Photo by Stephanie McCabe on Unsplash
Happy July 4th!
Oh, is that too predictable? Did you expect that?
Maybe happy Wording Approval Day? (The actual declaration happened on July 2nd, but it took a couple days to iron out the wording. And it wasn’t completely signed until some time in August.)
Oh, is that too unpredictable and therefore either (a) boring or (b) uncomfortable.
If I think saying Happy Holidays is tough, wait until I try to find the predictable balance in writing fiction. You want some predictability, a comfortable story for the read to slide into. And some unpredictability, making the story new and novel to keep the interest peaked. Like the fireworks tonight, they are expected and, yet, each explosion and spiral of the rockets is unexpected.
Diana Pharaoh Francis discusses this quandary in “Predictability” via her Magical Word post on May 5, 2016. I found how working on the topic impacted the manuscript she was creating at the time.
Again the URL is: http://www.magicalwords.net/diana-pharaoh-francis/predictability/