here’s the thing

How to spot it

The test is subtraction. Delete the announcement, read the sentence behind it on its own, and ask what went missing. A writer who reaches for "here’s the thing" honestly has something waiting that you did not have a moment ago: a figure, a name, a flat contradiction of the sentence before it. When the phrase is a reflex, it is a lid with no jar under it, and the line that follows repeats the line before at a slightly higher volume.

Subtraction works on every costume the habit wears, because the noun inside the announcement is interchangeable and the promise is not. The thing, the twist, the catch, the kicker: swap one for another and the sentence does not change, which is the first clue that the noun was never carrying any meaning. What the phrase actually does is hold a pause open on credit. A writer with something in hand settles that debt in the next breath. A writer without one leaves it outstanding, and readers who feel the debt go through the rest of the page with their guard up.

One more signal is worth learning, and it concerns position. A writer who has genuinely turned a corner tends to arrive at the turn, well into the ground that makes the turn mean anything. The reflex opens on it instead, at the top of a paragraph, before any ground has been covered that a reveal could reverse.

Why models overdo it

The system picking the next words has no stake in whether anything is left to reveal. It is estimating what usually follows, and in English an announcement of a reveal is among the most ordinary things that can stand in front of a sentence. Notice what that arithmetic does to the two halves of the device. The promise costs one short phrase and can be produced out of nothing. The payoff costs a fact the writer must already be holding, plus a working memory of what the paragraph has said so far, so that the new sentence can be measured against the old one and found to differ. Only one of those is cheap, and the cheap one is the one that gets produced.

The training material pushes the same way. Prose that teaches or argues or sells is full of honest reveals, because a person who has dug something up wants you to watch them set it down. A system reading that prose learns the gesture exactly and inherits none of the digging. So the gesture arrives on time, in front of whatever sentence came next, and that sentence is usually a restatement, because a restatement is also the likeliest thing to come next.

When it's fine

Whenever the line behind the promise pays, the phrase has earned its place. Barack Obama reached for it in the 2015 State of the Union, in a passage about wages that had finally begun to rise, and what followed the announcement was not a louder version of the good news. It was an instruction to stop being satisfied with it. The promise lifted the room's expectation, and the clause after it carried the argument somewhere the clause before it could not go.

Nora Ephron does the same work in a lighter key, announcing that something is coming about dessert and then arriving with a claim about savoring that the paragraph had not yet made. Charlie Kaufman's version, the line Paul Graham borrows to explain why the most ambitious ideas repel the people best placed to chase them, settles up inside one clause, with a verdict on the listener that the listener could never have supplied. Each of those pays in the same breath it borrows. Before reaching for the phrase, name what the reader gains by waiting; if nothing comes to mind, the sentence underneath nearly always reads better without the ceremony.

Where it comes from

The device is much older than the phrase. English has two ways of planting a subject in front of a listener before saying anything about it, one built on here and one on there, and grammarians call both of them presentative. The noun that follows is a placeholder by design, pointing forward at a meaning that has not arrived yet, which is the move rhetoric calls cataphora. Shakespeare hung a famous hinge on the there form: Hamlet counts up the sleep of death, runs into "there's the rub," and the soliloquy turns on the spot.

The here form belongs to the mouth rather than to the page. It carries the speaker's body with it, the lean across a table, and it spread through American conversation along the routes conversation spreads, by radio hosts and chat shows and comedians setting up a turn in front of a live room. Alec Baldwin named a public radio interview series "Here's the Thing" in 2011, which is roughly the point at which a spoken habit becomes a recognizable label. Writers have been borrowing it back from speech ever since, because it does something prose struggles to do on its own, which is make a reader lean in before they know why. Every generation has taken that loan out. What is new is a writer that can take it out endlessly and never once intend to repay.