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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33240
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33240
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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.

Original score: 32