Hey, I'm new to this forum. Recently, while I was plotting my story, I've wondered if there was some way to find out how predictable my story is. The internet kinda answers: Avoid tropes and get some beta readers. My story does not really go for tropes but then again maybe the lack of tropes is also a dead giveaway too. Others suggested to put a new spin on a trope but I'm not skilled enough to do that. It also doesn't suit my story. So I'm left with beta readers but that's another issue. You can find English beta readers but finding them in other languages is somewhat difficult. There are few available and the ones that are prefer established authors. So does anyone else have an idea? How can you tell whether your plot is predictable?
For an issue on predictability, I think you don't necessarily need experienced beta readers, maybe give your story to your friends, only asking if they find it predictable. Also, sometimes predictable doesn't mean bad unless you're writing a mystery where suspense is a key element?
Almost every TV show is completely predictable. The cops solve the crime. The doctor cures the patient. The ridiculous sitcom family pulls out of their problems no matter how bumbling they are. Movies are also very predictable - good guys win, bad guys lose. In heroes journey novels, s/he goes through perilous situations, but finally wins out in the end. It's not that your story/plot is predictable, it's all about how you present it. Music and audio was my thing before I started writing. How many songs use the I-IV-I-V-IV-I-V chord progression? (Standard blues pattern.) How about I-vi-IV-V? (It seems half the songs from the fifties used this.) Despite using the identical BASIC chord pattern, you can play it in 12 different keys at almost any tempo with lyrics that can say just about anything you want. How the lyrics are sung/delivered, the instruments played, the solo, the production, etc. are what make the song special - or not. From my perspective it's all about presenting your story and your characters in an interesting, relatable and hopefully unique way, not about the predictability of your plot.
Bringing something fresh to a familiar story device is a lot easier than avoiding them altogether. The vast majority of writers (and artists of all kinds) never invent anything completely new. They just find interesting ways to use the same tools all writers have always used. I dislike the term Tropes, especially because people believe they're things you absolutely must avoid at all costs. That's not possible, nor is it a good idea. Like all of the 'rules' in writing, tropes are things you should understand, but not to avoid. Just make sure you're not using them in a boring predicatable way. That's pretty much the main thing we need to do as writers across the board.
Isn't it a matter of range? I.e. your story may be unenjoyable if I can predict what's going to happen in each scene down to dialogue and descriptions, but most people can predict the broad strides of every story and that doesn't affect its quality at all. I think directors like Rian Johnson don't understand the latter point. I've also heard of showrunners changing series finales to something less satisfying just because some fans reasoned out the original plan. The reason those oracle fans succeed in the first place is because of proper forshadowing, which gets tossed with the bathwater in response.
Unpredictable isn’t always good, if it’s so unpredictable that I don’t see where it’s coming from. I remember Lucio Fulci saying Dario Argento was an amazing director but a terrible writer- and summed up a lot of how I felt about his work and a lot of folk that followed. An unpredictable ending should (I think) surprise the reader/viewer, but make them kick themselves for not seeing it coming. A second viewing let’s them see everything they should have spotted as clues. That’s what Argento messes up on. I can watch some of his movies over and over and never see a single clue beyond someone suddenly going “hey, I forgot to say, I was talking to a taxi driver last week and he said he was the murderer. Sorry about that”. Unpredictable, but rubbish. So there’s no harm in some predictability. People can be happy to go on the journey, but focussing on making it unpredictable can just force it into lacking cohesion.
Well said. It should be surprising but perfect, and on looking back it should have already been embedded in the beginning, only nobody noticed it.
Character-writing might help avoid predictability. If they are fully-formed people, they will be unique to us as writers, and won't want to do the same things as anyone else's characters. Related to this is the distance-of-focus. If an onlooker zoomed out too far, my life would look like:- born, went to school, got job, married, had kids, got old, died. And I think a common mistake in fantasy writing is that we can become distracted by all the dull background stuff that's going on in the storyworld, which prevents us from getting as close as we should to the characters' individuality. For people to be special and unpredictable, we have to bring the story's focus close enough. If someone's guarding a city wall, they're going to wake up at dawn, put their armour on, climb up a staircase in a tower, and walk backwards and forwards until their shift's over: maybe they see an approaching army or maybe they don't, but the reader will find them tedious unless they're shown a unique person. What thoughts do they fill their head with? Do they count the battlements? Who would miss them if they fell off? Do they keep bees? Can they see their house? Who do they have to suck up to to get a transfer to the sunnier wall? Have they remembered their pack lunch? What made them apply? Do they feel valued by the townspeople or did the king stick eight lookouts on each wall just to create jobs? Certainly the guard isn't going up there to be a plot device allowing a 200-word poetic description of skeleton bagpipers to be fitted into the wordcount: the guard is going up there for intensely personal reasons. Bills to pay. Presents to save for. These things make the guard unpredictable. And a story that is about the guard's character, rather than the Deadites invading Tropestein Castle, is a less predictable story.
Predictability itself isn't bad at all. What kills a story to me is when I foresee / predict two outcomes, one far inferior but likely simply because of tropes / expectations. If that ends up being the final result, then I'll feel disappointed. A good example for this is the movie / story of Hateful 8. Another is the movie adaptation of Valerian. Spoiler Hateful 8: TL/DR: eight characters end up stuck in a mountain lodge, they start dying one by one, suspecting one another, turning on each other, eventually landing some kills themselves. Now, the two predictions I had while watching fresh were: 1. Yeah, this is just gonna be [controversial title] from Agathe Christi and we'll discover there was some external killer hiding all along. 2. But the story lends itself to an awesome twist, what if there was no external factor, all the characters were sketchy with no exception and paranoia / disagreements / anger led them to start a murder spree with no point? Obviously, what I described happened - the first was the result, EG, a re-hashed version of a classic piece of literature, which severely disappointed me (and I haven't watched the movie another time). Had Tarantino gone with the 2nd idea, it would have immediately drawn re-watch potential as going through the whole movie one more time would've given you such a unique perception/perspective of it. BAH, rant over. Valerian: TL/DR: alien peaceful idillic native race's planet is destroyed during a space battle waged overhead. Aliens escape on a single craft drifting through space, and then start gathering materials to build /something/, paying hefty money / abducting people / doing sketchy stuff hiding in the middle of a space station, where the admiral is the leader who oversaw the battle that destroyed their home. 1. Yeah, this is just going to be "we just want to live in peace and get ourselves a home, evil admiral sought to erase us to destroy a stain on his past." 2. Then, there was the chance the aliens were driven from their peaceful ways & were fuelled by vengeance, creating a WMD. In the first case, Valerian just sided with them and the movie was over with little question / struggle. In the latter's case, Valerian might have met a WMD pointed at Earth and the aliens explaining to him their right to have vengeance. And he'd have to choose between adhering the corrupt admiral and eradicating the remnants, trying to convince the remnants that peace is still an option and there's room for reconciliation or potentially aid them and watch them unleash hell on the station / on earth. And that's precisely where a good beta reader can help. The best advice I can give you is to know your beta reader's ability to predict; some people can be surprised by menial twists while others see much further ahead. I specifically see this as I'm currently DMing a politics / intrigue / conspiracy based tabletop RPG for a group where two players largely go with the flow for fights & funs with little sight / perception of the greater picture while the other two players are trying to investigate fine threads and hints in the plot and plan sessions ahead. Asking the former pair about a book's twist would likely yield the "oh, that's clever" answer no matter how obvious it is, while the latter two might tell you their predictions. Inherently, once you've a developed / in-depth character you'll be baseline unable to follow tropes. Tropes require generic box characters to work; when you expose decent ones to tropes they'll claim them, mould them and do the spin themselves. I suggest trying to poke around your local NaNoWriMo community; those are present enough across the globe to be a reliable source. Last but not least, the answer really is no, because for a few it'll be blatanly obvious for others it'll be a wholly unforseene and weird twist. The right goal is to have 5%-10% of your readers guess the twist or plot right, and keep the rest surprised. Though always remember, a twist only works if it results in a plot that is a pleasant surprise to the reader, not a disappointment. Imagine if the plot twist in Philosopher's stone was Harry - after seeing all the clues about Quirrel in the dungeons - ends up seeing Professor Quirrel dead, slain by Voldemort who's just a kinda wrath standing there laughing. That /is/ a twist, but it's a disappointment because most readers expected either Snape or Quirrel to be the evil.
Predictability is not necessarily the kiss of death. For instance a lot of sub-genres - zombie horrors, gothic romances, prairie romances are predictable. Down to having exact moments - in Prairie romances there is usually a brush fire and a town picnic, in zombie horror there is usually the hits-home kill (of having to destroy ones own relative or friend), and a friend that is turned. Predictability is also pretty much guaranteed when you give the character a goal and the reader expects it to be fulfilled. The trick is in not fulfilling it in the way they expect. Other ways to avoid predictability is to fine-tune the characters motivation and reactions (what delays and trips up the mc to his goal is where you can be fresh), and pick details that are sharp and not over-used. Back in the 80s there were two movies that used vampire themes - Lost Boys and Near Dark - one used a baroque Peter Pan theme for it's frame-work and comic-book loving boys as the hero/vampire slayers, the other used the AIDs crisis and turned the vampires into nomadic hillbillies that target a farm boy. Both movies follow similar vampire-movie patterns and events, with similar characters - older boy with vulnerable, young sibling, lured into the clan by a pretty girl. Both movies are unique though in their details. Near Dark is less predictable than Lost Boys because Lost Boys cornered itself with a twist ending (who is the head vampire) and by process of elimination it wasn't a surprise.
The creative writing course I did a couple of years ago was facilitated by a fairly cool man who was most non-prescriptive in his delivery. He had a few gems he'd repeat and the one I remember best was something like "no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader". Wasn't quite sure what he meant at the time, not having written very much, but think I've a better handle now. Basically, let your story and the characters grow naturally, give it life and see\record what happens. Don't approach it with preordained paths to preordained conclusions and, instead, be led by the characters in their environment. Get that right and you will have moments where you realise you did not expect that to happen, or the character to say that, behave that way. Sometimes you may find the story wasn't about that thing you first thought but something else, maybe very different. It's something I've experienced a few times and has been a much more rewarding writing experience.
An idea of an unpredictable plot would be including a loud mouth obnoxious rich brat moron who is cowardly and can't fight and cowers in fear when the protagonists come after him. He could also be for comedy relief because the protagonists frequently play practical jokes on him whenever he runs his mouth. And then..........later on he turns out to be the leader of the antagonist organization who was pretending all along and is nothing like who he was before. If this kind of story is made into a movie or series however,the director could ruin things by getting a popular actor to play the role of the moron since he will be a chief antagonist later.
To the point of this thread—I'd say ultimately there's a constantly-shifting dialectic between predictibility and unpredictibility. You need both in the right doses. A story shouldn't be so unpredictable that readers have no frame of reference, but it also should avoid falling into worn-out formula. It's the 'pebble and the string' thing: "You must have seen children playing with a string and a pebble. They tie the string to the pebble and swing it around over their head. They pay out string and it makes bigger and bigger circles. The pebble is the revolt against the tradition, it wants to break away. The string is the tradition, the continuity—it's holding it. But if you break the string the pebble will fall. If you remove the pebble the string cannot go that far. The tension of tradition and revolt against tradition are in a way contradictory, but as a matter of fact are a synthesis. You will always find this kind of synthesis in any good art. "However radical the work, it is radical in relation to the primal shape. And the shape seems undeniable." In this case the pebble is predictibility and the string (actually the centrifugal force, only possible thanks to the string) is unpredictability. You need to tether them together, get it all spinning, and play around with that balance point—pay out more string at times, and sometimes reel that pebble in a bit. Keep the balance shifting and dynamic, not static. It's far more interesting.
Was thinking more along the line of someone who would degrade himself even more than Keyser Soze to keep up the deception.
Some stories thrive on predictability...for instance romance. Pick up any "The prince who loved me" type book read it, put it down, pick up another such title and its plot is wash and repeat. Nor is it alone, I am a fan of Louis L'Amour western novels and even as a fan I have to admit he is predictable as hell: a homely cowboy with a slick gun hand runs into some hard-charging bad guy(s), meets a pretty girl, ends up in some big shoot out. In the end, he's wounded, though not fatally, gets his pretty girl and lives happily ever after. Book, after book, after book. And yet he is the greatest best-selling western author of all time and his books are still in print. So depending on your genre, predictability might be giving the audience exactly what they expect. As for tropes...f the haters. I watched all the same YouTube experts you did and they all have their own opinions, especially fantasy: "Don't put elves, dwarves, gnomes or other things into your story". Screw that. If my story has an elf in it, it's my damn story. For instance, my current WIP has a race that call themselves the Miskini, they live in and are experts in the woods, use bows and arrows, and their magic system generally involves the manipulation of nature. The human world refers to them as elves, which in the folklore are evil spirits, because they are rather xenophobic of non-human races and use it in a derogatory manner. My story, it has elves, that's how I want it, trope and all, and if someone gets offended that my story has an elf race in it, oh well, it probably wasn't for them anyway.
Sherlock Holmes stories are extremely predictable, he always solved the crime. But the stories annoyed me because Holmes solves the crime by noticing things that were never in the story until he presents them at the dénouement. I enjoyed the Ellery Queen novels. It was guaranteed by the authors that all of the clues needed to solve the crime were presented to the reader. (They were.) A few times I even played detective and wrote down notes as I read, trying to solve it before the last chapter. I almost never did, but all of the clues were there, if I had only put the puzzle pieces together properly. Frustratingly rewarding.
That was a later development in the genre. Though it may have been used in some early detective stories, like maybe Murders In The Rue Morgue (?), it wasn't expected or common.
I totally agree with you. You might just miss your story's true potential if you limit yourself to tropes/no tropes. Simply writing what feels right seems to the best rule. In my current story I didn't avoid tropes on purpose. The story started out being somewhat of an experiment. I kinda just merged my 3 favourite genres into one big storyline. They aren't typically genres you find combined into one story. At first I was trying to find a healthy balance of meeting expectations and bringing something new to the table but I quickly noticed that this was not the story I wanted to write. My characters also did things (for the sake of tropes) that just didn't match their personalities. So I threw the entire draft out. I changed my protagonist and just went from there. The new plot is basically based only on the characters reaction to the society, culture, past, magic system, world and the inciting incident. We just roll from there but because the genres are a weird mix, I find that there are few tropes in this story because they don't fit with the other genres. But I'm happy. This is the story I wanted to write. I mean, I still have some issues with it like I'm so upset over having a character that I love die. I'm still trying to find a way to save her without destroying the plot. Anyway the surprise/unpredictability is actually a somewhat important for of the plot (since there is a lot of mysteries and predicting their meaning would probably spoil the entire story) but after this thread I've realized that my view might have been too narrow-minded.
Cozy mysteries might inspire the OP with authors like Laura Childs, Marion Chesney, and Agatha Christy. They're hard to write if you're not used to the genre. I wrote a short story cozy where it was a struggle to keep the foreshadowing subtle and have the hidden twist at the end. There were a lot of rewrites.
"Gentlemen," he said, "Ivan Ilyich is dead!" And so begins the second paragraph of "The Death of Ivan Ilyich". Never say never, right? Another thought would be to consider an unreliable narrator. Pretty difficult to write but delicious if it works.
I think "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" is the greatest book ever written. For me, seeing how someone faces up to their own extinction is the ultimately gripping plot-line. Yet in so many stories it's handled tritely. Whereas Tolstoy's descriptions are masterful: the mounting tension as the illness progresses; the mood swings as the guy tries to evade the inevitable; the accuracy of all the character portrayals; the terrible climax of the end. I couldn't bear reading another book for days afterwards. I knew nothing I ever read again would be as powerful as this book. So I'd say, predictable plots are fine: it's true-to-life detail and characters which count. Which is why I loathe fantasy . What is the point of it?
I like it because it lets you have true-to-life detail and characters but with complete liberation from the real-world constraints. But each their own I guess. I like historical fiction right up until the author starts writing in major interactions with real historical characters. The time frame is fine with me, but having say, your gunslinger back Doc Holiday down is just a no-go in my book. So we all have or dislikes
Not all fantasy is like that. Sci-fi and fantasy, as well as the other genres, can be confining or liberating depending on the author and how they're used. Some use the genre conventions to reduce the possibilities, to hide from the messiness and the big ideas of life. But some use them to expand what's possible, to find an interesting way to embrace some of those possibilities that you can't touch with mere realistic social fiction (I'm not calling Dostoyevsky mere realistic social fiction). Gene Wolfe is one who uses sci-fi and fantasy in an expansive way. In this interview, Wolfe explains that his fiction is essentially the OPPOSITE of what genre science fiction is often used for.... that rather than create little worlds where characters can act out simplistic ideas, he weaves a dense tapestry filled with intertwining concepts that cover pretty much the gamut of human thought... with an especial consideration for the more profound, such as language and how it shapes thinking and character, memory (and in particular memories of memories... ) why monsters are really US, and the unreliability (relativity) of narrators for various reasons. He says there's no separating form from subject... they interpenetrate and create each other in a symbiotic relationship. A quote from the interview: "Incidentally, I'd argue that SF represents literature's real mainstream. What we now normally consider the mainstream—so called realistic fiction—is a small literary genre, fairly recent in origin, which is likely to be relatively short lived. When I look back at the foundations of literature, I see literary figures who, if they were alive today, would probably be members of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Homer? He would certain belong to the SFWA. So would Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare. That tradition is literature's mainstream, and it has been what has grown out of that tradition which has been labeled SF or whatever label you want to use." "It's a matter of whether you're content to focus on everyday events or whether you want to try to encompass the entire universe. If you go back to the literature written in ancient Greece or Rome, or during the Middle Ages and much of the Renaissance, you'll see writers trying to write not just about everything that exists but about everything that could exist. Now as soon as you open yourself to that possibility, you are going to find yourself talking about things like intelligent robots and monsters with Gorgon heads, because it's becoming increasingly obvious that such things could indeed exist. But what fascinates me is that the ancient Greeks already realized these possibilities some 500 years before Christ, when they didn't have the insights into the biological and physical sciences we have today, when there was no such thing as, say, cybernetics. Yet when you read the story of Jason and the Argonauts, you discover that the island of Crete was guarded by a robot. Somehow the Greeks were alert to these possibilities despite the very primitive technology they had—and they put these ideas into their stories. Today it's the SF writers who are exploring these things in our stories." Ok, 2 quotes. Sue me.
