Screenwriting : Can Your Stories Really Be Unpredictable? by Aray Brown

I think that depends on if you can clearly steer your audience in a particular direction. Setting expectations is everything for setting up the surprise. Then, it's a matter of doing something new based on that setup. Pitch Perfect gets a resounding "that was better than I expected it to be" because the moment you think you know what will happen next, it switches the expectation.

Predictability comes from familiarity. The more familiar someone is with story structure the less surprised they are by a properly structured story.

I look at it like this: Create your story for the person who hasn’t experienced 1,000 stories. They will be caught by surprise from the twists and turns in your story and feel exactly how you want them to feel at the end.

Unpredictable is easy. Making it meaningful, logical or entertaining is not :-) If you haven't seen the movie "The Square" I'd recommend it. To me that movie is a masterclass in unpreditability. I guess one way of thinking about it is not necesssarily to write a surprising storyline. But making a surprising version of every scene and allowing yourself to go a different route and keeping the viewer on their toes.

Yes. I truly believe a story can be unpredictable. If there are three characters, of course one of them did it (whatever that is). So unless you do something stupid like the earth suddenly blows up. All guesses are constrained by the context of the story.

If you watch “Layer Cake” you see all the twists and turns and think I didn’t see that coming. Then bam, they pay off something you completely forgot about.

If you Save the Hero or believe in the Cat’s Journey things must eventually become predictable as we teach the audience what to expect. It is like Pop Music, easy to understand but not challenging or new.

I think my stuff is less predictable. But I have a style. For anyone that has read my screenplays, people die. Good people die. People have choices, when they make the wrong one they get punished and I make sure they know why they are getting punished. I always give them moments of reflection.

I think if we feel a lack of surprise, steer away from it. Which itself make me predictable (as me).

The movie Deep Blue Sea (1999) caused Roger Ebert, a professional movie watcher, to say this: (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/deep-blue-sea-1999)

"There is a moment in this movie when something happens that is completely unexpected, and it's over in a flash--a done deal--and the audience laughs in delight because it was so successfully surprised. In a genre where a lot of movies are retreads of the predictable, "Deep Blue Sea'' keeps you guessing."

However, this moment happens exactly at the 60 minutes mark.

From a structural standpoint, something utterly shocking happening at the 60 minutes mark is not a surprise. Take a look at any commercially successful movie ($100m+ at the box office) and see what happens at that same 60 minutes mark.

Predictability is how we guarantee our stories resonate at the deepest level with our audience.

It is our creativity that allows us to surprise the audience despite that predictability.

This is your skill as a writer at work. Always be leading the audience. A magician says "Nothing up my sleeve" so that you focus on her sleeve when she is really doing something with her hat which will create the magic. The audience is lead to believe that the sleeve is important, when it's really the hat... so when something magical happens with the hat, we're surprised.

If you lead the audience to believe A will happen next and then B happens they are surprised.

Writing skills.

I think when it's completely unpredictable it might piss audiences off and then you spend the next few years being made fun of for your twist endings. I'm a big fan of leading the audience like William Martell says. If you're surprised and able to go back and watch it and see how it was setup, I think that's the tightrope walk I find the most satisfying as an audience member.

Flipping or updating tropes is often a great way to play with audience expectations like Steve DeWinter is saying.

But I think pulling the rug out from under the audience can make them fall on their backs too hard. Even THE PRESTIGE with it's fun twist completely tracks moving backwards, and that's one I didn't see coming at all at the time. KNIVES OUT does an awesome job of toying with Christie-style murder mysteries by laying everything out on the table and then knocking it to the floor (an apt metaphor in the movie itself) and gets better with every rewatch for me because of those little details even though by the midpoint I knew who was responsible, but the how and the unintentional unravelling of it all was what made it fun.

So you can do the completely unexpected, but it might just end up disappointing if you undo things too much. People really hated THE VILLAGE reveal. I kind of like it, but I completely see why.

Nick Assunto I have not seen KNIVES OUT. Another one i gotta add to my list. I love the tightrope. Definitely lead the audience instead of dragging us behind like so many bad movie and shows i've seen/read, i strive to do the opposite of that. That's one of my goals. Lead the aueince, Leave them engaged and wanting more. Also a balance between predictability and unpredictabilty.

I think a surprise ending is depended on the unique premise. The reveal that a main character was dead the whole movie, would be very random and unpredictable in most stories. I remember reading that M. Night Shyamalan didn't come up with his plot twist until way into the rewrites. Had he not found it, it would have been a missed opportunity. But it also tells me that a surprise ending has to be developed through hard work and rewrites until you find it and get full value of the unique premise. Then of course, not all unique premises need a surprise ending.