Surprise Causes Writer to Choke on Big Mac

The first time I read John Irv­ing’s The World Accord­ing to Garp, I choked on a Big Mac.

It was a cold March day 15 years ago, and I was in a McDon­ald’s in Nor­wich, New York, eat­ing lunch, when a pas­sage took me by such com­plete sur­prise that I start­ed chok­ing.

Reluc­tant to suf­fer an igno­min­ious death in a Mick­ey D’s, I dropped the book and looked around clutch­ing my throat. Thank­ful­ly, an old-timer saw what was hap­pen­ing, jumped up from his seat and gave me the Heim­lich (he was remark­ably spry as I recall). The food dis­lodged. (Nev­er mind where it went. Gross.)

“What the hell hap­pened?” he asked.

“Some­thing sur­prised me,” I said, nod­ding at the book. “Some­thing I read.”

“Well, you prob­a­bly should­n’t eat while you’re read­ing then.”

“Prob­a­bly not, sir. Thank you.”

As I sat down, I glanced at the book that had near­ly caused my death. I real­ized that, while I did­n’t want to cause read­ers of my own writ­ing to choke in fast-food restau­rants, I did want to emu­late Irv­ing’s abil­i­ty to sur­prise them—the smile-induc­ing sen­tence; the word choice that evokes a gen­tle shake of the head; and best of all, the mem­o­rable, unex­pect­ed scene.

From the first, what grabbed me most about the nov­el was its deli­cious unpre­dictabil­i­ty. Take the first line, for exam­ple. I can quote it from mem­o­ry:

Garp’s moth­er, Jen­ny Fields, was arrest­ed in Boston in 1942 for wound­ing a man in a movie the­ater.

This was, and still is as far as I’m con­cerned, one of the best open­ing lines of a nov­el ever. The key word, of course, is “wound­ing.” From time to time, I con­sid­er the dozen oth­er words he could have used there, and I real­ize what a sur­pris­ing and bril­liant choice “wound­ing” was.  Stab­bing? No, too spe­cif­ic, too vio­lent. Injur­ing? No, too vague. What about “lac­er­at­ing” or “con­tus­ing”? Afraid not. “Wound­ing” was, and still is, per­fect. The ques­tions that “wound­ing” rais­es, and does­n’t answer, are what entice the read­er to con­tin­ue.

The famous Russ­ian short sto­ry writer and play­wright, Anton Chekhov, once said the fol­low­ing (I para­phrase): “If a gun hangs above the door in the first act, it must go off in the last act.” As a stu­dent of Irv­ing who has read Garp and one of his oth­er excel­lent nov­els, A Prayer for Owen Meany, at least a dozen times, I’m con­vinced that Irv­ing must have held Chekhov’s view—at least subconsciously—because noth­ing gets wast­ed in the sto­ry. Every char­ac­ter trait, set­ting detail and con­flict is impor­tant, they all build to the cli­max, and along the way there are hun­dreds of sur­pris­es.

Today, look­ing out my win­dow and watch­ing the shak­ing trees, I remem­ber that fate­ful day in McDon­ald’s when I not only learned to be care­ful try­ing to eat and read at the same time, but also the val­ue of sur­prise in writ­ing. Short­ly after that episode, I wrote some­thing on an index card that I’ve kept on a bul­letin board ever since. It’s a piece of advice to myself that I’ve tried to heed in every­thing I write. Many times I’ve fall­en short, but once in a while I nail it, and here it is:

Put a sur­prise on every page.

 

It’s the sur­pris­es that keep me read­ing.

It’s the sur­pris­es that keep me writ­ing.

It’s the sur­pris­es that make life worth liv­ing.

By Chris Orcutt

CHRIS ORCUTT is an American novelist and fiction writer with over 30 years' writing experience and more than a dozen books in his oeuvre. Since 2015, Chris been working exclusively on his magnum opus. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig is a 9-episode novel about teens in the 1980s. It’s about ’80s teens, but for adults (in other words, it’s decidedly not YA literature), and he’s applied this epic storytelling approach to the least examined, most misunderstood, most marginalized narrative space in American literature: the lives and inner worlds of teenagers.

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