It is unfortunate that you've been misinterpreting John Gardner since you were about 17. You've got four sentences and two sets of ellipsis there, but the money quote is right here: See, Gardner wasn't talking about "surprises." There are no surprises in literature. There is only foreshadowing and artful limitation of point-of-view. These are the things that separate literature from pulp, timelessness from ephemera. In quality writing, "surprises" are foreshadowed, have meaning, have consequence and are also inevitable. This is because the role of narrative is to provide an explanation, an insight, a cohesive through-line of a complex tale. That does not mean that nothing is unexpected. It means that these revelations are followed by the inward sucking of breath, by the "Oh, of course!" of the reader, by the realization of who Keyser Soze was all along. I've got a script with a "Luke I'm yer da" level of surprise at the end of the 2nd act. It's not a bad script; empirically, it's the one that got me repped at William Morris. And in order to set up that "I'm yer da" moment, I consciously dropped hints and foreshadowing in no less than eighteen places - not easy to do when you've only burned about 11,000 words so far. Nonetheless, not a single reader ever found all eighteen. The most anyone saw was eleven. A few people saw six or less. One saw three. A couple saw none. None of them saw the same ones. All of them were surprised. I win. When Gardner is talking about surprises, he's talking about the ending of Cold Mountain, wherein the protagonist completes his trek across the South successfully, hooks up with the girl, and then runs into a posse of never-seen-before deputies who shoot him dead in the space of half a chapter. There's no setup, other than the fact that the protagonist has been half-heartedly avoiding posses (in the abstract) for the entire book without encountering a single one. That's what Gardner means by "one damned thing after another." Piece of shit still won the National Book Award, and is still a shit movie with Jude Law, Renee Zelwiger and Nicole Kidman. A shit movie with seven Oscar noms. And trust me: Gardner would have hated the fuck out of it. A hatred of surprises and a love of spoilers may look superficially similar but they have only distrust in common. In the former, you do not trust the universe, you trust only yourself. In the latter, you do not trust the author... but for some stupid reason, you trust people like the choad in the article you linked. They're demonstrably worse narrators. Their motives are impure. You've linked me several poems with twists at the end. You have not helpfully added "by the way, it's about his dead girlfriend" prior to my reading them. Which is only marginally related to narrative, but substantially better related than painting, FFS. And yes. The first time I ever experienced anything in International Klein Blue was in person. In fact, I hadn't so much as heard of Yves Klein. I walked in off the street because I had a day to kill and the BART took me there. Not that it has much to do with narrative or spoilers. SPOILER ALERT: The Mona Lisa is an itty bitty painting. You're experiencing stories one way or the other. You can experience them first or second-hand, it's up to you. But don't for a minute pretend that you're not distrusting the narrator completely by leaving your experience in the hands of hacks like "Steve."False suspense comes from the accidental and meaningless occurrence of one damned thing after another.