Readers Crave Stories with a Twist: Tips for Writing Great Plot Twists
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When it comes to stories, everyone LOVES a good twist. Whether this is in a movie, short story, or a novel audiences LOVE to be fooled. Twists and misdirection can not only cultivate passionate fans, but they’re crucial elements that keep any story from the dreaded label…”formulaic.”
Who wants to spend precious time with a movie, am HBO series, or a book that anyone with one eye and half sense could predict the ending?
I believe the greatest compliment any story can earn is the surprising yet inevitable ending. When we craft a story, ideally the reader will finish and say two things.
I never saw that coming and How did I NOT see that coming?
Word wizardry is not easy, so a colleague of mine has been generous enough to write a guest post for today. C.S.Lakin is a fantastic speaker and teacher. She’s here to teach us to TWIST, BABY, TWIST!
Take it away, Susanne!
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Plot twists are all about the unexpected. So, the best tip for writing great twists is come up with unexpected plot developments.
The challenge for the writer is to craft twists that are both unexpected and believable. Ah, there’s the rub. How can your twists be believable if they’re unexpected?
Expect the Unexpected
Often, the trick is to set up hints, or foreshadowing, in earlier scenes, so that when the truth of the twist is discovered, your reader won’t get mad because they feel cheated or tricked. Having a new character show up at the climax to save the day for the hero will do just that.
No setup, no believability (and no satisfaction on the reader’s part).
If your novel has twists at the start of the story, immediately misdirecting due to appearances, that’s fine . . . again, so long as it’s believable. We humans make assumptions and come to conclusions about events we experience, and it’s believable that we may misinterpret what we see and hear.
For Example:
Your character is walking down the street of her city at dawn. Two men come running out of a bank, holding black briefcases. The bank alarm is blaring. She hears screaming from inside the bank, then an explosion. Not wanting to stick around, she runs . . . only to turn a corner, where she crashes into the two men . . .
Your reader might reasonably presume these men are bank robbers. And what transpires upon encountering them may also reinforce this belief when one points a gun at her and tells her to get lost and quick.
It’s only later, when she is pouring herself a stiff drink and trembling behind her locked apartment door that she sees on the news that a gang of Goth girls, sent by a mob boss, robbed the bank, using plastic explosives to blow up the vault.
This plants doubt in your character’s head: Is the news wrong or did I misinterpret what happened?
Later in the story, events may unfold that have her realize the men she encountered were not the “bad guys” but, rather, secret agents who, tipped off about the impending robbery, managed to get the highly classified plans from the safe-deposit box in time, before the Goth girls entered.
But then, another twist might show that to be false information given to the police. The men are actually from a rival mob, and they have even worse plans.
For Every Action There’s a Reaction
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Your twist needs to be written with your readers’ reaction in mind. Do you want to shock them? Scare them? Make them angry? Keep that emotion at the forefront when crafting your twist.
If you start with the “expected,” the believable, then you can work from there. Keep these points in mind:
Twists need to escalate the story.
Meaning, they shouldn’t be thrown in for no good reason (other than to surprise the reader). The stakes for your story need to be impacted by the twist.
The story must be able to stand on its own without the twist.
If you took out the Statue of Liberty at the end of The Planet of the Apes, it would still be a terrific story about a world of intelligent apes oppressing unintelligent humans. If Dr. Crowe in The Sixth Sense wasn’t really dead, the story would still be a fascinating study of a therapist trying to help a very troubled and gifted boy (not as great, but the story would hold up).
The twist shouldn’t trick your reader.
Avoid cliché’s and gimmicks. Keep it real.
Tips to Twist
***Remember: The Perfect Twist is Believable, Yet Unexpected
