Is Predictability Always a Bad Thing?

[Philip Overby]

I'm of the opinion that plots should do the following:

1. Give the reader something to latch onto.
2. Look like it's going to follow a certain path and then goes in a different direction.
3. Pays off in some ways.

I get the sense that some people are obsessed with not following cliches or going down a predictable path. But is that really so bad? I mean if a story is just unpredictable the whole time, it can throw off the reader just as much as if it were entirely predictable.

What if at the end of Lord of the Rings, Frodo just kept the ring instead of throwing it into Mt. Doom? Sure, it would have been an unpredictable, shocking ending, but it would go against almost everything that was written beforehand.

There are two season finales of shows recently that got mixed reviews.

Spoiler: Possible Breaking Bad and Dexter Spoilers

While Breaking Bad ended with a predictable ending that had been laid out since the very beginning, Dexter apparently went with a more unpredictable ending. Breaking Bad's ending has been mostly widely praised while Dexter's has been mostly maligned.

I don't necessarily advocate making your entire plot predictable, but doesn't any story need at least some predictability? At least enough for your readers to think they know what's going to happen? I'd say letting the reader being right a certain percent of the time, almost right another percent, and completely wrong another percent is the best option. Maybe 30% right, 50% almost right, and 20% completely wrong?

Thoughts?

 

[TWErvin2]

I think that televsion/movie and reading audiences, while there is some crossover, have some different expectations.

I think that plots need twists, bits of unexpected things occurring, including red herrings and irony woven into the plot.

I believe there needs to be some predictability, so that the reader can follow the story. Too many unexpected turns risks turning off the reader, and through foreshadowing and charactization and such, any twist should be one that the reader can say, "I can see how that happened."

 

[wordwalker]

Absolutely true, Phil. The only thing is, it's hard to measure "how far in left field" a twist is, so we can only clarify so much about how surprising to make one for a certain story (let alone a writer's style).

I'd say, the more surprising a twist is, the less readers can relate to the twist itself and the more the point is to show that anything can happen. Which makes it a different form of the relationship between Shock and Suspense: use shocks here and there to keep the reader alert, but use that to raise interest in the suspense of trying to predict what's coming.

So for a story's ending, it really shouldn't be too much of a surprise, maybe taking one of the most likely alternatives (possibly the Odds-On Favorite, which Breaking Bad did) and playing the game of "Will Author really follow through? Yes, yes he did!" If it's one of several runner-up probabilities, that's still plenty of uncertainty to drive the story.

In fact, sometimes the ideal is to misdirect so the reader doesn't think of the wild but plausible Outcome X, and then show them it always made sense-- but the more you do that, the more the story becomes about the misunderstandings the reader had about X, rather than what's gotten the spotlight time. Which seems less efficient than keeping the reader focused on "Will it A or B or C?" and actually using some combination of them. (Plus, if the reader either guesses X anyway or doesn't accept it when it happens, at least part of it's a misfire.)

All that's for a grand finale. For a story's middle, there's more room to shock, since you can follow up with suspense about what it means; episode or season ends love this, and so do books in a series. Of course it's still possible to be too startling, but you've got room to maneuver.

(For that matter, Frodo did claim the Ring. It just didn't work out.)

 

[BWFoster78]

It seems like this is a matter of personal taste.

Some readers really like twists. They gravitate toward the you'll-never-guess-the-ending stories.

Personally, twists do nothing for me. I don't mind them as long as they're not a distraction, but I'm looking for an engaging story. Give me tension and emotion, and I couldn't care less if I can guess the outcome. It's the journey, not the destination.

 

[GeekDavid]

A certain level of predictability is comforting to the reader, I think. It helps them get into the world of the story and also helps highlight the places where the story world is different from the real world.

For an (admittedly extreme) example, you could, if you wanted, create a fantasy world where gravity doesn't exist, but I think then the differences would overwhelm the reader and cause them to set the book aside. Even Weis and Hickman in their Death Gate series, which had a lot of unusual ideas in it, didn't go that far, though they did create a "world" of huge stone islands floating in an even larger bubble of air (the idea was that the world had been split among the four elements, and that was their "air" world, if memory serves).

 

[Devor]

Lord of the Rings had an unpredictable ending. Frodo did keep the ring, Golem stole it from him, and Sam knocked him over with a rock.

The idea that a "twist" format needs to be as stretchy as "Frodo keeps the ring, defeats Sauron and replaces him" is an extreme and misleading view of the formula, which actually makes many of these twist stories more predictable. Sure, sometimes the extreme twist can work - see Arthas from Warcraft 3 - but it's not necessary to view a surprising ending as completely contradictory to everything that had happened so far.

 

[Steerpike]

I don't think it is necessarily bad. I recently finished Seanan McGuire's Discount Armageddon and I saw every turn of the plot coming a mile away. But the ride was so much fun that I didn't care in the least. I just enjoyed the book.

I like twists as well, particularly when someone is really good at them (think Jeffrey Deaver, for example), but I think a good book can be engaging even if the reader can predict what is going to happen.

 

[Philip Overby]

Lord of the Rings had an unpredictable ending. Frodo did keep the ring, Golem stole it from him, and Sam knocked him over with a rock.

I always seem to forget that part.

I guess what I was getting at is that if Frodo kept the ring and killed everyone then it would be unpredictable in a bad way. Well, it would have been horribly bleak in any case.

My original point was that books that have twists should make sense to the overall story. If it just comes out of left field, then it makes no sense and can ruin an otherwise awesome story. One of the greatest twists ever is in The Usual Suspects. It completely made sense and was still shocking as all hell.

 

[Ireth]

Lord of the Rings had an unpredictable ending. Frodo did keep the ring, Golem stole it from him, and Sam knocked him over with a rock.

I don't think this ending was unpredictable at all. It couldn't possibly have gone any other way, IMO. The Ring is a force of pure corruption; that Frodo withstood it for so long is amazing, but he wasn't completely immune to its effects. No one is, even the wisest of the wise (i.e. Gandalf, Galadriel). For Frodo to throw off the Ring's influence and throw it into the fire on his own -- THAT would have been the unpredictable ending.

 

[Feo Takahari]

I think stories have more in common with jokes than people typically realize. If you successfully predict the ending of a joke, it's the weaker for it. But if a joke has an ending that comes out of left field, the response is typically confusion, not laughter. The perfect joke has an ending that makes sense in the context of what came before, but still wasn't expected, typically because it somehow reframes or redefines the point under discussion.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, let me give the simplest example possible: "A man walks into a bar. Ouch!" The word "bar" is already present in the joke, with both meanings possible. The listener expects one meaning, and the last word redefines it to another meaning. This is, of course, rather crude, but more complex jokes still run on the same principle, and us literary types can easily recognize it as the principle of foreshadowing.

I'm out of time to finish this, but you can probably see my point anyway. A story's ending should seem obvious in retrospect without having been obvious beforehand.

 

[Jabrosky]

I say write whatever you want to write without caring too much about predictability or cliches. That itself is a tried-and-true statement, but it works for me.

 

[GeekDavid]

My original point was that books that have twists should make sense to the overall story. If it just comes out of left field, then it makes no sense and can ruin an otherwise awesome story. One of the greatest twists ever is in The Usual Suspects. It completely made sense and was still shocking as all hell.

Agreed. Even if the reader didn't see it coming a mile away, once the twist happens they should be able to see where it came from.

 

[Devor]

I don't think this ending was unpredictable at all. It couldn't possibly have gone any other way, IMO. The Ring is a force of pure corruption; that Frodo withstood it for so long is amazing, but he wasn't completely immune to its effects. No one is, even the wisest of the wise (i.e. Gandalf, Galadriel). For Frodo to throw off the Ring's influence and throw it into the fire on his own -- THAT would have been the unpredictable ending.

The phrase is "surprising yet inevitable."

 

[Nobby]

If your whole story revolves around one thing HAVING to happen for a positive (or, indeed, your intended) outcome, you are almost honour-straightjacketed to that kind of ending with a few sprinkles of novelty (think l chose the house, you can choose the curtains).

On the other hand if you can do this with a twist (that involves no rug-pulling) then you are a better man than I!

 

[Penpilot]

It's not the destination its the journey. A lot of movies everyone knows the bad guy is going to get it, but how we get there is what's interesting. Like mentioned above "surprising yet inevitable".

 

[Lord Ben]

How it ranks on the Predictability Scale is neither a virtue nor a vice. About the only way to do a twist well is to make it surprising yet predictable on the second viewing. Unusual Suspects is one great example of that. Jon Snow's eventual family history another (if predictions are right).

If you advertise it as a romance story and they murder each other and it's really dark you'll turn people off. That's a great way to be badly unpredictable. People should at least be able to pick the type of story they want.

 

[Feo Takahari]

If you advertise it as a romance story and they murder each other and it's really dark you'll turn people off. That's a great way to be badly unpredictable. People should at least be able to pick the type of story they want.

On the other hand, how likely would it be that anyone in the West would have heard of

Spoiler: spoiler

School Days

if it hadn't done that? The entire reason it's known here is that the spoiled, selfish protagonist meets exactly the fate he deserves, and the ending is almost always the first thing mentioned about it.

 

[Helen]

I'm of the opinion that plots should do the following:

1. Give the reader something to latch onto.
2. Look like it's going to follow a certain path and then goes in a different direction.
3. Pays off in some ways.

I get the sense that some people are obsessed with not following cliches or going down a predictable path. But is that really so bad? I mean if a story is just unpredictable the whole time, it can throw off the reader just as much as if it were entirely predictable.

What if at the end of Lord of the Rings, Frodo just kept the ring instead of throwing it into Mt. Doom? Sure, it would have been an unpredictable, shocking ending, but it would go against almost everything that was written beforehand.

There are two season finales of shows recently that got mixed reviews.

Spoiler: Possible Breaking Bad and Dexter Spoilers

While Breaking Bad ended with a predictable ending that had been laid out since the very beginning, Dexter apparently went with a more unpredictable ending. Breaking Bad's ending has been mostly widely praised while Dexter's has been mostly maligned.

I don't necessarily advocate making your entire plot predictable, but doesn't any story need at least some predictability? At least enough for your readers to think they know what's going to happen? I'd say letting the reader being right a certain percent of the time, almost right another percent, and completely wrong another percent is the best option. Maybe 30% right, 50% almost right, and 20% completely wrong?

Thoughts?

I don't see any of it as predictability. I see these things as dramatic devices.

 

[Lord Ben]

On the other hand, how likely would it be that anyone in the West would have heard of

Spoiler: spoiler

School Days

if it hadn't done that? The entire reason it's known here is that the spoiled, selfish protagonist meets exactly the fate he deserves, and the ending is almost always the first thing mentioned about it.

I don't even know what that is.

 

[Feo Takahari]

I don't even know what that is.

It's an anime, so if you're not really into Japanese imports, you probably aren't familiar with it. The long and short of it is that the protagonist is a horrible person, and everyone watching the show wanted him to just die, and then lo and behold, he got horribly murdered in the end as a result of his own actions. (The show itself is based on a visual novel, which I've heard isn't all that good, but which had surprisingly good sales--apparently, there was a market for a romance with potentially violent endings.)