Category: twist

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 all mysteries are in a mystery stories. 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 things 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.

A few weeks back a friend asked me to look at their new manuscript, and something about it gnawed at me. It was doubly gnawsome because it’s something I’ve wanted to talk about here on the ranty blog but could never quite find the right words for. We ended up talking and it suddenly hit me how to explain it. In fact, I asked them if we could pause for a few seconds so I could scribble some notes down for myself.

And now you get to benefit from these thoughts.

I’m guessing most of you have probably heard of Chekhov’s rifle. Basic idea is that if we see a rifle in act one, it should go off in act three. Because if it doesn’t go off… what’s the point of it? Why am I cluttering up my manuscript with rifles that don’t so anything.

Another way to look at this is a setup and a payoff. I make a point of bringing up X now, and later X becomes important for this particular scene, plot thread, or maybe the entire book. For some reason Dad gives Wakko his old pager and fifteen chapters later we realize the last number it received was actually the combination for the hidden vault in the basement. We learn Phoebe used to shoot hoops with her older brothers and then saving the Surf Shack comes down to who can make the most baskets in five minutes. Setup. Payoff.

Now, let’s discuss.

First off, the setup/payoff relationship isn’t quite its own thing. It’s more of a structure element than a literary device. Reveals use setups and payoffs. So do twists. It’s always going to be an aspect of something else, so I don’t want to be thinking of it as some separate, distinct thing.

Second is the big one, and it’s what I wanted to blather on about the most. I’m a big believer that time is a very large aspect of a good setup-payoff relationship. The more time elapses for my reader (or whatever audience I’m dealing with) between the setup and the payoff, the more powerful the payoff will be. My characters will look smarter. My threats will look bigger. My unspeakable horrors will look SO much worse

Or should be, if I’ve got everything else working right.

I’ve talked about this a little bit before. A twist, for example, doesn’t carry a lot of weight on page three. If I want this to just be a cool beat, it doesn’t need the extra time that an OH HOLY CRAP level payoff needs. That time lets my readers absorb the setup, settle into the story, and the more comfortable they are the more impact it’ll have when my payoff hits. So I want to make sure I’ve worked out the right amount of time between the setup and the payoff for the weight I want that reveal to have.

Actually, I just thought of a great metaphor. Imagine you’re leaning out a window with a fairly heavy-duty water balloon. If I just open a first floor window and drop it, there’s a decent chance that balloon’s just going to bounce on the sidewalk and maybe roll away. But from a fourth story window, that water balloon’s definitely going to burst. And if I’m dropping it from a tenth story window… I mean, that thing’s going to explode. It’s the same balloon, but the different distances change how much impact it has. Make sense?

Now, a few things to watch out for…

If I have shorter times between my setups and payoffs, they start to look different. More like I’m just throwing out solutions and then presenting a problem for them. Remember my example up above? It’s one thing if Wakko gets the pager on page nine and he figures out it’s got the vault combination on page seventy, but it’s got a very different feel to it if he gets it on page sixty-six and then figures out the combination four pages later. Especially if I have this sort of structure two or three times throughout my book. This is the kind of thing that makes my writing feel episodic as it happens, well, again and again. Again, dropping from the water balloon from the first story window. Even if it’s a really big water balloon, it might not burst as much as… fall apart? It just won’t be as dramatic.

Also, side issue, if I’m doing this later and later in my story, it can feel a bit fake. I’ve set up the world and my characters, but when I start introducing new elements in the back half just so I can solve problems… that’s probably going to feel a little cheaty. Especially in genre stories. What’s that? I never mentioned the SV-7 androids only have one weak point and it’s at the top of their head? Well, I’m mentioning it now that I’m up here on the catwalk above this one. Again, solution and problem vs setup and payoff.

And I’m not going to lie. Finding this time-reveal ratio can take a little work. It’s one of those things that’s going to be a little different for every situation and every story. And the only one who’s going to know what’s right is.. well, you. The writer. Because you’re the only one who knows how all these reveals and twists and other payoffs are supposed to land.

Y’see, Timmy, at the end of the day it’s really not about the water balloon—it’s about the size of the splash it makes.

Next time, I figured I’d get into the holiday spirit and talk about why it’s good to be the Invisible Man. Or Invisible Woman. Really, any Invisible Person.

Until then, go write.

Despite the pandemic, there’s still been a lot of fantastic storytelling going on. Books. Movies. TV shows. Some of it’s been fun, some of it nostalgic, some of it… well, let’s be honest, some of it was greatly delayed because of said pandemic. Regardless there’s been a lot of enjoyable stuff.

BUT…

As Uncle Ben taught us, with great storytelling comes great spoilers.

As I’m sure you know, spoilers are a matter of great contention. Is it my fault or your fault if I post spoilers to something and you see them? How much time has to pass before spoilers are acceptable? Does getting them really affect my enjoyment of the story? Do spoilers even matter?

I’ve talked about (and in some cases, argued about) all these before, here and on the wider internet. But it’s that last one I wanted to blather on about today. Specifically, a certain angle some folks take with it you may have seen. It goes something like this…

”If knowing a spoiler ruins your story… maybe your story’s not that good.”

This one always makes me grind my teeth. Partly because it’s kind of an inherently smug thing to say, but also because it shows a basic misunderstanding of storytelling. Which is why it’s doubly annoying when I see it from… well, storytellers.

So let’s talk about narrative structure for a few minutes.

I’ve talked about this before at length, so I won’t do too much here (hit that link if you want a lot more). For our immediate purposes, narrative structure’s the order I’ve decided my plot points and character elements need to follow. It’s the sequence I want my audience to receive information in so they’ll get a certain dramatic effect. Simply put, narrative structure is the way I’ve chosen to tell my story.

If I want to tell my story in a straight A-to-Z fashion, that’s my narrative choice. If I want to use a bunch of flashbacks, that’s also up to me as the storyteller. Heck, if I decide to go completely nonlinear and change timeframes every other page without any apparent rhyme or reason… I mean, that’s my call. I’m the one telling the story and I (hopefully) have solid reasons for why I’m telling it in this specific way.

But whichever way I do it—assuming I do have a reason and I’m not just skipping around wildly because I thought it’d be cool—I’ve made a specific choice for my audience to get this piece of information first, this one second, this one third, and so on and so forth up to my five hundred and fortieth piece of information.

Yes, all real novels contain exactly five hundred and forty elements. No more, no less, just as Plato said in his many treatise on storytelling.

Anyway…

Now, that order’s important because my narrative structure is one of the things that defines my story. If I put them in a different order, it’s a different story. That makes sense, right? An example I’ve used before is The Sixth Sense. If you’ve never seen it before and somehow avoided hearing about it… well, first off, seriously, good for you. Go see it right now. Go! Now! I can’t believe you’ve made it this long. And I’m about to spoil it, so please don’t keep reading.

Did you go away?

Okay, spoiler-filled explanation…

The Sixth Sense is the skin-crawling story of child psychologist named Malcolm who’s trying to treat a little boy named Cole. Cole’s haunted by ghosts that only he can see, which leaves him constantly traumatized and in shock. Malcolm helps Cole realize the ghosts are, in their own way, equally scared and asking for help. And as Cole begins to understand that his powers are a gift, not a curse, Malcolm comes to realize that he’s a ghost—that he died over a year ago in an encounter we saw at the start of the movie.

What’s great, though, is that—like I said up above—if you watch the movie a second time (or if someone spoils the twist for you), it becomes a very different story. In fact, knowing the truth about Malcolm and the other ghosts, the story becomes less scary and much more tragic. Almost goofy at points. Now it’s a story about a kid and his ghost friends solving mysteries. It’s pretty much Paranorman.

That’s the key thing here—The Sixth Sense becomes a different story. Not the one Shyamalan intended for us to see. Definitely not the one he narratively structured. The audience learning the truth about Malcolm is intended to be element five hundred and nine, not element one that we knew before we even sat down. Knowing the big twist changes it into a different story.

So the whole “…maybe your story’s not that good” argument doesn’t make a lot of sense, because if I see a bunch of spoilers it means I haven’t seen your story. I saw a different story that had all the same elements, but in a different order and thus with different dramatic weights. It had a completely different narrative structure. I got Paranorman, not The Sixth Sense. Not that there’s anything wrong with Paranorman (I love it) but… it’s not the initial experience Shyamalan was trying to create for us.

Now, there’s another, related point we can make here. By their nature, spoilers tend to be some kind of reveal. It’s a piece of unknown or unexpected information. Maybe it’s a cool twist. Maybe it’s the identity of the murderer. Maybe it’s just a little cameo/ crossover beat. And sometimes, once that information’s been revealed, we realize this story didn’t have much else going for it. Once we know who the murderer is, we realize it was our own desire to know the answer carrying us through the story, not really the story itself. The story’s not flawed, it’s just… well, also not that great in any way.

Or maybe the answer just wasn’t quite worth the build up. Maybe the murderer turns out to be… well, exactly who we thought it was. Or someone we absolutely never could have considered (“Chris? Who the hell is Chris?”). Maybe the big twist happens and it… doesn’t make a lot of sense? Maybe it doesn’t change anything or doesn’t mean anything (“Chris is actually Pat’s long lost cousin? Well who the hell is Pat?”). In these cases the story beat might land with some impact in the moment, but not so much after the fact.

And, yeah, these stories have problems. I mean, a twist by its very nature should sort of retroactively rewrite large swaths of my story. If it doesn’t do that… well, that means I screwed up. If my flashback doesn’t make linear sense within my story, then I’ve done something wrong. My reveals aren’t doing what they’re supposed to do.

But problems with something flawed doesn’t mean the principle is flawed. I can’t say narrative structure doesn’t matter because a couple stories have crappy narrative structure. That’s like saying all sushi is bad because I bought sushi at a gas station once and it made me sick. Or, y’know, that Sharknado5: Global Swarming has a dumb twist that doesn’t change anything, therefore I can give away a bunch of stuff from Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

I mean, maybe it’s just me, but that doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense…

Yes, a really good story will still work once you know the big reveal. That’s why there are books we like to re-read and movies we watch three or four times. The storytellers were very careful to make sure  their narrative would still work even when it was forced to switch tracks because we knew things. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t want us to see the original story they planned out.

I know in my own writing I love having a good twists and reveals. Things that’ll make people sit up and go “WhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAATTT???” or maybe even shriek a favorite curse word or two. And I try very, very hard to make sure my books hold up on a second reading, that you’ll catch the little clues and maybe even realize I left some things sitting out in plain sight for you to catch on your second or third read, so that other story is still a fun one for you.

(like page 115 of Paradox Bound, for example. I don’t think anyone’s caught that. Not many people, anyway)

But that’s not the story I want you to read first. There’s a reason I put these things on page one and not page fifty, those things on page one hundred and not on page one, and why I was slightly vague about that so it’d be right where it was supposed to be… but you wouldn’t register what it was until a second or third time through.  Because this is the effect I’m trying to create, not that.

And the awful thing about spoilers is they make sure someone can never read this story. It’s almost impossible to unlearn something, so that experience gets lost forever. They never get to read this story… only that one.

And that’s a shame.

Again, as I mentioned above, still many issues about spoilers past this one. But hopefully—for now, at least—we’ve put the “do they even matter” question to rest. And also the “maybe your story’s not that good” defense of them.

Also-also, that Plato thing about halfway through was a joke. Please put that to rest too. In fact, forget it, just to be safe. Wipe it from your mental hard drive.

Next time…

I’ve got to be honest, I’m juggling four different projects right now and (at the moment) none of them have inspired a ranty blog post. So next week may just be some random cartoons or something unless any of you has a pressing question you’d like me to blather on about.

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.