in Chapter Two of Order of the Phoenix as Harry argues with Uncle Vernon about the attack on Dudley:

—————————————————————————

“How many times do I have to tell you?” said Harry, temper and voice both rising. “It wasn’t me! It was a couple of Dementors!”

“A couple of—what’s this codswallop?”

“De – men – tors,” said Harry slowly and clearly. “Two of them.”

“And what the ruddy hell are Dementors?”

“They guard the wizard prison, Azkaban,” said Aunt Petunia.

Two seconds’ ringing silence followed these words and then Aunt Petunia clapped her hand over her mouth as though she had let slip a disgusting swear word. Uncle Vernon was goggling at her. Harry’s brain reeled. Mrs. Figg was one thing—but Aunt Petunia?

“How d’you know that?” he asked her, astonished.

Aunt Petunia looked quite appalled with herself. She glanced at Uncle Vernon in fearful apology, then lowered her hand slightly to reveal her horsey teeth.

“I heard—that awful boy—telling her about them—years ago,” she said jerkily.

“If you mean my mum and dad, why don’t you use their names?” said Harry loudly, but Aunt Petunia ignored him. She seemed horribly flustered.

—————————————————————————

While this interaction obviously contains its very own WM, what we’re actually interested in is the red herring embedded in the conversation. At this point in the series, the reader (like Harry) has no reason to suppose that Aunt Petunia means anyone other than Lily and James. However, as we find out in Deathly Hallows, the conversation was actually one that took place between Lily and Snape. Rowling subtly lampshades this red herring by having Harry ask his aunt why she doesn’t name the people she’s talking about, but the moment is over shortly thereafter, and we don’t suspect anything until the corresponding WM of realization comes in the form of Snapes memories two books later. (Snape’s story is actually riddled with red herrings of this nature which are all overturned by that Deathly Hallows chapter, which is part of what makes the chapter one big awesome WM.)

4. Rhythm

Secrets can be plotted out, and clues and wee crimson fishies carefully placed, but unless you’re fortunate enough to have an ear for it, rhythm is one of the hardest things to master where all WMs are concerned. Just as it is important for a secret to carry enough weight for it to pack some punch when revealed, the rhythm of the story leading up to the reveal is critical to creating a proper climax for the WM. In fact, if you look at it from a purely rhythmic perspective, a WM is really just a method for creating an abrupt shift in rhythm.

Rhythm rhythm rhythm!

Thus, as you can guess, WMs are often most effective when placed in/around a scene climax. Exciting/interesting things are happening and you’ve got the audience’s complete focus, so if you can find an appropriate scene climax where the info can be be revealed, you’re set! If you find you need to build a climax from scratch, though, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Arguments and fights are a great way to build up to a WM. Not only does the escalation inject excitement/tension in a scene, but you get the extreme contrast between that heightened energy and the slam-on-the-brakes full-stop provided by a Naïve WM. (See the HP scene quoted in the Red Herrings heading.)
• Alternatively, you can sometimes get the same effect by presenting the WM in a very calm or happy moment, particularly if the WM is negative. The characters’ reactions (e.g. something along the lines of, “WHAT?!”) will draw a contrast to the previous atmosphere, thus creating the desired rhythm shift.
• When you’re writing a WM scene, pay attention to the rhythm you’re creating with your sentences, particularly the ones leading up to the reveal itself. Are they short and quick? Long and languid? How much punctuation are you using? Make sure the mood you’re creating with your sentences matches the mood you’re trying to create in the story.

And there you have it! The anatomy of a Naïve Wham Moment as I see it. Do you agree with my overall sketch? Disagree? Think I left out something crucial? Leave a comment and let me know. And keep your eyes peeled for Part Three, where I’ll be discussing Savvy Wham Moments (don’t worry, I doubt it’ll be anywhere near as long as this post)!

Anatomy of a WHAM MOMENT! Part I (or, The Things that Change Everything)

So, there’s this awesome story.

I know a lot of awesome stories (or I try to, anyways), but this one will remain nameless for the purposes of this post because today’s subject deals with River Song’s favorite word:

(I've never actually seen an episode with River, but some of my best friends are Whovians, so I am well-informed.)

Bear with me here, though. I promise to try to keep this as vague as possible (not even going to tell you whether it’s a movie or TV show or novel or play or what), but if you’re still concerned that you might recognize it, jump past the outlined section below.

—————————————————————————

In the awesome story in question, Character A is in disguise and using the alias “Character C”. While using this persona, A meets Character B, and the two become friends. However, the closer they get, the more C’s story starts to not add up in B’s mind. In particular, there are these occasional references made (by C and others) to a certain Character A who is somehow connected to C, though the exact nature of that relationship is unclear.

Over time, the clues pile up until B finally begins to suspect the truth. It becomes a matter of great importance, because if C is indeed not truly C, then their entire friendship is built upon a lie. B wants to be sure. B has to be sure.

One day, the two of them are talking, and B seems weirdly preoccupied. A can’t figure out what’s going on and finally calls B out on it. At which point, B takes a deep breath and says, “I need to know something. Can I trust you, A? Really trust you?”

“Of course you can,” A replies earnestly.

*B sighs, gets up, and walks out of the room*

*beat* *beat*

A: Oh shit.

—————————————————————————

Seriously. If you click those links, I take no responsibility for excessive time spent on TVTropes. You've been warned.

Reveals like this are probably my favorite moments in fiction—that instant when one little thing drastically changes the relationships of the characters forever. They are sometimes referred to as ”Wham Lines” by TV Tropes, but they don’t have to be lines. Such moments can rest upon:

• the discovery of an object
• an observed moment of interaction
• the intentional revelation of new information
• or a “You Just Told Me” conversation (like the one above)

So for the purposes of this post, I’m going to call them Wham Moments.

But how exactly does one go about crafting a Wham Moment (WM)? While I can’t claim to be an expert, but I do have a few ideas to offer on the matter. In the next few posts, I’ll actually be discussing two different types of WMs. Many great WMs are ones that shock the reader as much as the characters, but some such moments happen in-universe only, creating instances where the reader may be aware of the secret in question and  is waiting anxiously to see if/when the reveal will happen. I’m going to call these WMs “Naïve” and “Savvy”, respectively. While Naïve WMs have the advantage of blowing the audience’s mind, you can still get a lot of plot mileage out of Savvy WMs because the dramatic irony can actually heighten the impact of the revelation, particularly if we know there’s a good chance it’ll happen and find ourselves desperately hoping that it will (or won’t, as the case may be).

Yeeaaah airports!

I’m going to leave it there for now because I have to go get on a plane (YAY WINTER BREAK!), but keep your eyes peeled: our post about Naïve Wham Moments will be coming up here soon!

And as always, a question for you, dear readers and raptors:

1. Are there any authors that stand out to you as being particularly talented where WMs are concerned? Which ones, and why (only tell us if you think you can articulate it without spoilers, though)?