Writing Tip #14: Surprise Yourself, Surprise Your Audience

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I write all types of things. Magazine articles, poems, non-fiction books, screenplays, short stories, emails, blog posts, speeches. I haven’t written a novel yet, but I’m saving that for my 80s or 90s. And I also don’t write about anything specifically. You can look at the articles I’ve written for The Good Men Project here. They cover a huge variety of topics. My poems are about… everything and everywhere. They often just start with one little specific image, and then travel into the absurd, and then come back with a coherent theme. But the connection with all of my articles, all of my writing, is that I don’t really sit down to write about the thing that I’m writing about.

I sit down to try to surprise myself. I sit down to try to discover some insight.

There’s something I see in the world. Maybe it’s another article or, maybe it’s something I see outside on one of my walks, or maybe it’s something I encounter in my travels. Maybe it’s a person, maybe it’s a place, or an idea I disagree with. And I just start going deeper until that moment of surprise. When I get to that moment, I know that I’ve got something. It’s exciting.

It’s an epiphany.

And that moment of surprise becomes an epiphany for the audience in real time. The audience discovers something right along with me.

The moment you surprise yourself as a writer is the moment you surprise your audience too.

And then… I feel connected to the audience. And honestly, it’s that connection to the audience that I love most about writing.

Also, for the record, I do love sentences. I’ve said that in my Top 10 List of Writing Tips. It’s from an old story. about a student, at some university, and there was some well-known author who taught writing classes, whose name I wish I could remember. The author-professor is walking across the quadrangle, and student runs up to him and says, “Professor, Professor, do you think I have what it takes?” And the professor looks at him and says, “I don’t know. Do you love sentences?”

I love how surprising and yet “OH YES” that is. And so, yes, I do, actually love sentences, quite a lot. But even more than that, I love the moment when a sentence surprises me.

Here’s one of my poems. Don’t worry, even if you don’t like poetry, it’s very short. It’s called Bake Sale. See if you can see how quickly I get to the surprising thing.

Bake Sale
In the end, it wasn’t much of a success.
The icing on the cupcakes melted in the sun,
and the lieutenant general got chocolate
stuck beneath his fingernails. Damn it’s hot.
He scans the landscape of card tables and paper plates.

Wipes his sweaty neck with a wrinkled napkin.
The reports from the front keep asking for supplies—

more irons to keep the uniforms pressed,
more bullets, a bomb or two, more shoe polish.
He had suggested a walk-a-thon to raise the money

but all those diseases kept getting in the way.
He picks up a mini-cookie with m&m’s,
grimaces as the hard shells crunch in his mouth.

Very quickly, right?

But sometimes surprises build on each other.

This poem Bake Sale was based on a bumper sticker that used to be popular—50 years ago, maybe even longer than that. Back in the late 1960s to mid-1970s the slogan was popularized by the peace movement and author Robert Fulghum.

The poem is an example of something I saw maybe 50 years ago. And it hit me enough to write a poem about it 30 years later. Then, 20 years later, I still remember the poem and the impact the writing of the poem had on me. Because of the surprise of it all.

If you’re a writer. I invite you to do that when you’re writing. See what surprises you. Figure out how to surprise yourself. See if you can transfer that surprise to an audience experience.

And if you like to write, and if you love sentences, I invite you to write for the The Good Men Project. We’re an online platform that’s been around for 16 years. Over ten thousand people have written for us over the years. Some people wrote the very first thing they ever had published for The Good Man Project. Some of those people went on to write books and plays, and songs, and all sorts of other things, or went on to become speakers, or coaches, or teachers.

Because once you start to write about your insights and share them with the world, there’s no telling what might come of it. Submit here.