Week 42 - Mobile Anticipation

On Tuesday morning I received a text message from my mobile phone provider to tell me that Apple’s new iPhone would be available to order from 8am. The new phone would be sold on a strictly first come first served basis, as demand was expected to be high.

I read the text, thought about all those people who would be besides themselves with excitement, and then went back to work.

That afternoon one of the news sites I subscribe to had a story about O2’s website crashing due to the millions of people trying to order the new phone. The company soon issued a statement saying that due to unprecedented high demand, there was essentially little chance of getting your hands on the new phone over the coming weeks, but the wait would be worth it.

Picture those gadget obsessed tecno-geeks (I know - those in glass houses...). They must have had their day/week/life ruined by that message.

Why? Because anticipation is a powerful master. It can turn normally sane people into gibbering wrecks. I once attended a launch party for Apple's Tiger operating system and one of the tie in treats was a bottle of Tiger beer. The only catch was that you had to roar like a tiger to get your hands on the drink. As I was weighing up personal dignity versus alcohol, my wife brushed me to one side, made a noise that could have got her the next Frosties commercial and promptly grabbed the beer.

The anticipation had got to her and she went to lengths beyond her normal character to get something she could have bought for 75 pence at the local supermarket (then again, the fact it was alcohol may have been the bigger motivator).

The point is that we like to be teased a little and have our sense of anticipation raised, but there has to be a satisfactory conclusion; we need to be sated. This is equally important in the books we read, arguably nowhere more so that in the crime novel.

Can you imagine reading The Murder on the Orient Express to find the final pages missing? Torment unimaginable. Similarly, would we mourn the unfinished state of Dickens’ last novel so much if it hadn’t been a prototype murder mystery?

The fact we need to bear in mind is that the reader wants to be teased; they want to have the carrot of crime dangled in front of them as we lead them through the byways of our plot; but they want...they need...they demand that they get to eat that carrot before the end of the book.

I was reminded of this duty to deliver on the unwritten contract between reader and author, as I was writing an additional scene during the final stages of my second draft. The book seemed to be lacking the level of anticipation that would keep a reader turning the pages and I realised why. So this week I added the scene and set up another level of anticipation.

All I need to do now is deliver on my promises later in the novel by adding another scene that offers the right level of resolution.

Hopefully, by the time the novel is published, everyone who reads it will feel happy at the outcome.

Even the techno-geeks, who might have got their new phone by then.