One of the worst things a writer can hear in response to a story they’ve written is that the story was predictable. People read stories to experience something new and to be surprised, and if your story is predictable and the reader feels like they could’ve guessed what was going to happen in the story before it happened, then your story has unintentionally robbed them of the experience.
That’s the dilemma I faced when I was writing a serialized story for my 9th grade ELA students a couple years ago. I told the story in episodes over several months that school year, and one of the criticisms I got from my students was that the story was predictable. After getting past the initial feeling of being kicked in the gut, I realized they were right.
The Predictability of Human Thought
Stories become predictable because we often settle into one particular way of thinking. We take the most direct and obvious route to a solution, and this is the route anyone would take because it’s first thing anyone thinks of.
Of course, there are many things in life for which we should take the obvious route. If you’re going to change a light bulb, for example, there aren’t a lot of options for how to twist out the old bulb and twist in a new one.
