Hey folks! Happy Halloween for all those who celebrate. Here’s my clever husband and his costume. Pickleball, anyone?
Back to our regularly scheduled post. Have you heard of the “wrong shoe theory” that’s been making the rounds in the fashion mags and TikTok? The idea is to make something that at first glance seems to be a Glamour Don’t, take on intentionality, and thereby imbue the look with authority.
As a devotee of comfy shoes paired with whimsical pants, I’m for it.
Interestingly enough, this same idea, this Bad Shoe Theory, can be used to great effect in your prose!
Those of you who’ve been following this substack (and Chuck’s Plot Spoiler substack) will recognize the phenomenon as “burnt tongue.”
The idea is to subvert reader expectation with an element of speech, or a response in dialogue, or a cut to a new scene, or even a standard and expected grouping of words, by replacing them with an unexpected choice.
For example, in my upcoming novel The Bequest (Running Wild Press, sometime in 2025), I have this early scene involving a rake, that features one of my POV characters, Remmington, upon the intrusion of another character, Amelia:
Amelia had been something akin to his father’s best friend the last year or so of his life. A sort of Dennis the Menace pest without talent for social cues. Amelia was, what the current parlance referred to as, a tween. She was home-schooled, apparently, which, in her case meant, free to roam about the neighborhood and bother people. She was also spookily brilliant, her photographic memory and odd penchant for trivia would make her a perfect candidate for Jeopardy! one day.
It was too late to duck out of sight.
“Hi,” she squawked, adjusting her rain-spattered spectacles, which were ill-fitting, and constantly sliding down her nose.
Remmington wiggled his fingers in a half-hearted salutation.
“That rake’s broken,” she said.
Now, the reader might expect Amelia to respond to the “half-hearted salutation” with a pleasantry, such as, “How are you?” or “What’s new?” because, we’re trained to fill in the blanks with “tennis match” dialogue. It’s just the way the human brain works, typically. But Amelia, instead of following the polite, expected volley, launches in with a criticism.
It’s a willful redirection, and in the above case, it serves to introduce dissonance between the two characters that eventually (semi-spoiler) becomes Remmington’s salvation.
Wrong shoe theory as applied to writing works to heighten authority, to inspire curiosity, and to engage the reader by surprising her.
The secret though, is to bend the composition in the direction of heightening stakes, tension, characterizational idiosyncrasies and/or voice, rather than to simply slap your reader in the head with, say, bad grammar for the sake of bad grammar. When done well, the resulting irony pulls the reader into your scheme, as though you and that reader are sharing a joke.
As we sit on the cusp of the dreaded NaNoWriMo, if you are partaking, keep in mind that wrong words, like wrong shoes, can fire up your line of flight as you launch into your next project.
Good luck, and happy All Hallows’ Eve.
The element of surprise. Yes!