: Re: How can I avoid a predictable plot? When writing a novel, authors generally don't want the reader to know how things will end. This is especially true of mystery novels, but obviously applies

@Goswami879

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You mention mystery stories and use a non-mystery-story as an example. That cannot work.

So let's explore how a mystery story creates unpredictability. The recipe is very simple: incomplete information. We know someone died, or some conspiracy did something, but we don't know how, when and who did it. Piece by piece, we find these things out, but always there is one more part of the puzzle missing. There is misinformation leading us down wrong paths, there are surprise turns, there are discoveries... all of this works because we start out with incomplete information.

Your hero story doesn't have that and that is why it cannot possibly be made into a mystery story. We know the hero will be the hero - we know this in a mystery story as well, but the question in the mystery story is not "who is the hero?", but rather: "who is the villain?" (e.g. the murderer, or the conspiracy behind everything, or the dark wizard who cursed the village or whatever).

We also know who the villain is - the monster.

We also know what the mission is (leaving the island), what the obstacle is (defeating or bypassing the monster).

There just isn't any mystery.

To make this outline unpredictable, you need to remove information. Maybe the villagers don't know about the monster and just know that leaving the island leads to death at sea. Then discovering the monster as the obstacle is your first mystery to solve and the reader can have all sorts of own ideas about what is causing all these shipwrecks - and even if he guesses right, he will derive satisfaction from it.

You can then throw in a turn. The villagers try approach A and B and C and fail, and the actual solution is something unexpected. Maybe they try to fight it, no luck. Then they try to bypass it by moving faster or at night, no luck. Then they try to build stronger hulls to simply withstand the attack, no luck. Then it turns out that they were sitting on the solution the whole time. The reason the monster always circles around the island is that its favourite food grows there. Collect a large amount of coconuts (or whatever) and bribe your way past the monster, feeding it a couple every time it comes near the boat.

Your mystery and unpredictability comes from unknowns. You need to add unknowns to your story to make it less predictable.

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