Playing on the reader's expectations is elementary - which way will they go, which man will she choose, who will survive, who is the villain? A lot of what draws the reader along is wanting to see their expectation subverted in some way - we see the couple end up together, but not for the reasons we thought. They choose the seemingly worse idea, but it turns out better than the other could have. You give the reader what they expect, but twisted. Robert McKee's Story goes into a lot of depth on this, and is well-worth the read (despite his snarky comments about novelists).

You can, of course, attempt to give the reader no idea what to expect. There's a choice - who is the better man, which is the dream or the reality, and the audience is given no meaningful clue as to which is the correct choice. They have no indication which way to sway their expectation. It can make for a far-more-entranced reader, but at a cost.

People like to figure things out. They like to know what to expect, to at least think they see where something is going. If they can't see the path ahead (or at least, what they think is the path ahead), they'll typically feel like they aren't grasping what's going on now.

Without a clear path, they'll grasp at any kind of meaning or logic they can get (just look at the millions of Lost fans and their disturbingly in-depth conspiracy theories about the shirt that Bob was wearing in scene three of episode forty-seven*). This can, obviously, pull your audience right into the story as they examine every facet and detail at length, and thoroughly immerse themselves in the world and the characters. It can give them a sense of purpose through the story, even if that purpose is, ultimately, just to figure out what the hell you're talking about.

But it's a fine line to walk.

If you give your reader no answers, no clues, they start looking elsewhere for them. Outside your craft and into meta-information surrounding the piece, and even other works you've done. If this is a TV series, for example, they'll think about which answer holds more closely to the series, and which wouldn't work. In a movie, they'll start judging by how much longer the movie has to go, other movies they know the director has created, and the standard hollywood formulae.

This means your readers are no longer paying attention to your story. It also means they've probably figured out your careful suspension between two alternatives, and are waiting with mild boredom for the characters to figure it out.

Which means the expectation is already nullified - they're not paying attention, and they think they already have the answer. By the end of your story, one of three things will happen:

• You give the answer they expected, they have a small sense of satisfaction at working it out, and a large sense of disatisfaction that there was no twist on their expectations
• You give the answer they didn't expect, they feel it 'doesn't make sense' or is a 'silly' ending, because it doesn't work with the canon/rest of the season/doesn't fit what they expected. Here, you didn't just subvert their expectations, you completely inverted them - not satisfying for an audience.
• You give them an answer that wasn't on the menu - if the choice is between apples and oranges, you give them a freight train. This one depends very much on the execution: if the freight train has a link back to one of the choices (maybe it's apple-flavoured, or it carts oranges), it can perform the expectation-subversion and work for the reader. If it's not a clear link, however, you're more likely to wind up with option two above.

So - giving a reader no underlying clues is very risky - and we're not even getting into the potential for plot holes and other mistakes that arise from this kind of fiddling about. It can be done masterfully, but not often, and not easily. And frankly, you spend so much time juggling the expectations that the resulting story often feels shallow and contrived, or horrendously complicated.

*I don't want Lost, and never have. This is a completely made-up conspiracy.

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