User blog comment:Bonkilemonster/Total Drama Gone Wild: Progress! (No.3)/@comment-2021069-20140825025519/@comment-1874924-20140825035427

By the same token, don't fall for the siren's song of trying to make every elimination shocking. First, it's impossible on its face, because overusing shocking eliminations would drain them of their shock value. Viewers would come to see them as merely screwy and would learn to see the red herrings for what they are. Second, a shocking elimination has to make sense, at least in retrospect, and that's not always possible to arrange.

My competition story has had one truly shocking elimination--the very first, which I suspect has become one of the story's iconic moments--and another that would have been shocking if it wasn't a Station of the Canon. A couple of others were shocking in-universe but not to the reader, because all the drama was in lining up the votes. A couple were probably obvious, but sometimes that's what makes sense. The rest were (I think, at least) middle of the road, where a lot of people probably guessed who was going home and a lot of people didn't.

In my story, the elimination order follows the storylines, so it was sometimes a challenge to come up with a good (or at least plausible) reason for this or that player to leave when they had to leave. Most of the early outs were eliminated for specific dramatic reasons, but one player left when he did because the elimination order had only one open spot left.