Navigating a Reader’s Learned Expectations

A story is always in conversation with the narratives that have come before.

What I’m tossing at you today is more a series of questions than anything–an invitatino

My partner and I just finished watching the second season of Heartstopper, which is based on Alice Oseman’s series of graphic novels. If you aren’t familiar, the series follows the loves and challenges of a charming group of Gen Z Brits, most of them queer, bi, gay, trans, and ace; the two main characters are both cis and white. It’s a story that dwells on the swell of feelings that young people experience in first loves, in facing down homophobic parents, in standing up to bullies, in pursuing their art. There are serious issues—cruel parents, peer bullying, eating disorders—but by and large, one can expect that nothing truly horrifying or traumatic will happen on the page (screen). Even the vast majority of the parents are lovingly accepting of their children, their genders, and their relationships. 

In the season finale, two of the queer characters share a vulnerable and gushy moment, and one turns to leave the other’s house. It’s the burbs of England, it’s late-ish at night, the street is still and quiet. The kid pauses to send a sappy message to their sweetie, and the scene goes to black. I think the cliffhanger is meant to be about the relationship, of the will-they-won’t-they-say-I-love-you variety. But for me, it was riddled with a deeper, much more terrifying tension. My throat was squeezing shut from the moment the kid opened the door to leave. 

In my body, I was waiting for death. For horrifying injury. For violence.

After 30+ years of consuming whatever queer media I could find, I have been trained to expect something truly horrible to happen to a queer character whenever it appears that they’ve found love or happiness. Whether it was Rickie Vasquez getting kicked out of his house, Pedro dying, Tara getting randomly shot after reuniting with Willow, Justin getting gaybashed at prom, or Brandon Teena being raped, queer characters have never been safe. (I'm noticing how these descriptions all require passive construction. Things happen to queer characters—that is, they are acted upon, again and again.) Gen Xers like me came into our queerness at the same time the culture was metabolizing AIDS—and twisting it into a constant threat that, along with extreme violence, hung over anyone who dared come out.

I know that a lot of this is ancient history to Gen Z-ers, whose experiences of their a/sexualities and genders have been so different from mine. But still I wondered: what is a writer’s relationship to a reader’s learned expectation? Does Alice Oseman, who was born when I was a sophomore in high school, have to take into consideration how older queer readers will approach their work? Does she have to see how her work fits into a dominant cultural expectation or narrative? Do they have to consider how their stories respond to a canon (that might not interest her at all)?

Years ago I was in a fiction workshop with a writer who had a beautifully written novel chapter that focused on a white family in the rural south in the 1950s. Within the chapter there was much made of an ominous old “hanging tree” on the property. Though lynching was not part of the story, I couldn’t imagine not seeing the implied threat of it in that context. (To be clear, lynchings were not a Southern-only phenomenon.) That writer and I talked for a long time about what their responsibility might be to readers who approach that chapter with a deep learned expectation of seeing Black trauma depicted in Southern literature. How does a writer navigate those expectations? How does a writer focus on their own story while acknowledging that their story is always in conversation with the narratives (fictional, cultural, political) that have come before?

It’s clear that it would be impossible for a writer to be responsible for or to every theoretical response to their work. And yet, there are a lot of big cultural stories that shape our novels, our fictions. Are we free to (pretend to) ignore them? Even if a writer, from an ethical perspective, rejects the idea of responsibility to learned expectation, I think there’s more to consider. From a craft perspective, how much distraction are you willing to allow into your story? Just as critique partners will encourage us to orient the reader, to make clear the stakes and conflict, to avoid needless confusion, they might also request that we clarify our relationship to these larger cultural narratives that will seep into our fiction at the edges. 

I think that Alice Oseman does teach us, through the course of Heartstopper, to relax into a universe where things are gentler, if not entirely isolated from harm. The focus is relentlessly on relationships, on the binding character of friendship and love and understanding. Oseman has, I think, used a lot of the same tools I’d encourage all of us to use to make clear their relationship to these bigger cultural narratives, to these learned exceptions. And yet. As that screen went to black, I found that I was on the verge of tears—moved not by the joy I had just watched but by my own certainty and fear that none of these characters I’d come to love could ever, even in this gentle version of our world, be safe.

Try this:

It can be a useful exercise to get outside of the narrow perspective of your story to see it from a different angle. Consider a different generation or a different lived experience from your own, and freewrite about what expectations that reader might bring to the story. Then brainstorm about how the story works with or against those expectations. Did you just learn something new about your own story or the limitations of your/your character’s perspective? What might you do with this new information?

From Allison:

I’m currently finishing up an interview with the writer Suzan Palumbo about her forthcoming collection, Skin Thief, (I’ll let you know when the interview is live!) who talked to me about the way queer relationships can serve as a small space of comfort in horror stories. This makes me think about how a deliberate (and glorious) subversion of expectations can—counterintuitively—become a tool to guide the reader beyond those expectations.

Talk to us: 

Leave a comment to tell us about a time your own cultural expectations clashed with a story you read or watched.