In Defense of Predictability
Maybe having a shocking twist at the end isn’t actually the best indicator of a great story.
By Drea Jenkins
Predictable” is good if we’re talking about traffic patterns or the weather. When applied to fiction, it’s rarely a compliment. If anything, it’s an insult: “Boring—I knew what was coming since the first chapter… so obvious!” Reviews featuring “Innovative” and “It kept me on the edge of my seat” and “I never would have guessed the ending” are almost always positive. With all this praise for shocking twists, it seems storytellers should try to be as experimental and transgressive as possible. Maybe Harry Potter would have been better if Voldemort had won. Maybe someone needs to write a new Harry Potter where Voldemort hides out on the dark side of the moon. Maybe we need a romance that switches from first person to second person and the reader realizes they were the love interest all along.
Notice that when a story is rendered fully predictable—the ending shared, the twist given away—it’s not been told, it’s been spoiled. (Oh, the fury of my middle-school self, prematurely informed of Dumbledore’s death.) Notice, too, that we allow spoilers from the first chapter or the first five minutes—“Don’t say anything, I haven’t seen it!” is often followed by “Oh don’t worry, it’s in the second scene.” Apparently we don’t value the initial reveal of the set up of a story, but we do value the reveal of the outcomes of that set up later on. The later bits, where shocking twists are really possible, are where our attention is focused.
Perhaps we love shocking twists and hate spoilers because we need to experience the story for the first time. If so, maybe we are reading for the excitement of the twists and to satisfy our curiosity about the plot, to see where it goes, where it ends. Reading a predictable story, then, has no value since we aren’t curious about the plot.
But predictable stories do sell. In fact, some of the most reliably marketable—and reliably predictable—stories are genre fiction like romance and mystery novels. These novels aren’t only predictable, they are known to be predictable, demanded to be predictable even. Since romance novels must have romance and mystery novels must have a solved mystery, there are some restrictions on what can be written. In these genres, common tropes arise, like the “meet cute” or the incompetent police. Even the most sophisticated examples of the romance and mystery genres—the works of Jane Austen and Dorothy Sayers, for two examples—are fairly predictable stories.
When we feel aesthetic pleasure at the smooth, tidy, predictable unfolding of a genre plot, we recognize that we are responding to a kind of beauty.
A predictable story doesn’t tell the reader exactly what will happen, but it gives them clues as to what will happen. An early scene in Pride and Prejudice has a haughty Mr. Darcy speaking rudely about Elizabeth Bennet’s class, and from then we know that he will marry her. If Mr. Darcy didn’t overcome his prejudice and Lizzy her pride, the story wouldn’t be following the logic of its universe. In the case of Pride and Prejudice, we are set up to expect a happy ending for the two because of the novel’s genre, its tone, and maybe even the title.
In mystery novels, we expect the death (or other mystery) to be solved, but it also has to be solved according to established conventions. In Unnatural Death by Dorothy Sayers, when an old woman dies a little sooner than expected, her niece inherits her estate. The reader is immediately suspicious of the niece, and, sure enough, eventually Lord Peter Wimsey discovers that she needed to kill her great aunt to ensure she would inherit her money—the niece had a motive. When the motive is determined though, Lord Peter Wimsey still has to figure out if the niece has the tools to kill, the means: means and motive are the bread and butter of Sayers’s genre.
When we feel aesthetic pleasure at the smooth, tidy, predictable unfolding of a genre plot, we recognize that we are responding to a kind of beauty. As John-Mark L. Miravalle argues in Beauty: What it is and Why it Matters, one of the essential constituents of beauty is order, or “that which has a certain measurement or proportionality.” He uses nature to show us orderliness, or regularity. It’s easy to see order in the physical world. The tides have a rhythm, a regularity; so do the sun, moon, and stars. Most plants and animals have some symmetry, like the wings of a butterfly or rose petals, or proportionality, like the spirals of sea shells. In stories, we see order in the established universe and the genre, like with mystery and romance novels. But we want some order in all stories. When books don’t adhere to certain rules, the reader can feel cheated, like if a character is making decisions inconsistent with the rest of their behavior or if the previously established non-magical character suddenly starts throwing fireballs without explanation. A story needs order for the plot to make sense.
Order isn’t everything; otherwise carbon-copied, dimestore romance novels would be the most beautiful of all. Miravalle points out that order is necessary but not sufficient to make an object (or a story) beautiful. If order is the object of our aesthetic appreciation, the objective side of the beauty coin, then the other side, the subjective element, is surprise. A surprise is something that is unexpected by us, even if it’s objectively predictable—Miravalle defines surprise as “the mind’s attentive response to what it does not find obvious.” A child from the city goes camping and sees the Milky Way for the first time; he is surprised, even if he already knows the stars are beyond number and even though those stars are actually present all the time. The stars, in their number, arrangement, and brightness, are surprising to the child who has never seen anything like them.
We can be confident that humans will continue telling stories.
Miravalle claims surprise prevents us from “getting used to the order,” which is essential in continuing to appreciate beauty. We are surprised by the order itself, like the boy with the stars. In Pride and Prejudice, I was surprised when I first read Darcy’s letter to Lizzie detailing Wickham’s checkered past. Up to that point, I’d read Wickham as a mostly harmless, if mildly unctuous character. My surprise at the letter was an appreciation of Darcy’s character, since Darcy had responded kindly to Wickham in the earlier parts of the novel. Later, Darcy’s hand in paying off Wickham’s debts comes as a bit of a surprise and shows that he still takes responsibility for Wickham (even after cutting him off and Wickham’s poor behavior after that) and he has overcome his pride against the Bennet family’s drama. These surprises keep us from getting used to Darcy being and becoming a good, less-prejudiced man and Wickham’s being a bad one. Lizzie is surprised by Darcy’s character revelations, too, and changes—the reader gets to then be impressed, surprised, by Lizzie’s changing as well. As events unfold, and we are surprised by the individual events of the characters’ growth, we are able to appreciate the beauty of the romance of two people overcoming their vices and loving each other.
In Whose Body? by Sayers, the true identity of the corpse has been hinted at throughout the book, but we are still surprised when we find out that the murderer has substituted a medical cadaver for the victim. When we get to the final reveal, we know all of the details, yet we “ooh” and “ahh” at each step, allowing Lord Peter Wimsey’s storytelling to impress us all over again. The reader knows from the very beginning that the eccentric detective Wimsey will solve the mystery, but the methods (like his focus on the teeth, nails, and hair of the found body) are still surprising. We have to admit, “I wouldn’t have thought of that.” Surprise is how we keep engaging with the beauty of order.
We can find surprise outside our own responses, too. In the essay “On Stories,” C.S. Lewis uses the experience of rereading to show how “surprisingness” can transcend “being surprised.” He points out, “You cannot, except at the first reading, be really curious about what happened.” When we re-read a story, we are beyond curiosity, but we can appreciate the cohesiveness of the plot, how we couldn’t see the twist coming yet it still fits perfectly in the order of the story. This applies to re-reading previously unpredictable plot points (and it might apply to reading stories that are spoiled), but we can find surprisingness when certain characters are surprised, too. Readers can empathize with Lizzie’s family’s response to her rapidly unfolding romance with Darcy. The sweetest scene is when Mr. Bennet asks his daughter if this is true, and she tells him it is. His shock reminds us of the order of the book, that normally a family would be involved in or aware of the pending engagement, and that the engagement itself is surprising in the era. These responses of other characters may be different than that of the reader, especially people who expect love to be the primary reason for engagement. Since Mr. Bennet and the other characters live inside the order of the novel, they can showcase proper surprise at its events. The surprisingness of the relationship helps us appreciate the beauty of the novel in a different way—we appreciate Darcy and Lizzie’s break from expectations and the social risks they are taking for each other.
In our age of cookie-cutter superhero sequels and rapidly advancing AI technology, some have worried that culture is running out of creative steam, that every story worth telling has already been told. But if novelty, originality, and suspense aren’t the essence of a good story, if order can be surprising and predictability can be beautiful, then we needn’t worry. We can be confident that humans will continue telling stories. And as for the storytellers–there are whole, predictable worlds of genre and form to be rediscovered.
Drea Jenkins is a software developer in Lebanon, NH. She graduated from Dartmouth College in 2020 and spends her free time reading, writing, and coding.
