: 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

@Lee1909368

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Orson Scott Card in his Elements of Fiction Writing - Characters & Viewpoint talks about "a contract with the reader". I'll try to describe it as best as I remember.

The first contract you make with the opening of the story. If you open with a murder, readers expect a murder mystery, so you need to close it with the resolution of that murder. If you start with murder, then switch to the victim's wife and how it disrupted her life, and end with the widow setting her life in order without the murder being solved, the contact is broken and reader will be disappointed. However, if you open it with the victim's wife, and then continue with how the murder impacted her life, you can not close with the resolution of the murder without showing how the wife set her life in order. The opening conflict sets the type and the focus of the story, and you need to resolve that conflict before the story ends. Other things may happen in the meantime - for example, if you opened with the victim's wife, catching his killer will be an interesting bonus to the story, but the reader will still focus on the widow and her life. You need to tell the reader what to expect from the story from the very beginning. For example, I got very irritated once when I was reading a story that was set on a spaceship, when about a chapter into the story a vampire appeared. I was assuming, based on the beginning of the story, that I was reading a science fiction story, not a fantasy. I felt cheated, it annoyed me so much I stopped reading.

The second contract is happening throughout the rest of the story. If you spend some time on something, the reader will expect that thing to matter to the story. Since you already mentioned that, I won't go into it here.

I remembered an interesting example in "A Song For Arbonne" by Guy Gavriel Kay. The book starts with a Prologue that happens some 10-15 years before the main plot (one nobleman sleeps with another nobleman's wife), and while it's not the main plot (the main plot is a war with another country), and not even directly connected to the main character, that initial conflict shapes the events of the whole story. Even the resolving of the "main" conflict depended heavily on that first conflict. It's not until the very end that the first conflict got resolved (just after the "main" conflict), and everything that happens after that just wraps up the ending.

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