Wanna surprise your audience? Surprise yourself!

Often we think of plot twists, when it comes to surprising an audience. And some writers will go far out of their way to create a twist, perhaps even so far, that they will inadvertently have left their good senses behind. Twisting the plot is just the most obvious, but not only way of keeping your audience on their toes. Surprising material exist at many levels, from the way a character phrase a question to the grand dramaturgy in your arrangement of scenes.

It all comes down to striking a balance between repetition and development. We want to repeat patterns, because it establishes recognition and awareness. Both comedy and tragedy relies on the repetition to establish a motif and then on a surprising development to exact the laugh or the tears.

Often I find that the balance is off in many dramatic productions. Either there's too little development. The pattern is being established, but in the most predictable way, and in the worst cases, so the pay-off is seen miles away. The other extreme is when the motif is not established properly, because the creator is simply afraid to repeat himself or afraid to bore the audience and jumps all over the place with new ideas. For me the key is not to be afraid of repetition, but instead have a bit of fun with it – by creating variations along the way. This also helps to keep the audience guessing and hopefully not see the pay-off before it arrives.

In my own work, I keep challenging myself to create small surprises in everything. It's not about being clever, but about opening your senses; feel if you are boring yourself a bit with the stuff you come up with. And if you do, surprise yourself by choosing a different path. No, they are not going to kiss, even though the moment is perfect. Instead he asks her, if she thinks, he is that easy to get. She has been wearing dresses in different colours – but suddenly she's in a grey, dirty coverall. You are your own audience – are you surprising yourself or just keeping ourself busy by putting words together, painting-by-numbers-style?

It's both far more difficult and far too easy to second-guess an audience, you'll most probably never even meet. Can you master the discipline of being your own audience, then you have the best test at hand, to see if you are being trite or surprising – just surprise yourself.