No one was scared

Apart from the strange thing that happened at the beginning, everything else has been deliberately normal. In fact, so normal that the event seems like a dream. But it wasn’t. The last part of this passage importantly brings foreboding.

Kids were staring at one another, craning their necks this way and that, giggling nervously. No one was scared. No one was crying. The whole thing seemed kind of funny.

Gone(2008)

Foreboding: a feeling that something bad is going to happen.

As the reactions are written as past tense, the narrator knows what has happened. They think that the class should have been scared, they should have been crying, and what happened wasn’t funny. What they think occurred actually did occur and there will be consequences further on in the story.

Even though the exact details of the event are a mystery, you know that you’ve only seen a small part of a much bigger problem. It’s an invite to keep reading; to find out what happens next.

Can you find the same pattern in these examples?

We were standing, waiting patiently for the problem to be fixed – for the lights to come back on. We thought that someone could help and everything would go back to normal. We should have been panicking, screaming, crying. Back then, all we were was just irritated.

Trixie felt strangely detached from it because she was still convinced she’d been imagining the dinosaur. Delusional was the word she’d been looking for. She wasn’t alarmed. Not hyped. She was feeling fine, fine, completely fine, because there was no way this was real.

Write your own variation. Remember the big event you thought up at the start of the lesson.

High-concept storytelling in Gone 1: Big concept, small beginnings