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It all started with the decision to scrub the shower.

Despite having a water softener and using Iron Out religiously, it still gets iron stains. So I donned my Nyplex gloves and started in with the cleanser.

Then my hand, and the tile it was scrubbing, went through the wall.

The rest of the saga isn’t important (though it includes several trips to big-box home improvement stores, a new faucet, trying to match 45-year-old tiles, and I could whine about it for hours). What matters for the purposes of this post is that the unexpected happened.

According to Robert McKee in his must-have book for all fiction writers, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, one of the essential things that must happen in any story is that the protagonist does something expecting one result and gets another result. A result that leaves her off kilter, out of her comfort zone, in uncharted territory.

Character acts, gets an unexpected result, acts again, gets another unexpected result. McKee says that nearly every action the protagonist takes should have this result.

I had never thought about this before reading McKee, but now I notice it in every book I love. When the unexpected happens, characters reveal themselves. When our hero is out of his comfort zone, he will quickly start doing things that may not be characteristic on a “normal” day, but which reveal deep character because it’s an exceptional day.

Fiction, even day-in-the-life or stream-of-consciousness fiction, is never about an ordinary day or an ordinary series of events. It’s never about when the expected happens. It’s in the crisis or the fun-house of the unexpected that we come to care about a protagonist. It’s in the resolution of the unexpected that we leave characters in their “new normal.”

The “new normal” may look like the “old normal,” but it isn’t. Something has changed. It may just be the protagonist’s mind or heart; it may be the landscape. But something is permanently altered, all because of the unexpected.