How do you deliver plot surprises?
In our previous post on Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me, I looked at how Dave sets up reader expectations and then delays fulfilling them to pull us into the novel. By chapter three, however, she has to start delivering on the promise of the premise, showing us the aftermath of Owen Michael’s disappearance and the mysterious note he left for his wife, Hannah, telling her only to protect her stepdaughter, Bailey.
How does Dave keep us turning the pages? How does she balance filling in the backstory that will make her characters come alive and give them a character arc that will deepen the narrative, while also delivering revelatory punches that answer some questions even while they raise more?
In this post, I’ll step a little further into the novel to show you exactly how she does it. We’re only going to go as far as chapter 4, just thirty-five pages into the novel, so I’m not going to reveal too much of the plot—you can read on without fear of major spoilers!
Chapter 1 showed us Hannah receiving the note, then chapter 2 is largely backstory, filling us in about Hannah’s relationships with both Owen and Bailey. Dave wisely moves away from backstory in chapter 3, dropping in two new dramatic developments. First, Hannah hears a news report on the radio that there has been a raid on the company Owen works for, and the CEO has been arrested. Second, Bailey emerges from her high school drama practice carrying a bag of cash and another enigmatic note from Owen.
It’s a short scene, just over four pages, and Dave spaces out these two revelations. The first, the radio broadcast, is bracketed by introspection from Hannah. Before the news, she is pondering possible explanations for Owen’s disappearance—all of which must be discarded after she hears the report. Afterward, she struggles to make sense of what she’s heard, and her introspection here drops clues that help readers become sleuths alongside her: the company, called The Shop, was building software to help privatize online life; Owen had taken a salary cut to work there; he believed in his work and thought it would make a positive difference in the world. As Hannah asks herself, “How could there be fraud in that?” Dave here is handing readers the most pressing story question so they can’t miss it.
The question is still hanging in the air when Bailey gets into the car, kicking off the next revelation. The actual content could have been delivered in just a paragraph: the bag is stuffed full of cash, and the note instructs Bailey to “Help Hannah. Do what she tells you” and counsels her, “You know what matters about me. And you know what matters about yourself. Please hold on to it.”
But Dave draws on a number of writerly tools to slow the scene down in order to maximize the drama of the moment. Her most important tool, once again, is introspection. She’s writing in deep first-person point of view. Writers are often urged to cut out “filter words”—terms like see, notice, heard, felt—when writing in close, limited POV. Readers already know that it is the POV character experiencing whatever external details are being noticed, so you can just cut the narrator from the sentence. For example:
With filter words, underlined: I saw the breeze ruffle the leaves of the scrawny street tree in front of the house.
Without filter words: The breeze ruffled the leaves of the scrawny street tree in front of the house.
What Dave does at the beginning of the bag of money sequence, however, is to lean on filter words in order to draw attention to the act of Hannah noticing:
“Bailey?” I say.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know what’s going on…”
This is when I notice it. The bag she has with her isn’t her messenger bag. It is a duffel bag. It’s a large black duffel bag, which she cradles in her lap, gently, like it’s a baby.
“What is that?” I say.
“Take a look,” she says.
The way she says it makes me not want to look.
Notice the impact of the line I underlined? And then the introspection line at the end serves to bring us into Hannah’s emotion, while also delaying the moment of actually opening the bag and seeing the cash. Here, Dave speeds up again and eliminates filter words: “I pull back the zipper just a bit and money starts spilling out. Rolls and rolls of money, hundreds of hundred-dollar bills tied together with string. Heavy, limitless.” Notice, too, that after that first sentence, Dave also eliminates a subject and verb in the next two. She’s renaming the money that is spilling out of the bag in these sentences, focusing our attention tightly on the “heavy” rolls that seem, to Hannah, “limitless.”
Then Dave adds drama to the follow-up punch, the note, by tracking Hannah’s rising emotions as reflected in her physical state. After the money spills out, her heart is “starting to race.” After she reads the note, the words “start to blur.” Hannah pictures what must have happened, Owen running through the hallway of the high school to put the bag and note in Bailey’s locker, then deliver Hannah’s note to the girl who brings it to her. At this point, Dave tells us, Hannah’s “chest starts heating up, making it harder to breathe.” Dave then makes use of the backstory details she set up in the previous chapter: Hannah recognizes this feeling because it’s what she felt when she realized her mother wasn’t coming back and when her grandfather died. “How do I explain the feeling?” Hannah asks herself, then answers: “Like my insides need to get out. One way or another.” At which point she vomits everywhere, and the scene ends. Maximum drama!
The next two scenes operate a bit differently, though in both of them Dave holds the revelations until the very end. Let’s look at how they work.
In the second scene of chapter 3, Hannah and Bailey are parked at the docks, trying to make sense of what they’ve learned. We get a couple more details about Bailey—she has a joint, which Hannah suspects she got from Bobby, her boyfriend, whom Owen doesn’t trust—and they make a tentative plan about what they’ll do next. All of this is handled fairly expeditiously. But for the last pulse of action in the scene, Dave slows down again before ending with a punch.
They’ve gotten out of the car but haven’t yet gone into their houseboat when another car pulls up, “headlights blinking at us, bright and demanding.” Notice how Dave personifies the car to add to the drama? We wonder, what does the person driving this car want from them? Here Dave gives us several lines of Hannah’s introspection as she thinks through who might be in the car: Owen? The police? Hannah is sure by the end of the paragraph that it is the police, then reveals: “But I’m wrong on that count too.”
Dave draws out the suspense of who is in the car for as long as possible, then surprises us by introducing a new character: it is Hannah’s best friend Jules who steps out of the car. Even Bailey loves Jules, and the three characters share a group hug. “This is who Jules is to everyone who is lucky enough to know her,” Hannah tells us. “Comforting, steady.” Dave has surprised us, delivering comfort rather than the additonal stress she led us to expect through Hannah’s interiority. But she has another swerve in store for us:
Of everything I’m guessing she’ll say to me in that moment, the one thing I don’t expect is what actually comes out of her mouth.
“It’s all my fault,” she says.
Dave ends the chapter on this small cliff-hanger. If we want to find out what Jules knows about Owen’s disappearance—and how she is involved—we have to turn the page.
Chapter 4 does answer these questions, but Dave makes us wait for the answers, just as she made us wait to see Hannah’s reaction to the first note in chapter 1. Dave starts the chapter in scene: Hannah and Jules are sitting at a table, “drinking coffee spiked with bourbon.” The first line of the chapter is dialogue from Jules: “I still can’t believe this is happening.” This is it—the conversation we are dying to see!
Not so fast, says Dave, who deploys a number of delaying strategies. First, we get backstory about the relationship between Hannah and Jules, who met at fourteen when they were both newcomers in their Tennessee hometown. Next, character description: Jules is a photo editor at the San Francisco Chronicle. A hint about how she might be involved in Owen’s disappearance? But, Dave tells us, she focuses on sports—how could that be related to fraud at a software company?
After that, Dave leans on a subplot to delay the revelation and yet keep the scene moving. Hannah notices Bailey snuggling with Bobby on the couch in the living room. Learning in the previous scene that Owen didn’t trust Bobby sets up her thought here: “I have no idea what harmless looks like,” which reminds us of how high the potential stakes are in the main plot. Bailey notices Hannah’s gaze and slams the door angrily, reactivating the tension of their relationship that might have been dissipated in that hug with Jules.
Only then does the conversation start up again, though Dave delays a bit longer by having them discuss Bailey and whether or not Hannah should have more whiskey. We’re getting closer: Hannah recognizes that Jules is nervous, building the tension, though delaying a few more sentences to remember the time Jules had to tell her she’d seen her “quasi-boyfriend” kissing another girl. Finally, Hannah is forced to ask directly, once again using the very question the reader might be asking at this point: “So are you going to tell me, or what?”
Now we do get some fresh information. Jules explains that The Shop had been selling their privacy software before it was functional, but counting those future sales as profit in order to juice the stock price. Jules learned this from an investigative journalist at the Chronicle who got the scoop about the raid and couldn’t resist telling her during the period he was required to sit on the story so the raid could be pulled off.
We see Hannah reacting to this news both internally and externally, trying to work out what it means. We get a couple more clues to add to our store: Owen was the chief coder at The Shop and must have known the software wasn’t ready for release. Avett, the CEO, had been quietly selling millions of dollars of his stock in the company, while Owen had kept and even increased his own shares. We also get a new story question to add to our list: Who tipped off the SEC, thus leading to the raid?
What we don’t know yet is how any of this is Jules’s fault. Dave saves this bit of drama for the end of the chapter, and she uses the answer to heighten the drama around the story question introduced in the book description: Why has Owen disappeared and where has he gone?
Jules, we learn, called Owen to tip him off before the raid. She considers it her fault that he ran. But Jules also knows something else—Hannah can read it in her face: “I realize she isn’t telling me whatever it is that is beneath that look. She isn’t saying the worst of it.” Here again, Dave slows down to amp up the drama. Jules demurs at first and must be pressed before she finally says, “He wasn’t surprised when I told him about the raid.”
Hannah doesn’t process at first what this means:
I stare at her, waiting for the rest, as something starts shifting in my head. I look through the glass at Bailey. She is lying against Bobby’s chest, her hand on his stomach, her eyes closed.
Protect her.
See how Dave is deploying filter words here to deliberately slow down the scene? She tells us the wheels are spinning in Hannah’s head, but she’s also showing it in her aimless gaze, which just happens to land on Bailey. Note, too, the emotional thrust of the remembered phrase “Protect her,” from Owen’s note. Dave has quoted this line four times already before this moment; it’s a steady drumbeat reminding readers of the stakes.
The chapter ends, once more, on a revelation as Jules explains how she knows Owen was aware of the fraud:
“He would have needed a lot more information about what was going on at The Shop. He’d have said something like, Slow down, Jules. Who do they think is guilty? Does it look like Avett spearheaded the fraud alone or is the corruption more widespread? What does it look like happened, how much has been stolen? But he didn’t want to know more. Not about any of it.”
“What did he want to know?” I say.
“How long he had to get out,” she says.
Both Hannah and the reader are left asking, Can we trust this man? We’ve already become invested in what happens to Hannah and Bailey. Part of us wants, like Hannah, for there to be an easy explanation for Owen’s disappearance—one that allows us to still like him as a person. With this last revelation, Dave forces us—right alongside Hannah, whom it will impact most—to confront the possibility that Hannah has married someone who would commit fraud and then run away, leaving his wife and child to pick up the pieces.
In the next post, we’ll see how Dave keeps us guessing about Owen until the very end of the novel.
Takeaways:
When writing a page-turner, be sure to balance forward action and backstory in the beginning of the novel. You need to provide enough backstory for readers to care about your characters and understand how their arcs might develop, but you also need to keep delivering punches of action and revelation.
Be deliberate about where you place surprises or new information within a scene. Placing the punch at the end is a guaranteed method to keep readers turning pages, but you still need to vary the rhythm.
If you’ve ended a previous chapter on a cliff-hanger, you don’t have to resolve it at the beginning of the next chapter as long as you start the scene in a place that makes readers believe they’ll get to the revelation soon.
When you get to the actual punch, slow down the pace just before and after the revelation to maximize its drama, using techniques like filtering, introspection, and physical reaction.