Pulp Fiction: A Simple Trick For Shaping Your Audience’s Expectations

Pulp Fiction: A Simple Trick For Shaping Your Audience’s Expectations

This episode is going to be a throwback to Pulp Fiction. I recently rewatched the film in preparation for the ProTrack mentorship session with one of my students. There are so many lessons in this film that will be really valuable for you all, so I’m excited to share them with you.

Pulp Fiction, on its surface, seems to be completely revolutionizing what screenwriting structure looks like. 

Pulp Fiction unfolds out of chronological order. It has these long, long, long scenes. It has monologues, it has dance, and it has all these things that we don't typically see in movies. Pulp Fiction looks like it's doing something completely wild and complicated. And yes, it is. 

But at the center of Pulp Fiction is something so incredibly simple. And I want to talk about this one simple idea because this is an idea that you can use in your writing.

Here’s the simple screenwriting idea that all of Pulp Fiction grows from: You never give them exactly what they're expecting.

We talk a lot in this podcast about getting in touch with your voice. If you have taken my Write Your Screenplay Class, you know that there are actually four phases of writing, and the phase where you're getting in touch with your voice is really just one of those phases. 

One of the phases of writing that we haven't talked a lot about on this podcast is a phase I call The Audience draft.

How do you manipulate the audience's expectations? How do you surprise the audience? How do you track the journey that the audience is having and the way it relates to your main character’s journey. 

But there's a deeper thing that we can do as we write The Audience Draft. We can use The Audience Draft to actually push ourselves past our own inner sensor. In other words, by surprising the audience, we can also surprise ourselves. And we can also surprise our characters. 

This is one of the things the screenplay for Pulp Fiction does so brilliantly: it sets up really clear expectations for the audience, and then it both delivers upon and violates them, in wonderfully entertaining ways. 

For example, in the first scene, we're going to watch this loving couple, played by Amanda Plummer and Tim Roth, plan a robbery of a diner. We think we know where we are: Oh, these crazy people who are so madly in love with each other are going to rob this diner, and we're going to watch their little heist movie.

Their expectations around robbing the diner are set so clearly. They've talked about all the hard places to rob and why the diner is going to be the easiest possible place to rob. 

Once you set those expectations, you know it can never happen like that. 

You can never give your characters what they're expecting. And you can never give your audience what they're expecting. It has to happen in a slightly different way. 

How do we surprise the audience's expectations? 

Well, rather than watching these two rob the diner, we cut away, and suddenly we're in a completely different story! 

That's a shock for the audience, the audience is asking themselves, Oh, how are these two storylines going to match up? 

How do you surprise the audience’s expectations? Well, that's going to come a little bit later. But you can see that there's a string of the plot of Pulp Fiction that Tarantino’s choice to cut away leaves dangling for us.

We don't forget about that string even though we lose track of it. And when it comes back together in a way that we could never have anticipated, it’s so much fun for us to experience. 

We're going to cut away from Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer.