Breaking what people expect to see.
Your brain is a prediction machine. Every moment, it’s running ahead of reality, guessing what comes next. Most of the time, those predictions come true, so you don’t notice them. This is why you don’t consciously perceive most of what happens around you — your brain has already decided it’s not novel.
But the moment something doesn’t match the prediction? Your attention snaps to it. This is a pattern interrupt.
You can see it at the smallest scale. “In 1997, I had a temper tantrum and founded a web agency.” Your brain expects the sentence to continue logically — maybe something about working in an agency, or struggling for years. Instead: temper tantrum. That’s not where you predicted the sentence would go. Your attention wakes up.
It works at every scale. At the word level — the unexplained “but” that changes direction. At the sentence level — the short one after three long ones. At the story level — the twist you didn’t see coming.
The key insight is this: if you can show that the world is not as your audience believes, the tension will have them leaning in towards you. They want to understand how their predictions got it wrong. They want the explanation. So they listen.
This is different from novelty — novelty is genuinely new. A pattern interrupt is specifically about violating an expected pattern, which means you need to establish the pattern first before you break it. “The sky is purple” is weird, but weird doesn’t grab attention the way “The sky was blue until the moment it wasn’t” does, because the second one builds an expectation and then destroys it.
The danger is becoming cute or clever for its own sake. A pattern interrupt that doesn’t lead somewhere is just annoying — like a hook that never gets paid off. The best pattern interrupts create unresolved tension that only resolves when you follow the rest of the story.
Use them to wake people up. But make sure there’s something worth waking up for.