Chapter 7: Twisting Any Plot
A great plot twist should be surprising & supported.
Picking out plot twists is one of the best parts of my job. First, it’s where things start getting tricksy: where I get to watch my book morph from a straightforward murder story, into a serpentine tale of intrigue and deceit.
But it’s more than that. It’s also just… fun. It’s one of the most imaginative, freewheeling parts of the whole mystery writing process—a part where I get to float eagerly from possibility to possibility, often surprising myself along the way. Using the tactics set forth in the next few chapters, you can do the same.
But to do that, we’re first going to have to define what a plot twist actually is. Here’s the definition I like best: a plot twist is something the reader believes, that turns out to be false.
A plot twist is something the reader believes, that turns out to be false.
Let’s look at some famous plots, and how this definition of a plot twist applies to them.
In Star Wars, we believe that Darth Vader killed Luke’s father. This is false. Darth Vader is Luke’s father.
In Planet of the Apes, we believe that the astronaut played by Charlton Heston has landed on an alien planet. This is false. He has landed on Earth, many centuries after he left it.
In The Sixth Sense, we believe that the protagonist, Dr. Malcolm Crowe, is alive. This is false. Malcolm is a ghost.
If we accept this definition, we can see where your job, as a writer, begins. You have to make the reader believe something that isn’t true.
There are three basic ways to do this:
You can have a character lie to them. In Star Wars, Obi Wan Kenobi tells Luke Skywalker that Vader murdered his father. Luke trusts Obi Wan, and so do we: we immediately take this false information on board.
You can present facts that encourage them to make a false assumption. In Planet of the Apes, we’re shown NASA astronauts landing on a planet, and that planet looks very different from our own. We naturally assume that the planet is an alien world.
You can rely on an assumption the audience brought with them. In The Sixth Sense, we assume Malcolm is alive because—well, we always assume all our characters are alive. No work needs to be done to get us to adopt this assumption; it’s one we had from the get-go.
In each of these movies, when we learn the truth, it shocks us—because it violates a belief we truly held. The cognitive dissonance we experience as we’re forced to reconcile ourselves to the new reality is what we call “a killer plot twist.”
Where does your mystery need a killer plot twist? Right at the end, of course! Generally, the reveal of your Villain’s identity should be a plot twist. It should violate some belief the reader held up until that point—either because you gave them that belief, or because they brought it with them.
Let’s say you wrote a mystery about the murder of a tech executive who was about to sign a huge deal that would disrupt the smartphone industry. Your readers would immediately leap to the assumption that the murder had to do with preventing this deal, and you’d encourage that belief by giving them lots of suspects to whom this motive might apply—the owner of a rival company, the brilliant engineer your Victim screwed over, and a free information activist who hates the idea of anyone profiting from this technology.
At the end, your readers would be shocked to learn that the Villain was your Victim’s secretary, whom he had just jilted romantically. You gave them the belief, The motive is stopping the tech deal. This was false. The actual truth was: The motive is frustrated love. Having that false belief overturned is what gives your reader a wonderful feeling of surprise.
But plot twists need to be more than just surprising. They also need to be supported. Aristotle famously remarked that a great ending should be surprising and inevitable. While “surprising and inevitable” is a great goal to shoot for, the ending of your mystery novel generally doesn’t have to hit quite this high mark. Instead of “surprising and inevitable,” we’ll say that the reveal of your Villain should be surprising and supported.
A great plot twist should be surprising and supported.
And what, exactly, provides support to a plot twist? Clues. Let’s look again at The Sixth Sense. In this movie, we’re shown several clues to Malcolm’s ghostly status:
Malcolm is shot by an home intruder during the early scenes of the movie.
After this point, we never see anyone interact with Malcolm except for Cole, the little boy who can talk to ghosts. Although Malcolm appears in several scenes with other characters, they take no notice of him.
Malcolm complains of a mysterious distance he feels growing between him and his wife.
Now let’s imagine the movie without these clues:
The film begins after Malcolm is dead.
The film is staged in such a way that Malcolm only appears in scenes with Cole. We don’t see other characters fail to react to him.
Malcolm has no wife from whom to feel distant.
In this version of the movie, the ending would still be surprising—but it wouldn’t be supported, and therefore, it wouldn’t be satisfying. It would leave us saying, “Huh?!” Or perhaps, “That came out of nowhere!”
On the opposite end of the spectrum, a plot twist that is too well-telegraphed often leaves the audience saying, “I saw that one coming.” So, if audiences don’t want their plot twists to come out of nowhere, but they also don’t want to see them coming… what the heck do they want?
They want the plot twist to run up to them out of their peripheral vision. They want to catch brief, indistinct glimpses of it as it approaches, but to never see it too clearly, until the moment when it’s revealed before them in all its glory. At that point, your reader experiences a moment of shock, followed by a moment of synthesis, as all of the clues they’ve observed throughout the story come together with the new information to form a reality that astounds them… but, also, makes perfect sense.
This is the feeling I want to give the reader every time. I don’t want them to say “I saw that one coming,” and I don’t want them to say, “That came out of nowhere.” Instead, I want them to gasp out the words, “Oh!… of course!”
Ok, but what about surprising and inevitable?
If a surprising and supported ending means “a surprise well-supported by clues,” what about an ending that is actually, in the words of Aristotle, surprising and inevitable?
To me, inevitability comes into play when the ending is driven by the characters’ intrinsic qualities. Think of the book A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin (or, if you’re a fan of the HBO show, think of the penultimate episode of Season 1). Our hero, Ned Stark, has learned a terrible secret about Queen Cersei, the widow of the recently deceased King Robert. Cersei has been unfaithful to Robert, and none of her children are his—which means that young Prince Joffrey isn’t a legitimate heir to the throne. For saying as much, Ned has been arrested and sent to the dungeons. Nevertheless, he’s struck a deal with Cersei. If he confesses to treason and proclaims Joffrey as the rightful heir, his sentence will be commuted from execution to banishment (and, more importantly to Ned, his family will be spared).
Ned fulfills his part of the bargain, but as he stands at the executioner’s block expecting to be pardoned by the newly crowned King Joffrey, tragedy strikes. Joffrey reneges on the bargain, and cheerfully screams, “Bring me his head!”
As Ned is driven to the block, surely he has a moment to reflect that this ending to his story was simply… inevitable. After all, he’d been given plenty of opportunities to understand that Joffrey was a power-mad sadist. When given power over life and death (and in front of a crowd, no less!), of course Joffrey would choose power and cruelty over mercy and wisdom. It’s who Joffrey is.
When an ending is surprising and supported, we want the reader to say, “Oh!… of course.” But when the ending is Surprising and Inevitable, the reader often says, “Oh!… of course. That’s who he is.”
Surprising and inevitable, as we’ve just seen, makes for a killer ending. But for most mysteries, surprising and supported will do the trick. Over the next two chapters, we’re going to be exploring two ways to create plot twists for your mystery: making use of Classic Plot Twists, and generating unique plot twists based on your premise.