: Re: How can I make the story less predictable? I'm working on my first novel. As I was going through the initial chapters, I felt that the story is quite simple and predictable (in the initial

@LarsenBagley300

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Give your characters meaningful choices. Have their decisions matter.
To make a story interesting and unpredictable, there have to be questions which are not already answered, which have a bearing on the outcome of the plot and on the evolution of the characters.
In The Lord of the Rings, various characters make choices. Boromir faces the decision of whether to support the (to his mind) suicidal plan to take the Ring to Mt. Doom to be destroyed, or whether to try to take the ring by force, or whether to persuade Frodo (if he can!) to bring the ring to Minas Tirith and save everything. All kinds of things hang on what decision Boromir makes. And the decision he makes hangs on all kinds of things.
As long as the Fellowship are traveling in roughly the right direction to go to Minas Tirith, Boromir can procrastinate his decision, and he does. But he's a wild card sitting in the middle of things, sowing uncertainty in the story, and ultimately galvanizing Frodo to (try to) set out on his own. And Sam, observant patient Samwise, anticipated Frodo - and chose to follow after his mater alone, instead of warning the whole Fellowship of Frodo's intentions.
Every major character in that story (and some minor ones) are likewise faced with decisions which matter to the progress and outcome of the tale. Which path should Legolas, Aragorn, and Gimli take, after Boromir has been killed by Orcs, and the hobbits have all vanished or been carried away? Choice after choice.
Trials, goals, conflict, are all important to a story. But what makes a story unpredictable is the uncertainty of what choices each character will make - and what insights this will give us into their character.
Even if you know where your story is ultimately going, the most powerful, interesting, and seemingly unpredictable stories lean heavily on the choices of the characters.
Your story is a tale of revenge? Is your main character married? Does he have to abandon his wife (her husband, significant other, etc...) to pursue vengeance? Is he forced to choose between moving on and having a life, or with destroying his own reputation by bringing death to someone who wronged him? That's a choice. And your character can waver before crossing some Rubicon, making some decision from which there will be no turning back.
Does your character have to decide whether to pursue private revenge or public justice - wanting to bring public shame to the one he has a grudge against, but fearing that a trial may go awry, and the guilty party may walk free? More immediate choices, too - will he hazard trying to disarm a foe or surrender; to lie to a potential ally or tell the whole truth; to settle for punishing a henchman or to promise immunity to the one who pulled the trigger in the inciting crime in exchange for cooperation with getting at the mastermind behind everything? And maybe the henchman then has to decide whether to betray the protagonist, or support him, and so on...
Every alternative faced, every willful sacrifice (or cowardly compromise) your character makes, gives new and deeper texture to the tale.
Or have them be blindly stumbling, or compelled along, from one plot set piece to the next, saying "Gee, maybe I'll go this way now" whenever a fork in the road happens to come up (if there's ever even a fork in the road at all). And then have laser unicorns fly down from the sky and kill all the enemies. But I wouldn't recommend that.

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