How Do You Construct a Well-Executed Plot Twist?

A good story involves good plot twists. But how does one create one?

On one end of the spectrum, I feel like "I can see this coming a mile away, so why can't the characters see it?" On the other end, it's "Well, that came out of nowhere." How does one strike the balance?

I learned the hard way that you really can't predict who will see what. I've had really perceptive readers and really dense readers. The best you can do is foreshadowing with some red herrings and hope for the best. I'd also avoid writers for this kind of work--they can tell you how to do it better, but your audience is the average reader and writers tend to be avid readers so catch plot twists faster than the average person.

I also think it depends on the type of story you write. I found out when my novel was fast paced adventure style with comedy, no one picked up on the subtle clues. (Except for a few women---but then my story for some reason discriminates.) I really had to make them downright blunt for anyone to understand it and then some people picked it up then. (Still working on some of the denser folk out there.) (I was quite blunt about some of the hints too... but I had to make them more so.)

But then the stories that are subtler, you have to change tactics for. The foreshadowing and plot twists has to match the pacing and tone of the story.

Other than that Writing Excuses covered this very well. (Saying don't save up your plot points, take your plot twists two or three steps further--plant enough seeds that there are diversions that go in other directions. I'm taking from several podcasts from last year.

Mind mapping is wonderful for this type of thing. (Mine tend to be messy.) I used that method for the politics of my new novel because I couldn't figure out how to bring it up a step further. The only risk you have with this is that you forget to cross off the unimportant stuff and try to keep it all.

One technique I've found is where the viewpoint character, the one through whose eyes the readers see the story unfold, has no idea what's coming. This character should have his own conclusions; he just happens to be wrong. Look at the first Harry Potter book. Harry's convinced the one after the stone is Snape, and then, at the last moment, it's not Snape. Yet when you look back at it, everything makes sense. (I've got one story where I use similar tactics.)

A slower twist might work better than an abrupt one. For example, in one book (the third book in the X-Wing series), early on they believe it's impossible for a certain antagonist to come out and help them out. The reader (who should have read two earlier books) would believe this as well. Yet due to a series of his events, this antagonist fails his superiors and turns to the other side for protection. I saw this unfold, but when it came to the scene where he did it, I remembered thinking this would never happen. Perhaps twists involving a character changing should go slower. Too abrupt a change wouldn't ring true -- unless you can convince the readers that they just haven't seen this character's true colors before.

Sometimes twists don't work -- at least not for me. If the explanation is so convoluted that it doesn't make any sense, it fails. (I'm still not sure about the last Harry Potter book.) If a change comes out of nowhere and doesn't match with previous events, it fails. (I've encountered this more often in role-playing than books.) If it feels like a twist thrown into the mix just for the sake of having a twist, it fails. (Like this one stupid Japanese fight movie.) If the character is so dumb that s/he didn't recognize the signs that s/he was the chosen one, then it fails, and I never can respect the character for being so dumb (Eddings, I'm looking at you; Lackey is also guilty of this one).

Depends a lot on the type of story you are writing. I love to plant a hard left somewhere in the story, but to do it, there has to be enough bits and pieces in order for the reader to want to slap themselves in the stupid spot for not seeing it sooner. What I like to do sometimes is have characters disagree with how to solve a particular question, one is right and one is wrong. The one that is wrong finds bits and pieces to satisfy their per-concieved idea while the right one is purely working with the facts at hand. Give them both equal page room to work but make the pure fact character have to work a bit harder to get things to fit. Let both characters work with all or most of the bits and pieces and show how it can easily be misread.

Example, I put together a supernatural mystery where you are trying to figure out who killed Mr. Body. One character immediately starts hunting a specific type of monster because the wounds are obvious. Another character is unconvinced because there are wounds that can not be explained by the first conclusion. While they get into all sorts of trouble hunting the wrong monster, they keep uncovering clues about who it really is, unless you are keeping track of all the little bits and pieces behind the action of chasing down the wrong monsters you wont see who really killed Mr. Body until they are caught.

To make this work I had to draw out a complete plot line for chasing down the wrong monsters. Then, I had to plan all the clues to who really did it and line everything up to get the two separate threads to weave together correctly to get the twist right where it needed to be in the story. With all that planning, I practically wrote the novel before I even started the first paragraph. All I had to do was make it readable by the time I had all the finer points planned out.

Mind you, that is not my usual style and the only time I tried to write a supernatural mystery. I tossed the manuscript on the shelf, it ultimately left a bad taste in my mouth because I had to work too hard to get everything to work out right. I'm seat of the pants, not plan every detail. Too many details to not plan, so usually do things a bit differently.

The stuff I've been writing recently is a bit more straight forward, I fallow the path the characters take and twists happen when new pieces of evidence are found. It's like connect the dots without knowing what the next dot might be so the direction keeps changing until the end. Some folks really get irritated with this sort of style because there is no way to draw a conclusion before the author wants to give you that answer, but I think it builds much better suspense when keep running into game changers. Others will argue that some authors write this way because they didn't know how to end their own stories. No what, some times that's true and there isn't a thing wrong with it, a twist can sometimes surprise the person who wrote it.

Hope that helps.

TC

Plot twists are tricky. You need two possible explanations for events, and you need the reader to take the wrong explanation. Ideally, when the twist is revealed, the reader says "Of course! Why didn't I see that before!"

You don't want the reader saying "Meh. I saw that coming 30 pages ago." And you really don't want the reader to say "Huh?" The twist has to make sense in retrospect.

You can mention things in passing that are seemingly normal occurrences that wouldn't raise suspicion, but in hindsight see that it was an important fact. Mention the clues little by little so that it's subtle, so that only later will the collective clues point to the truth.

Or, if it seems the reader could potentially figure it out early on, plant seeds of doubt. Bring it up, whatever it is that they might think is what is happening, and then shoot it down with a seemingly rational explanation that would refute it.

I raise this because I remember reading a book where the main characters had convinced themselves of something to be true using only anecdotes and flawed logic rather than facts, and it bit them in the butt. By the sequel, the same character does something very similar, and his friends call him out on it saying there's no proof and the connection is flimsy, but he still intends to pursue it anyway, and is still bitten in the butt. Needless to say I saw that coming.

Right now my story is verging into Howdunnit territory since I already mention what the problem was at the beginning after-the-fact to my sleuth five years in the future, and the story is about the hero finding out what's going on in his present. I figure I could mitigate this if I chose to make his disappearance a greater mystery than it already is (I said he fought the alien parasites, an established threat. What happened afterward is the mystery. I'm thinking of dropping the former sentence).

I mention a couple innocuous events by news report; sharks losing control and a runaway bride, both events are greatly overshadowed by larger reports that involve him directly. The next day, he finds a bunch of sharks that beached themselves (since the aliens were using their bodies, then discared them. He takes one home to clean and grill up, unknowingly destroying the evidence) and also is called to take care of the dead body of the bride, only to find it missing when he arrives (because one of the aliens stole it). These don't get reintroduced until the end when he's already figured it out, and I don't know if it's already too obvious if both guns are fired at the same time.

Meanwhile, I purposefully delayed a clue by having him get attacked by a zombie while monitoring swamp water. He manages to successfully acquire a sample of what's wrong with it, but can't find it because his equipment isn't good enough (he's looking for a nanovirus- how the alien parasites spread- and his microscope is only good for fleas and bacteria), so he sets the sample aside for when he can get access to better equipment and spends the next few days interrogating local spellcasters, but the trail ends there, until one of the guys he speaks with finds out his homemade puppet is missing (once again, stolen by aliens). By the time he finds better equipment to analyze his sample, it would be very late in the game but he'd find out what it was immediately, and the people who own that equipment wouldn't be happy to find it there and would have a knee-jerk reaction of their own.

I also planned an event where a different faction of more traditional, mischevious aliens would go to a barn to steal cattle and he'd help repel it, only to find that one of the cows is missing and probably ran off scared (yep, stolen by the alien parasites).

In other issues, I still can't quite figure out how to make an unaddressed letter one person sent to his friend lead back to the old lady he met in the Asian district (and paper was tightly controlled in those days; it was a plot point). I know he wouldn't have sent it in the same place he met her because he really wanted cover his tracks, so there has to be another way to find her again.

Do you think these twists would work out appropriately?

A plot twist doesn't necessarily need to play fair to the reader to be awesome-there was no way anybody saw Snape killing Dumbledore but it was still one of the most shocking endings to a book I've ever read.