: Re: What factors in fiction arouse readers' expectations? Feedback from my writer's group tells me that my recent stories leave promises unfulfilled and important questions unanswered. So I've become

@Debbie451

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(The name for "Textual Weight" is Chekhov's Gun. Briefly, every element in the story must have a purpose, or don't put it in there. There are LOTS of examples and variants on TVTropes, with the standard TVTropes caveat.)

Other than your excellent list so far, I'd add plot complications or obstacles. The obstacle doesn't necessarily have to be defeated, but it does have to be dealt with.

An example: if the heroine punches out a guard and stuffs him into a closet, there are a number of things which could happen:

The guard wakes up and goes after the heroine.
The guard wakes up but the heroine has already gotten away.
The guard wakes up, but the heroine locked the closet.
The closet is locked, but the guard makes enough noise for someone to
find him and let him out.
The heroine tied and gagged the guard before locking him in the
closet.
The other guards find the tied and gagged guard in the locked closet
and realize the heroine is in the building doing her heroic thing.
The heroine hit the guard so hard she actually killed him.

Et cetera. Many potentials. But what you can't do is just have the guy in the unlocked closet with no restraints indefinitely and nothing else happens. The guard in the closet represents potential. You have to counter the potential or let the potential happen (which becomes the next obstacle for your protagonist).

A different way of dealing with expectations is (TVTropes warning again) the Brick Joke. This is when you set something up casually far in advance which pays off well after the audience may have forgotten about it.

An example: In Star Trek's "The Trouble With Tribbles," tribbles are established to squeal in distress when they encounter Klingons. At the end of the episode, Kirk is carrying around a tribble which abruptly squeals when presented to a man who appears to be human. This unmasks him as a surgically altered Klingon.

Now, if you set something up in the beginning (a Chekhov's tribble, if you will) which then doesn't pay off (there's no traitor to unmask), your audience may wonder why the hell you bothered telling us that tribbles hate Klingons in the first place. If you're going to throw a Brick Joke into the air, remember that it has to land again somewhere.

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