On the eve of my wedding in 1991, as I helped to clean and decorate the house where my fiancée had grown up, my future father-in-law took me aside to offer his life lessons. He’d accumulated these over the span of sixty years, which included the harrowing childhood I would fictionalize a decade later in Hardscrabble Road, service in the Air Force during the Korean War, and a long career as an electrical engineer and manager for the Tennessee Valley Authority.

He gave me his three fundamental conclusions about people:

  1. People don’t change.
  2. There is nothing stranger than people.
  3. You will never understand people.

This was not an attempt to caution me about his daughter I was about to marry. Rather, I believe he saw me (correctly) as a callow youth in need of wisdom as I embarked on that most important of journeys, i.e., what is now called “adulting.”

Over the course of the last 28 years, I have seen his three rules supported time and again. Beliefs and behaviors, for good and for ill, do tend to abide. However, I have also seen those rules contradicted. And sometimes, depending on the person, I’ve observed evidence both for and against.

The changes I’ve witnessed have been subtle rather than substantial—character traits modulated or exacerbated—and many friends’ New Year’s resolutions and intentions to “turn over a new leaf” showed short-term gains but without staying power. Those instances of lasting behavioral shifts that I’ve seen have come about due to religion (either adopting or discarding a faith) or physical changes in the brain brought on by illness or trauma. And while I think I understand most people I encounter well enough, even close friends continue to mystify me with decisions that defy logic and undermine their best interests.

Ultimately, my experiences have borne out a more-flexible version of his three absolutes:

  1. Most people don’t change for the long-term.
  2. Even sensible people can behave illogically.
  3. You will never understand everything that a person does or believes.

I think that we regularly encounter numerous examples of these three “equivocal rules of thumb.” And I believe this is why I and others enjoy reading fiction: we wish we could change but know that’s difficult to do, so we want to read about other people managing that difficult transition.

We want to see the protagonist characters overcome the beliefs and behaviors that had prevented them from achieving their potential. Because of what they have endured and the odds they’ve beaten, we want to see them change for the better—and permanently, not just a while—such that they deserve to receive their reward. In fact, depending on the genre, we might even want antagonists to repent and mend their ways. Essentially, we want the story’s characters to be wiser and improved because of their fictional experiences.

We also want to understand why everybody does everything in a story, so we can anticipate what will happen next—and even enjoy having those expectations confounded as long as that happens in totally logical, consistent ways. Reviewers who exclaim, “I never saw that coming!” (as so many did with Gone Girl and The Sixth Sense) are expressing joy at their predictions being thwarted by a twist that makes sense in hindsight but wasn’t obvious.

This is far different from some Game of Thrones reviewers who groused, “The ending came out of the blue.” In this case, they didn’t feel like the writer earned the shocking payoff; in their opinion, not enough logical underpinnings had been provided for the surprise to satisfy.

Unlike in reality—where arbitrary behaviors, coincidences, unanticipated good/bad fortune, and random incidents can improve, upend, or even terminate lives—we feel cheated if such a thing occurs at the climax of a novel. We’re fine if an accidental event opens a novel and propels the plot because we all acknowledge that stuff happens. But such stuff better be confined to the start of the story and not unduly influence its climax. Imagine how disappointed you’d feel if, at the end of an action-adventure story, the villain overdoses on drugs or is hit by a car rather than being nabbed by the hero. Even worse, imagine the hero getting run over by a random drunk and the bad guy winning.

Some first-time writers have no doubt made such creative decisions because they wanted to make a statement about art mirroring life. We can’t name their books, however, because no publisher would touch that manuscript, and, if the writer self-published, few readers would tolerate such a finale, even though good people experience misfortune every day, and bad people catch countless breaks.

Rather, we want the fictional worlds we read about to refrain from throwing outcome-influencing curveballs, and we want the heroes we’ve rooted for to succeed on their own merits and to change into better people because of their odyssey. As my mother-in-law, a prolific fiction reader, used to say, “If I wanted reality, I’d watch the news.”