: How do I spot an unintentional promise in my story? It's commonly said, mainly here on Writing SE and mainly by Mark Baker's answers, that "a story is a promise". The beginning of the story

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Be cautious with the little details, the set dressing. You can describe a normal scene for pages upon pages, and all you will do to the reader is draw a picture in their minds.

But the moment you describe something out of place in that scene, the moment something jarring comes up, that's the moment you make a promise about it.

You can describe the furnishings of a room at great length, the decorations on the walls, the hunting trophies... but the moment you describe a gun on the wall, you are describing an implement that will be used in your story. Yes, even if you're writing about the American Wild West.

In general, it's obvious from context. In a thriller set in the US about terrorism, some swarthy men with grizzled features wearing cloth head-coverings will clearly be a plot point; in a romance set in the middle east they may just be local color.

But it can cause trouble when, to you, something is so entirely normal, you don't realize it's out of place in that particular setting. Someone steps out of their shoes as they enter a building (are they being sneaky or simply polite?); someone is driving 5mph over the limit (are they dawdling, or speeding?); there's a dead animal lying by the street (a commonplace or a tragedy?); and so on.

"Come on in, I'll put the kettle on." To an English person, this just means a friendly welcome, but to others might suggest that boiling the kettle may be the point of the visit.

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Characteristics you introduce are often unintentional promises.

To be too obvious here, if I write a character from the beginning that was a long distance sniper in the Marines, but he is leaving the military to become a safe boring accountant, readers are going to expect him to shoot somebody. Otherwise, why did I make him a sniper? Perhaps I did that for the contrast and to give him something to "escape", PTSD from being under fire while shooting dozens of enemy soldiers.

But that characteristic is a promise: A sniper should snipe, a Marine should fight, Don Juan should seduce multiple women, and a woman spy trained to trade sex for information should be shown doing that in the story.

This is similar to "show don't tell", but basically in the opposite order: If you tell us something unusual about a character or something that has dramatic potential, the reader expect that to pay off sooner or later. If you tell me Bill is forgetful, he better forget something. If you tell me nothing about Chuck's height or build, I expect him to be average, and don't expect him to turn out to be six foot eight. If you tell me he is six foot eight, I expect that to figure into something at some point.

What you write is there for a reason, and this is unlike real life in that sense. IRL you can be friends with some giant person and that never has any dramatic consequence. In a story, such an unusual characteristic makes the reader expect some consequence.

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Pay attention to your editor's/beta readers' reactions. Ask specifically:

Were you satisfied with the story?
Did it do what you think it set out to do?
Were you suprised in a bad way about anything?
Do you feel like the story arcs concluded properly? (obviously if
you've left cliffhangers you'd ask a different question, but you take
my meaning.)
Did anything feel like it came out of left field?
Did any character feel informed? (that is, the narration says "Jon
was clever and methodical" but Jon is consistently sloppy and misses
clues.)
Did any plot twist feel like a deus ex machina or an ass-pull?

If you get good answers across the board, you're probably fine.

What you don't want is for people to say "Yeah, I really thought Greg and James were going to get together, because Greg was always jealous of James's wife and people kept making jokes about Greg and James dating, but nothing came of it." Or "you spent all this time talking about how terrifying the wargs were, but then Anne cast the Warg Repellent spell and they were all dead in two paragraphs."

Those are unintentional promises — expectations you set up but didn't follow through with, potentials which don't pay off. They can be major or minor, but asking those questions can teach you what to look for.

ETA To address Andrey's excellent comment: A subverted expectation is deliberate: you think the good guy is going to put down his weapon, but instead he shoots the hostage. Your expectation is that he was a pure good guy who puts the hostage's safety first, but instead he turned out to be (or became) a more gray guy who is putting the larger good or the mission first. If you re-read, you can trace the development of his changing morality or you can see where he was never all that good in the first place.

An unfulfilled promise is when you spend three seasons setting up a romance between Sherlock and John, and then in season 4 it becomes The Mary Morstan Bro No Homo Show. It might be queerbaiting or it might be bad writing, but it's clearly not where the story was going. There was no narrative hint beforehand that the romance was going to be abandoned, and the focus on a third character doesn't follow from any previous character or plot threads.

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