Do You Have a Story with a Twist, or a Twist That Thinks it's a Story?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Stories with a great twist are stories readers remember, but make sure your story is more a single punchline.
I ran into a problem when writing my adult urban fantasy novel, Blood Ties . There's a twist, and one of the things that kept changing in the original outline was where that twist was revealed. Did I reveal it early on so the reader got to the "cool part" of the idea first? Did I use it as my midpoint reversal? Or was it an end-of-book shocker?

Then it hit me.

I wasn't writing a story that had a twist, I was setting up a 400-page joke with the twist as the punchline. The novel was all about the reveal, not the story. Which was a major problem.

A twist can't be the whole book. The story has to hold up even if readers know the twist.
Read more »Written by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com