Readers Should Know What to Expect From Your Story
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
I’ve both read a book and watched a movie recently that had bad reviews because the audience thought they were going to read/watch one thing and were delivered something very different.
This can probably be carried off if you have a rewarding twist of some kind. Gone Girl, which starts out as a missing person story before transforming into a psychological thriller and From Dawn to Dusk, which begins as a crime thriller before morphing into something very different come to mind. But there wasn’t a rewarding twist in these cases.
In the case of the film, the show’s premise operated as a kind of MacGuffin…an irrelevant plot device. Viewers thought they were watching a movie about the disappearance of the daughter of two police officers. The disappearance was only a set-up, though, and the means to propel the story in a totally different direction.
Maybe this could have worked with more skillful handling, but according to reviews, viewers were frustrated, calling the plot a “deception.” No one likes to feel they’ve been duped, especially if there’s not a payoff in terms of a cool twist or a satisfying ending (and resolution of the original plot point, MacGuffin or not).
The book was marketed as a different genre than it was. It was promoted as a mystery, but the focus of the plot was a romance, and the mystery faded into the background.
If a publisher is trying to market a book inappropriately, the author should push back. And independent writers should be careful not to mischaracterize a genre or plot with category metadata, the cover, and the book description. Otherwise, reader backlash could prove pretty tough.
Have you found yourself reading or watching something that ended up very different from what you thought it was?
Readers Should Know What to Expect From Your Story:
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