The problem with plot twists.
Honestly, personally, I have no problem with plot twists.
I used be glued to the TV when they ran Twilight Zone marathons on the odd holiday weekend. I watched The Sixth Sense and was blindsided by the ending. Now, in a world where readers are so saturated in the mechanics of story they can see the ending before they finish reading the logline, a well-constructed plot twist can be an absolute delight.
Unfortunately, I’m starting to hear writing advice that insists that you must have a plot twist. If you can have multiple plot twists in one work, that’s even better!
It doesn’t even need to apply to “natural fit” genres like mystery, thriller, or action-adventure. Throw a plot twist in everything! Maybe even change genre at the end, and that’s one of the plot twists!
Getting through to a numb audience.
I understand the allure. Audiences are growing increasingly both savvy about things like three-act structure and expected arcs, and numb due to sheer content. You’ve got a few seconds to hook them, and you’ve got to keep fighting every inch to keep them engaged. That’s a tall order. Surprises, shock value, and “twists” can help keep a reader on that hook… if only to figure out what the hell’s going on.
The issue with the advice “plot twists, all the time!” is that not every story is foundationally structured to accommodate one.
Surprise = good.
I strongly believe that you should surprise and go against reader expectations. That’s the beauty of a genre formula.
I’ve used this metaphor before, but it still applies. American football is fundamentally always the same: the rules, the play, one winner and one loser. Only the teams change.
If you suddenly have the game end at half-time, or they decide to choose the winner based on a spontaneous badminton game in the fourth quarter… you haven’t “twisted” anything. You’ve pissed off an entire stadium full of people who came here to watch four quarters of football. (Hopefully, you’re not also in the stadium, because good luck getting to your car in one piece.)
You might argue “but you don’t know who’s going to win!” Good point. But you know someone is. Again: the formula remains the same.
If you want to apply that to genre… you want to create a sense of uncertainty within the framework. They know that in a mystery, the sleuth is going to solve the murder. In a romance, the lovers will end up happily.
But you want to create what in football would be called a close game. You’re rooting for the characters… and while you know how it’s supposed to end, somewhere in the story, you have no idea how, and you’re breathlessly turning pages to learn the outcome.
This is usually due to unexpected turnabouts, a roller coaster of emotion as things swing from high to low unexpectedly.
That’s where you build in surprise. That’s where you take reader expectation and… well, “twist” it.
“But I thought plot twists were bad!”
What I just described above? The close game?
Is not a plot twist.
Things like that are carefully crafted surprises that can happen organically at any point in a story.
Got a mystery? Maybe the sleuth is a hitman who was supposed to kill the victim, and now they have to figure out who edged them out of the job because his handler is throwing a fit… it was supposed to happen a certain way, and higher-ups are freaking out. (Granted, this moves out of mystery and probably more into thriller, but still, it’s a “twist” on a classic set up or hook.)
Or let’s look at a Western. A fantastic “twist” on the entire genre was One Thousand Pieces of Gold. While it was a biographical novel, it told the story of a Chinese-American woman who was sold to a slave merchant headed to the U.S. Her struggles for independence and success still encapsulate a lot of the classic details of a Western: the location, the “players” (saloon owners, cowboys, etc.), the time period. But the protagonist and the experience vary wildly, creating the surprise and the fascination.
Finally, romance. This is a classic for a reason, and there are elements you don’t mess with. But there is also a lot of leeway, and a multitude of tropes and micro-tropes just waiting for fun interpretations.
Plot twists are third act elements.
If we’re going to be grossly semantic, plot twists apply to the ending of a story. They take where the story is expected to go and then shock you with a surprise.
(For fun, I’d recommend checking out the Wikipedia page that describes plot twists, by the way.)
The kind of plot twist these writing coaches are describing are usually peripetia: “a sudden reversal of the protagonist’s fortune.” This is a shock, but it’s built in to the story… the “oh!” when all the clues that didn’t look like clues line up, and you see that the triumph you were expecting is snatched away.
The key here is: built into the story.
If you just yank away something out of nowhere (or, conversely, gift a character with something in the last stages of the third act), what you’ve created is a deus ex machina: the “god of the machine” that the Ancient Greeks used to use when they’d written themselves in a corner. This sort of thing doesn’t fly with modern audiences at all, though.
Unforced Twist.
The thing is, without the other foundational elements of a solid story, a plot twist is just a party trick, and often a cheap one at that. Someone who hate-reads a novel to get to the end usually doesn’t find the payoff redeeming enough for them to buy your backlist. The resulting bad reviews aren’t going to help either, as they scare off potential readers of that title and any others.
If your story is solely engineered to lead to a plot twist, just make sure that the rest of the story is built on a firm foundation: your characters have arcs and solid GMCs, the clues for the plot twist are cleverly but clearly planted.
If your story was built without a plot twist but now you feel you need one… I beg you to reconsider. (Kidding. Sort of.) Keep in mind if you reconstruct your third act to accommodate a wild new twist, you’re going to need to go back and sow the seeds for the twist so it’s both believable and “fair play” for the readers.
Just use plot twists responsibly.
Just like I wouldn’t advise anyone to write a genre they don’t like or understand because it makes money, I would steer clear of writing plot twists just because they’re currently “all the rage.”
Storycraft is storycraft, regardless. So write the story as solidly as possible, and if it twists, let it – but don’t force it. Better to leave one out than write a clumsy one that leaves your readers angry and unsatisfied.
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