Category: mystery

A few weeks back on Bluesky I got a very nice compliment about how my books very frequently—actually, the word was inevitably—take a sharp turn. That got me thinking about twists in general. And then I glanced at that list I mentioned a few weeks back and… twists bumped up a few.

Before I dive in deep, though, I thought it might be good to define a few terms up front, just to cut down on any possible confusion as we move along.

A reveal is when the characters or the reader get a new piece of information. I refer you back to the often-quoted-here Damon Knight rule of thumb— facts my readers and characters don’t know are information, facts they already know are noise. Some reveals are key and dramatic. Others are not.

A mystery is when the main character and the readers are aware that information has been hidden from them and are searching for that unknown fact. Really simply, a mystery is when someone in my story has a question and is trying to find the answer.

Real quick aside—please don’t confuse mystery the story element with mystery the genre. All mystery stories are about mysteries, but not every mystery is in a mystery story. Make sense? I know, giving them the same name is confusing. Not sure who we can blame for that

Anyway, that brings us to a twist. A twist is when information is revealed that my characters and the audience didn’t know was being kept from them. Unlike a mystery, they don’t even suspect those facts are out there. When a twist appears, it comes from out of nowhere and changes a lot of perceptions for the characters and the audience.

So let’s talk about what makes a good twist. Or at least, what I think makes a good twist. Your MFA professor may have different ideas. And just for fun, I’ll mention a few ways they can go wrong.

I think a good twist always has four distinct elements…

First, as I just mentioned, my readers and my characters don’t expect a twist is coming. By it’s very nature, it’s a surprise that hits when we least expect it, often in a way we don’t expect it.

Keep in mind, if I tell you there’s a big secret about our hero’s best friend… well, I’ve just told you her best friend has a big secret. If I tell you you’ll never guess who they run into in Argentina, I’ve just told you they’re going to run into someone unexpected in Argentina. It’s a lot harder to be surprised by something we’re expecting, so it’s hard for any twist to land well when my readers are already on the lookout for it.

This is one of the reasons I rant about spoilers a lot. If I’ve structured my story so that this reveal has a certain dramatic weight, knowing the reveal ahead of time means that’s just gone from information to noise (there’s Damon Knight again). In my dramatic structure, it’s just gone from a high point to almost a flat line.

Second, the information a twist reveals has to be something my readers and characters didn’t already know but they need to know. Revealing that the murder victim is dead is kind of a given. Showing you Billy has a pet cat isn’t much of a reveal because, well, we’ve been talking about the cat since chapter four. It’s a fact that doesn’t carry any weight at all. Telling you Billy’s cat is a seven hundred year old immortal Wichianmat from the Empire of Ayutthaya —well, that’s something you didn’t know.

It’s worth noting I need to be revealing information the audience doesn’t know, but it has to be information they could know. It can’t break the characters or the world I’ve established. It needs to fit within that context. If I’ve been talking on and off about the ancient secrets of the Ayutthan Empire for twenty chapters now, cool. If this is a modern-day romance between rival hockey players that’s never referenced anything farther back than February… Empire of What?

A good rule of thumb is that whatever information I’m revealing in my twist is something my readers should be able to guess—even if it might mean a lot of guesses. If I have sixteen characters/ potential suspects in my murder mystery, it shouldn’t take forty-two guesses to name the murderer. If the big surprise is that Phoebe is Wakko’s niece, the readers should probably know who Wakko is. And why it would be shocking that he has a niece.

Third, the information revealed in a twist has to change how my readers and characters see previous events in the story. This is the moment when our view of things get twisted (ha ha ha now I get it) and we realize we’ve been looking at a lot of characters and elements the wrong way. And again, seeing them the right way should give my readers a bit of a thrill as everything realigns and fall into place in new ways.

That said, this new information can’t actually contradict previous events or any of the information my readers have been given up until now. Worth noting—this is when a lot of twists go wrong. I can’t reveal Billy’s dog is immortal when it’s been a cat for the past 200 pages. Also, this is still a hockey romance, but Billy was always a baseball superstar. And a federal marshal. Who’s here in New Orleans hunting immortal cats.

One of the worst examples of this is when we’ve been seeing over a character’s shoulder for a few hundred pages and they just, y’know, never happened to think about how they’re the serial killer the whole team’s been hunting. Or that Wakko knew Dot was the killer since chapter four but just didn’t mention it or act on it until the last twenty pages. For reasons.

Fourth and last, a twist needs time to build up strength. It’s really tough to have a good twist in the first five pages of a novel. As I mentioned above, a twist needs to alter our view of past events, which means… there have to be past events. So they tend to happen in the back half of the story.

I think a large part of this is that bit I just mentioned above about everything realigning. The power of a good twist comes from how many things it forces us to re-examine, so more time means more things. Some folks try to have their big twist in chapter two and it usually falls flat. Instead of seeing a dozen things in a new light we’re seeing… two? Maybe one? And sometimes, yeah… none

And that’s that.

Again, these are my own requirements, not something (to the best of my knowledge) taught in any courses or books. And as always, there’s always going to be a few exceptions, sure. But I’ve found these four elements tend to be pretty solid.

Y’see, Timmy, when a twist lands right, your readers will absolutely love you for it. They’ll re-read the whole book just to see how you slipped it past them. You can’t have slipped this past me! Holy crap you did!!!

But if I mess up a twist… at best it’ll leave readers with this gnawing, something-doesn’t-sit-right feeling. Or they’ll go back through the book and pick it apart. And at worst… they’ll just shake their heads, put my book aside, and forget about it.

And that’s definitely not the reaction I want a twist to get.

Next time… well, okay, next time is probably going to be in two weeks because I’ve got a handful of final tweaks to do on The Off Season. But when next time shows up, unless someone mentions something cooler, I’m probably going to talk about that one thing you were supposed to do.

Until then, go write.

Let’s have a little moment of truth between us. At some point or another, for any number of possible reasons, most of us have been in a position where it’s in our best interest not to answer a question.  Or, at the very least, to take as long as possible to answer it.  A few such questions might be….

— “Hey, what’s in the bag?”
— “Do these jeans make me look fat?”
— “Are you actually claiming this as a deduction?”
— “Did you eat the last piece of cheesecake?”
— “So, where were you last night?”

Now, by the same token, there are questions that should take no time at all to answer. Things where, if someone asks us and we know the answer, there are very few situations where it makes any sense for us to delay or be evasive. These are the ones where I have to seriously wonder why someone isn’t answering–and they’d better have a damn good reason for their lack of response. A few examples of that would be things like

— “Do you love me?”
— “How the hell do we get out of here?”
— “What are tonight’s specials?”
— “Which one of these is the antidote?”
— “WTF is that thing and how do we kill it?”

I mean, why would you hesitate on any of these? If we need the antidote and I know which vial it is, that’s a no-brainer, right? Grab the yellow vial marked #23 and pour it down his throat.

For example, I loved LOST.  Yeah, sorry, absolutely loved it. Even the questionable third season. Yes, I will fight you if you say foolish things about the ending.

But… I can admit LOST suffered a bit when Benjamin Linus became a regular member of the cast. And a big part of that was because we all knew there was a lot of stuff he wasn’t telling anyone. There were still lots of cool mysteries on the island and Michael Emerson is a wonderful actor… but there were also lots of times where the “mystery” was just Ben sitting there… not talking.

A concept I’ve brought up here a bunch of times is withheld information. I’ve mentioned it a couple times recently, but it occurred to me I haven’t’ really explained it in… wow, ten years? Seriously? Okay, so this is long overdue.

Withheld information is when the characters (or really, the writer) hold back information from the audience for no other reason than to drive the plot forward. Characters just don’t talk about things, even though it’d be very natural for them to. Or they make vague statements when they could just as easily make clear ones. We’ve all seen things like this, yes? Where the only reason there are conflicts or challenges is because characters just aren’t saying what they know.

Withheld information’s the clumsy, unskilled version of mystery and suspense. It’s what I fall back on when my story doesn’t actually have a mystery but I’m trying to create the illusion of one. Because there’s more to a mystery—or suspense, or a twist—than me just not telling my readers stuff.

The thing is, withholding information is really just me and my characters… not doing anything. The plot may keep advancing in a clumsy way, but it’s almost always going to end up falling flat. Because information in a story tends to hit a tipping point. There comes a time when that knowledge hasto come out because it just makes absolutely no logical sense for it not to. And when it doesn’t…

Y’see, Timmy, the one thing withheld information definitely creates is frustration with my reader. If Wakko’s been poisoned, Phoebe knows which one of the vials is the antidote, and she’s just not telling anyone—that’s just going to annoy the hell out of my reader. I mean, yeah, it makes the scene more tense, but why wouldn’t Phoebe save her friend? Why wouldn’t she help? If she’s the villain, sure, but other than that…?

And, wow, if we get to the end of the story and that’s when we find out Phoebe knew which one was the antidote and didn’t say anything? I mean, I need to have some ironclad reasons for her silence then. That’s when my readers are going to be looking to punch holes in things, so I need things to be sooooo solid if I’m going to go this way.

Now, all of this doesn’t mean I need to tell my readers everything. But what I don’t tell them depends on what kind of effect I’m trying to create in my story. If I withhold (or give out) information at the wrong points, my story’s going to trip over its own feet. So to speak.

So here are three story elements and how they use information.

A mystery is when the main character and the audience are aware a piece of information has been hidden from them, and my story usually involves a search for that unknown fact. At it’s simplest, a mystery is a question someone in my story is asking and trying to find the answer to.

Suspense is when there’s an important piece of information the audience knows and the characters don’t. The key here is that the characters don’t know that they need to know this vital fact. ussually as soon as possible. Like that Phoebe (who Wakko’s taking back to his hotel room) is the murderer. Or there’s a bomb under the table. These are common suspense situations we’ve all been in, right?

A twist is when a piece of information is revealed that my characters and my readers didn’t know was being kept from them. They didn’t even suspect those facts were out there, waiting to affect the story. A twist comes from out of nowhere and changes a lot of perceptions for the reader and probably the characters. We’ve all been assuming <<SPOILERS>> Luke Skywalker’s father is dead, so when we learn that Vader is his father, it’s a twist that alters our view of several things we’ve been told up until now.

Yeah, sorry. Blew the big Skywalker family secret there.

If I’m trying to use one of these devices, I want to make sure I’m using them correctly. I don’t want to just withhold information. My characters should be just as smart and clever as my audience, and if they aren’t talking… well, I should be sure there’s a solid reason why.

Next time, I’m going to try to answer another question that got tossed my way.

Until then, go write.

A couple weeks ago I talked about a certain kind of opening that shows up in a lot of books and movies. It’s when that prologue or first chapter or first scene has some stuff happen (computer virus is stolen, monster lands on earth, vampire comes out of the earth, etc) and then it jumps forward in time four day, five weeks, six months, or more. It can be a problematic opening, and the fact that I feel the need to point out that time gap—how separated these events are—should usually be a sign to take a serious look at how important that opening chapter or scene really is.

Today I wanted to talk about the reverse of that opening. It’s another one you’re probably familiar with, and I’d guess it should probably be an even bigger red flag. It’s not always a sign I’m doing something wrong… but I think it’s really leaning that way.

What I’m talking about, of course, is the infamous opening scene of high action, desperate people, severe crisis, screams, shouts, gunfire, exclamations, and then—

Thirty Six Hours Earlier…

You’ve seen this, yes?

Now, on a casual first glance, this opening seems great, right? We’re diving right into the action at the start. We’ve got tension. Strong character moments. And then—usually—a following scene that shows these characters in very different circumstances, leaving us with the mystery of “how do they end up there?”

Thing is, the more we look at it, the more this opening tends to falls apart.

First, it’s dropping us deep into the action. Sounds good on the surface, but as we’ve talked about before, a lot of folks who do this misunderstand what “starting with action”  really means. By its very nature this opening is out of context, and there’s a good chance I don’t know any of the characters involved, so this “action” opening has superficial stakes at best.

Think about it. Me telling you Wakko has a knife to Dot’s throat is… bad? Good? Bad for Wakko?  Without context, there’s a drastically different way to view almost any scene any of us can imagine. Seriously. Kids on the playground, people fooling around on the couch, someone reading a book in the library—in the right context, any one of these can be funny, sexy, sinister, or right out creepy.

Ah-hah! Says random internet guy #108. That’s the whole point! Like you said above, it’s creating a sense of mystery!

Funny you should mention that…

Second, this opening’s trying to build mystery by showing me an out of context piece of my story. But, a lot like the straight action, this opening mystery is a mystery without any stakes. If I need another six or seven scenes to establish “no, it’s really weird that Wakko would have Dot at knifepoint,” well… doesn’t needing another seven scenes to explain it kind of hint my opening isn’t that powerful?

Plus… this isn’t really a mystery. It’s just withheld information. We expect things are going to be different at the end of my story. The tension level should be higher. My characters should be in a different place, on several levels. It’s sort of like if I said “Wait, he’s Spider-Man at the end of the movie, but he’s just Miles Morales at the beginning?? Whoa! How could that possibly happen?”

The point of the story, quite literally, is to tell us how we get to the end of the story.

Third, it sucks a lot of tension out of my story. One way or another, I’m telling people who makes it to the end. Nothing that happens to Wakko until then is going to be a real threat, because I know he needs to be there at the end to hold a knife to Dot’s throat. Likewise, Dot’s got to be there to be knife-helden. Anyone standing around watching this? Well, we know they’re going to make it, too. This may sound silly, but if I tell people what happens at the end of my story… they’re going to know what happens at the end of my story.

Small note—if I’m gambling on my readers/audience forgetting that opening bit and being surprised when the plot guides us back to it, well… does that sound like a great opening? One I’m hoping my readers forget?

Fourth and finally, I think when I use this kind of beginning, it’s me admitting I just don’t have a great beginning for my story.

Y’know how I’ve suggested cutting off some prologues and seeing how the story works without them? I’d bet three out of four times, if I cut this “One Week Earlier” opening off my story, I’ll find the one I’m left with is kind of weak. Nothing really happens. The characters aren’t that interesting. It kind of meanders a bit before it gets back to the plot.

Y’see, Timmy, if I’ve started my story at the wrong point, the “Two Days Earlier” opening can seem like a quick fix. It’s me pasting on a more interesting beginning. But odds are it hits a lot of those problems I just mentioned. That’s why I think it’s such a big red flag.

I should consider starting my story now instead of at the end. I’m not saying this never, ever works, but if now feels like such a lousy place to start my story… well, that might be my subconscious telling me something.

And maybe I should listen to it.

Next time, I’d like to tell you why you should delete all your dating apps and meet someone the old fashioned way.

Oh! And a shameless self-plug. NPR is doing their summer reading lists and is looking for sci-fi and fantasy books that you loved from the past ten years. And while I’d never stoop so low as telling you how to vote on such a thing, I’m not above reminding you how much you liked Paradox Bound and how it’s a wonderful stand-alone novel that would appeal to most anyone. Just something to have in mind. While you vote.

Anyway, until next time, go write…

A few weeks back I talked about things getting their genres mid-identified, and afterwards somebody asked an interesting follow up. Namely, how do we identify genres? What are the benchmarks? How do we decide if something’s sci-fi or a techo-thriller or a romance that just happens to be set in a sci-fi world?

I know this sounds like a simple question, but it isn’t. For a couple reasons. Which I shall go over now.

First and foremost thing to remember—I shouldn’t worry about genre while I’m writing. Genre’s really a marketing tool more than anything else, so it doesn’t have a lot of use on the creative/ artistic side of things. In fact, if I’m worrying a lot about the guidelines of a given genre while I’m writing, I may want to take a step back and make sure I’m not just trying to jump on a trend. In my experience… that doesn’t work out most of the time.

With that in mind… what even is genre? A great way to think of it is a compass (many thanks to Pierce Brown for this analogy). Genre points you in the general direction of things you’re looking for. You want to head south-west? Just keep going that way. You want to find horror novels? They’re all over there.And that leads us to another good way to think of it, maybe an even more relatable one. Where would my book get stocked in the bookstore? Don’t think about getting misshelved or getting featured on that best-sellers endcap. No excuses, no avoiding the question. Picture your favorite store and decide where would it be shelved in that store.

If I can’t answer this… I have a problem. Because this is how an agent’s going to try to sell my book. “It’s something new to go here.” Even if I’m just planning on self-publishing an ebook, Amazon’s going to want to know how to categorize it.

Let me tell you one last little story. My first published book was Ex-Heroes, which ended up becoming a series of books set in that world and all involving the same basic theme—superheroes fighting zombies in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. When the series originally came out, it was through a small press that specialized in apocalyptic fiction, specifically zombie fiction. That was their niche, and they filled it perfectly. So they heavily emphasized the zombie/ post-apocalyptic aspects of the book in their publicity for it. That’s the direction their compass pointed.

Consider Twilight. It has vampires and werewolves and more than a few deaths… but it’s not a horror story. It barely counts as urban fantasy. The thing we’d emphasize in our elevator pitch is the high schooler who falls in love with a vampire. It’s a romance novel. Supernatural romance if we want to start focusing down.

And remember—there may be elements to my story that’d normally be immediate signs of one genre, but they don’t come up in that elevator pitch. That’s okay. I shouldn’t try to cram them in. Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth has lots of raunchy jokes and a few spaceships, but I’d bet 99% of the people who’ve read it don’t think of it as a comedy or a sci-fi novel–their minds jump right to the necromancy and the murder mystery.

Well, in some beautiful, alternate world we all sheltered in place all through March and April, wore our masks for May, and now it’s perfectly safe for all of us to attend San Diego Comic Con next week! YAY!But in this world, alas, SDCC was cancelled because of folks who refused to do those things. There are still going to be some virtual events, though. I’m doing a panel on sci-fi writing next Friday at 4:00. I’m hoping to have a new Coffeehouse video up by then. And I’m also going to be doing a special Saturday Geekery, live-tweeting a few B-movie classics with some friends. You should come join us.

And all this means that next time, I may revisit and revise my list of top B-movie mistakes.

So until then, go write.

And, c’mon… wear your mask.