the unexpected in your plot

How often do you surprise your readers or take your story in an unexpected direction? Is it the unexpected that keeps a plot interesting? Is it the unexpected that keeps life interesting? What do you guys do to ensure your story isn't on a straight and boring and predictable path?

 

I pants, and take time to contemplate each chunk I write.
Shorter works are much more off the cuff than that.

 

A younger woman enters the workplace of a happily married, bicycle shop owner. Pheromones fill the place to the rafters as the two of them spiral toward each other, caught in each other's unexpected gravitational fields. He knows this can lead nowhere good, but cannot break free of whatever force is acting upon them. He feels his heart beating harder, sees her breathing more rapidly. Other customers have become invisible, though he knows they are there.

My wife walks in. I can breathe again. The other woman leaves the shop in a rush, never returning. I have no idea what happened that day, what might have happened, and I am extremely happy my wife arrived when she did.

Everyone you meet alters your trajectory, so in my stories, characters follow their own chaotic orbits. Sometimes they approach the orbit of one of the others, but do not interact, later they collide.

What may happen one day, and I truly hope it doesn't: I will be out riding my bike. That other woman, driving along in her SUV, distracted by a child in back or her phone, will that day run over a bicyclist, and then drive away rapidly from the scene. He dies. She goes to prison. Neither recognize their previous approach.

So one tries to give life to their characters.

 

Think of a typical heist story. The elaborate plan is laid out and the reader (or viewer) knows everything that will happen in excruciating detail and has a good idea how things will pan out. Or should pan out. The wheels fall off somewhere down the line, leading to some necessary improvisation and that's what keeps it exciting - what could go wrong next?

I try to do a similar thing in my novel. There is a plan - for being too chaotic makes it difficult for a reader to keep up - but the plan doesn't go quite as expected, derailed by several incidents that snowball into one big problem and the solution is subverted compared to what the MC originally set out to do.

 

Usually if I'm interested in a new nugget that's developing I'll follow it rather than just stick to my outline. Because if I'm interested I'm hoping my readers will be too. My WIP was pretty straight forward in the outline stage but it's taken some interesting turns now that I'm writing. For instance I had a character by the name of Eff Reddy, a bit of a stupid brute (wildly funny by accident), who showed up in a couple of scenes and that was it -- but he made me laugh so much that I kept him in the story actually extending the part before the mc is hired for his acting gig to keep the boy around.
Then I even tested the likability of my mc by having him do something a little bit questionable. I've killed off a character that wasn't meant to die and I'm right on the cusp of another twist I'm hoping to pull off that I had never seen coming. I'm nervous about going this route but ... I'm intrigued.
I'm not sure If I'm going with the unexpected or more just I'm just rattling around all possibilities in my brain and the ones that I didn't think of first are sometimes the most interesting because they took months of writing to surface. If they're that deep then maybe they're not so cliché?

 

Predictability isn't bad. The most well written story that people love to read doesn't have to have shocks and twists in it. People want to be engaged by good writing and character's whose development they become invested in. Surprises not necessary.

 

But your approach doesn't ensure things will stay interesting and unexpected, does it? I pants too so I'm sort of in the same position, but if this isn't something you struggle with or worry about, I would love to hear more from you.

 

Keeping things simple is definitely easier said than done. I aim for simplicity, but that's never the way it turns out. I guess because I do try to keep things simple on some level, I fear that it could lack in other areas. I feel like if I am going to keep things simple, there better be some level of surprise that comes with it. Does that make sense?

 

Um... I don't agree with this. We really must read different things.

 

Most of what I read doesn't have much in the way of twists and turns either. I just like straight up romance about two people meeting, falling in love and getting their happily ever after. I love the predictability of these books - they're super comforting to me. I don't read to feel emotionally or intellectually challenged (I get enough of that from my day to day life, thanks), I read to be entertained and emotionally satisfied, period.

 

Some people really do seem to like predictibility ...at least when it comes to the end result. In fact they can get very upset if the hero doesn't get the girl, or the good guys don't win the fight, or the lost girl never comes home, etc.

I kind of ride the fence on this one. If the reading journey is full of surprises and the joy of travel, I don't mind ending up where I actually expected to end up. However, a twist or something unpredictible that is an organic development is always welcome as well. By organic development, I mean something that I didn't think of while I was reading, but seems natural when it does happen.

People who can pull off these kinds of surprises exhibit a particular kind of genius for milking characters and situations that I truly admire.

I keep going back to Tolkien for examples, mainly because nearly everybody is familiar with the story. But the 'death' of Gandalf (in the book) seemed final. When Gandalf reappeared—believably changed—it was fantastic. And I don't think anybody expected it to be Gollum who finally takes the Ring into the fire. That was such a surprise. I remember putting the book down for a minute after finishing that bit and thinking, "Oh WOW...." And yet, the whole story had been building to that point, and all the clues were there. "Even the wise cannot see all ends..." etc. But Tolkien skillfully hid the clues well enough that while they registered, they were not obvious.

I would be very surprised if Tolkien actually pantsed that event. I'm sure he must have had it in his mind for a long long time. That's storytelling genius, in my book anyway.

Something tacked on or gimmicky as a 'surprise'...no.

I think it's relatively easy to think up believable twists. All you need to do is think of a couple of alternatives to what your characters might do, or what might happen to them. Choose one alternative and shine the spotlight on it, while carefully engineering the other alternative in the background. Keeping the spotlight bright enough so nobody expects anything else to happen is the the trick, I imagine. However, setting up the 'surprise' also has to make sense, and that's where the genius comes in. Not thinking it up, but pulling the surprise off. What you want from the reader is, "Wow, I didn't see THAT coming, but—yeah! Holy shit. Makes perfect sense, when you think about it." You don't want, "WTF???"

Mystery writers and to some extent crime writers have been doing this sort of thing for yonks. It might be interesting to read up on the topic from the viewpoint of somebody who is constructing a 'mystery' for the reader to solve.

 

I mostly go on tangents that are completely unexpected but are still followable. The danger with writing is that you get sucked into writing the same stuff over and over again so that the plot remains predictable - I find. Else, you never deviate enough to make the plot interesting. The challenge, in my opinion, is to have enough courage to change direction every now and again, yet to have sufficient judgement to make said changes followable.

 

For starters, I would prefer a story be predictable with a logical progression, then attempt twists and turns just for the sake of trying to throw the reader off. So my first point is that predictability isn't always bad. Rue's death in the Hunger Games was predictable. You knew it was going to happen. The story was set up that way. But the predictability didn't take away from the impact. In fact, it made the tension even worst. It's kind of like being in a dark room, knowing you're going to be grabbed, you just don't know when, so you wait for it with baited breath.

And with that said comes my next thing about predictability. The idea that something will happen, isn't often as important as the why, when and how. When you watch or read a ghost story. You know there's going to be ghosts in there. You know the haunting is going to have something to do with how the ghost died. This is completely predictable. So with a ghost story, why the ghost is haunting a place, when it's going to appear, and how to resolve the issue, that's where the audience says "Oh. Wasn't expecting that."

That brings me to my next point. Impracticability has to be planned. When I call a plot twist "cheap" it's usually because it feels forced. There are good plot twists where the clues are there, but easy to miss, such as with The Sixth Sense. The twist was so seamless. You just missed it. On the contrary, I hate the plot twist of Frozen where Hans is revealed to be the villain trying to take the kingdom the whole time. It was just very forced. There was nothing leading to it and it almost felt like punishment for paying attention.

With that said, here is the real difference between a good plot twist and a bad one: Rewrites. That is often the only difference. With Frozen, they rewrote practically the entire script very late into pre-productioon. Jennifer Lee is a good story teller. She's has written great scripts in the past. She just ran out of time. In the meantime, I'm sure the director of the Sixth Sense had plenty of time to write, rewrite and flesh out his idea. Funny, is that all his other movies that were rushed, suck. Lady in the Water (also one with a bad plot twist) just feels very unfocused. He had a solid premise with a storybook concept, but the premise got lost somewhere. And this could happen when a writer is overworked. Ron Stirling said he got that way and soon couldn't tell the difference between good writing and bad, that's why the later Twilight Zone episodes don't feel like they're as good.

So if you do try and dabble into the unpredictable, then it's worth going back, carefully making sure that your story has a logical progression. So even if you didn't plan that from the beginning, it at least looks like you did. I personally make predictable the default. That way if the unpredictable isn't working, I have a default to go back to.

 

I write, then go back and fix it. Today for example, I'm looking for a place to introduce a character's first person voice. But right away it didn't work where I put it because it ruined the reveal that followed.

Meh, no big deal, I just need to introduce the character's POV later.

I also found natural places to end chapters with page turner endings.

Maybe the best advice I've gotten was to not make things so easy for my characters. Wouldn't it be nice if... too bad, it'll have to wait.

 

The result you expect that doesn't happen is very satisfying if/when it makes sense. Books are less interesting when the writer just throws a twist in for the sake of a twist.

Take tonight's episode of Lucifer:

Spoiler: Lucifer the TV show

Lucifer finally meets the Sinnerman, but nothing is explained about how he can overpower the Devil. Then we get to the part where the Sinnerman is trapped and Lucifer is about to deploy Lucifer's talent, he looks the Sinnerman in the eye and asks him what he wants and you cannot resist answering.

Earlier you saw Sinnerman pocketing a knife while in handcuffs and you assume it means he's going to escape.

You expect him to escape. Instead he uses the knife to gouge his eyes out. Lucifer cannot look him in the eye to discover what it is Sinnerman wants.

Wow! That is one plot twist the audience didn't see coming but it is also more satisfying than the expected escape of Sinnerman. And it makes sense so it doesn't feel like a cheap plot twist for the sake of a plot twist.

It has to make sense within the story.

"Yonks"?

I'll never have the skill of a mystery or crime writer to develop the plots they do. I am in awe of their skills.

 

Excellent example. A classic case of misdirecting the viewer/reader. Focus the spotlight on one alternative, then deploy the other.