Life Is Larger Than What We See In Our Heads
If I said to you, “Look! It’s a trucker!” odds are, before you turned your head to look, your mind would conjure the image of a male. You’d be less likely to imagine a female tricler, or a trucker with vitaligo, or transgender trucker, even though all those things are valid and exist in thr ereal world.
In the real world, we walk around with subconscious biases for how things ought to look and sound, and this may be based on how things commonly are, or based on stereotypes that are far off from reality. Regardless, the biases exist within us and effect our expectations and therefore how we interact with the world.
So when we see the unexpected, say, a female trucker, we are momentarily shocked—we’re put in a situation we aren’t usually in, which forces us to be in the present moment. There’s no subconscious pattern created for novel situations. And following said experience, we’re more likely to remember it since required more brain power to process and navigate.
The Unexpected Can Enhance Your Writing
The principle of the unexpected—of people and situations that don’t neatly fit into our common ideas—this principle can be used when crafting stories. Concepting a story where a belly dancer is revealed to be a man, or a story where the setting is described as a house but is revealed to be a dungeon—these stories shock readers, make the narrative more salient in their minds. By practicing your skills as a Visionary, someone who plays around with the various ways a single story can be presented, you, too, can create plots that hook readers.
If in a story I say there’s a waitress, a generic image will come to mind. But if I have a story set in China with a Muslim waitress wearing a hijab, you’ll see something more vivid. And uncommon. Questions will come to mind: how is the woman speaking Chinese? Was she born there? How unique!
Subverting expectations can have splendid results. When creating a plot for your next story, try experimenting with this.
The Fiction Writer 