Predictability in Fiction Writing

Predictability is a common criticism of fictional writing from short stories to novels. A short story absolutely must have a twist in the tail (tale?), as it's part of the genre. Novels, too, must have twists and turns to keep the reader interested.

There are several ways to achieve good plot twists. Mainly, the idea is to not tell the reader! Then you spring it on them when they least expect it. Some of the techniques include:

• Unreliable narrator: your narrator can intentionally, or even malevolently, tell the reader the wrong stuff.
• Misdirection: you can intentionally make the plot look like it's going one way (the butler did it), but then twist it (the butler dies).
• Red Herrings: these are false plot twists, such as clues in a mystery that later turn out to be irrelevant.
• Perverse plotting: make your plot the opposite of what readers would expect. Be creative!

But even though you've added a wonderful big twist at the end, you're also supposed to signpost it somewhat with "foreshadowing." As a practical matter, you write the twist first, then go back and add foreshadowing in revision. The goal is to have hints along the way that the reader half-misses, so that when the final twist is revealed, the reader says to themself, "Oh yeah, I should've seen that coming." And then it's fun for the reader to re-read your novel the second time! Foreshadowing is hard to balance correctly: done well, it is a beautiful thing, but done poorly it just becomes a spoiler.

In reality, all of this is extremely hard to achieve. What's more likely is you'll have reviewers saying your book has "twists and turns" and some other reviews saying it's "predictable." You just can't win. The underlying difficulty is that readers are people, and people are unique. Some readers will give your novel a close read, and be thinking about the plot issues as they go through, and so they'll see everything coming. Other readers will just skim through the book letting the story flow over them, and they'll get surprised. Readers who are very familiar with writing, and how books are structured (I'm looking at you, Goodreads), will actually see your foreshadowing and know what it is.

One final twist in our tale about twists, is that in some genres predictability is expected! Obviously, you don't want predictable plots in thrillers or mysteries, but literary fiction is less clear-cut. Romance novels are one genre where the reader is supposed to be explicitly assured that the two lead characters will actually get together happily ever after (arguably, it's not a "romance" without this HEA). Romance readers like to watch the story leads interact, see lots of twisty drama, while feeling comfortable warm fuzzies that it'll all work out in the end. So in the romance genre, it's intentionally predictable what will happen (literally from the very first page), but how it happens should still be twisty.