z The surprise ending is a fairly simple kind of withholding; yet another
kind is the creation of suspense. In a story that involves a surprise, the
writer withholds information from the reader and sometimes from the
characters, but when a writer creates suspense, he or she generally
withholds information from the characters while letting the reader in on
the secret.
z Other kinds of withholding have to do with rearranging the elements
of the traditional plot; these techniques are perhaps not so much about
withholding information as they are about simply presenting it to the
reader in an unusual order.
o As John Gardner points out in 7KH$UWRI)LFWLRQ, exposition
can take place at any point in the narrative, but in most cases,
you want to save a good deal of your exposition for later. At the
beginning, you want to say enough about the situation and the
major characters to intrigue the reader, but you don’t want to
explain too much. Parceling out exposition only as needed is
an approach that often feels more natural than dropping all the
information on the reader’s doorstep at once; in many cases,
you are providing the information to the reader at the same
time that the characters are learning it.
o ,QSRSXODU¿FWLRQWKHLQFLWLQJDFWLRQ²WKHPRPHQWFRQÀLFW
is introduced into the story and gets the plot going—often
comes at the very beginning, before the exposition. A good
example is the opening of the movie -DZV, when a young
woman goes for a midnight swim and is eaten by the shark.
2QO\DIWHUWKDWGRZHPHHW&KLHI%URG\WKH¿UVWRIWKHWKUHH
main characters, and learn about the island community of
Amity. The traditional elements of the Freytag pyramid are
present but in a different order.o In fact, you can even structure a story so that you give away
WKHFOLPD[LQWKH¿UVWIHZPRPHQWVDVLQ-DPHV%DOGZLQ¶V
novel *LRYDQQL¶V5RRP. If we lay out the events of this story in
chronological order, the results look like the Freytag pyramid.
But Baldwin shrewdly gives us the most dramatic element