Not to begin with

[owlcitizen11]

this may just be my thinking, but i don't think lemony snicket had the idea of V.f.D. at the beginning (i am not down-putting lemony snicket). one reason is if you look at the illustrations of count olaf's tattoo in TBB, it is different from the tattoo in TSS. But it is possible that lemony snicket started the v.f.d. plot because the books began to become repetitive, the orphans going guardian to guardian and count olaf showing up. I don't know, what do you think?

[csc]

I agree with you, I don't think he had the idea at the beggining. If so, why would he keep all the V.F.D. information from us in the first 4 books and just throw them at us in the last 4 or 5?

[Hermes]

Yes, I think that's widely agreed. Another thing that supports it is that Monty and Josephine don't seem to know anything about Olaf, which is puzzling if they were in VFD. (He didn't intially know how many books there would be - the series was planned so it could stop after four books, if necessary.)

Keeping back the information until late in the series isn't that surpising in itself - it helps to maintain interest if new material is brought in later - but we might have expected at least few cryptic clues. (In the movie, although it is based on the first three books, we do get VFD material, since by the time the movie was made this theme had been developed.)

[Dante]

It should be noted that illustrations aren't necessarily significant; as far as I know, the illustrations are done without Daniel Handler's input, although it's quite likely that he does get to suggest what clue to the next book should be included in each endpiece illustration, since some of them couldn't be divined from just the Kind Editor letters (I don't think there was anything to suggest in TSS that the next book would feature mushrooms, for instance).

But it's true that this is widely agreed. Handler always wanted to write thirteen books, but he genuinely didn't think the series would be that popular and so his initial contract was just to write four. It figures that, after those were a big hit, he'd need to come up with a greater plot to sustain things over thirteen books; adhering rigidly to the formula with no deviation and no original narrative for that long would definitely turn off readers. And we can also note that a lot of things associated with V.F.D. and the overarching story evolve and change as the series goes on. The broad strokes are pre-planned, but the details are being developed as they're brought into focus. This is pretty standard for authors; you don't always have all your good ideas at the start, especially in a series written over a period of... well, aSoUE was published from 1999 to 2006, so that's eight years in total. You might think Harry Potter was intricately well-planned, which is true, but JKR's also mentioned a lot of material that was changed or removed over the course of the many years of writing that series. You can't anticipate what you're going to want to do years from now.