Look Through Your Audience's Eyes

There are a number of techniques that you can use to surprise the reader. Many of them involve misdirection. Consider the hero coming across a shadowy figure several times along his travels. Now, as the author, you know that this character is actually a fellow hero who is watching over the protagonist and keeping him safe from hidden dangers. Because you know that he is a good guy, it is easy to try to paint him as such. You like him and you know that everybody else will, so there's no reason to smear his face. Unfortunately, you have taken away his power. Now he's not a shadowy figure, just a guy who wears a lot of black. When he shows his true nature, it doesn't surprise the reader because he didn't seem that bad in the first place.

Now, the above example is a painfully obvious one, but it leads to the more important point. When you write, you have to look through your audience's eyes. As the creator of the story, you know far more about your characters and their surroundings than your audience ever will and you know it before your story is written. But just because you know it doesn't mean your audience does. How will people interpret a scene without the full context behind it? Maybe the scene will be obvious or lend itself to the most likely theories. Maybe the shadowy figure really is a spy and is not to be trusted.

The artistic use of this technique is to make your audience think a particular way with incomplete information so that you can blow them away when they learn the whole story. The technical use of this skill is to make sure that when people read your work, they think exactly what you want them to, whether it is the truth or not.

Little tricks can help. When two people see each other in the distance, friends will smile and shout and enemies will either show no emotion or start a fight. When you say that your main character saw another person and walked toward him, we could assume that they are friends or enemies. If you intended them to be riends, then throw in extra details. Say that he saw his friend and felt a big grin form, that he waved his hand through the air to get attention.

Writing is all about leading your reader exactly where you want them to go. Be your own reader and see where your writing takes you. That is one of te safest methods of finding out if your writing is doing what you intend it to do.