Creating Plot Twists from Thin Air

And how to come up with them.

On this blog, we’ve been talking a lot about Classic Plot Twists—tried and true ways to deliver a surprise to the reader. But Classic Plot Twists aren’t the only way to twist your plot. It’s also possible to come up with plot twists that are unique to your individual premise. Let’s talk about my favorite exercise for doing just this.

First, let’s lay out the bare bones of a premise. A woman and her husband arrive at an exclusive island resort to spend a romantic vacation together. At first everything seems perfect—except for the stomach bug the wife seems to have picked up. Her husband is solicitous, trying to make sure she eats, or at least drinks plenty of fluids. Over the course of a few days, the wife begins to get the idea that her husband is trying to poison her.

Now, let’s list some of the assumptions that are inherent in that premise.

• The husband is in fact trying to poison her

• The poison is intended to cause death

• The other resort guests are here on vacation

• The woman loves her husband

• The man with whom the woman arrived is her husband

• The purpose of the exclusive resort is tourism

And then all we have to do is come up with a way of violating each assumption. Doing so will give us a unique plot twist, something tailored to this individual novel.

How could we violate Assumption #1, “The husband is trying to poison her?” Well, I can think of a couple of ways. Perhaps the woman is suffering from a real stomach bug, and from paranoia. She places a sinister interpretation on her husband’s genuine acts of concern. Or perhaps she really was poisoned, but the culprit is not her husband. It’s a resort worker who has her own reasons for wanting our Victim dead.

What about Assumption #2, “The poison is intended to cause death?” The poison might be intended to cause a miscarriage, or a coma. Or how about this: the poison is intended to cause exactly what our Victim has experienced: intestinal distress. No one is trying to kill her, but someone is trying to make her afraid of her husband, thereby driving a wedge between them.

Now let’s talk about Assumption #3: “The other resort guests are here on vacation.” This is an assumption your reader could come to very easily; you would show her happy, snorkeling resort guests, and she’d assume they were nothing more than they appeared to be. But a couple of your guests could be spies, and your Victim has unwittingly learned more about them than they can allow.

Assumption #4: “The woman loves her husband.” Well, what if she doesn’t? What if she actually lured him here to kill him? Now she’ll be concerned that he’s turned the tables on her.

Assumption #5: “The man with whom the woman arrived is her husband.” Identical twins, anyone?

Assumption #6: “The purpose of the exclusive resort is tourism.” What if, instead, the purpose of the resort is to give wealthy men a convenient place to dispose of their wives? The entire resort is in on the poisoning, and our Victim will have to escape from not just her husband, but an entire murderous staff.

I hope you can see how this exercise allows you to quickly come up with plot twists that won’t just surprise the reader—they surprise you, too! Some of the ideas you come up with during this stage may be truly outlandish, and I encourage you to lean into that by grasping for every assumption you can. I quite like my little Murder Resort idea. But I never would have come up with it if I hadn’t forced myself to question every single assumption my premise contained.

Some of the twists we listed above would make a great Climactic Plot Twist—the twist revealed by the Sleuth at the very end of your novel. Others—the Murder Resort, for example—would be better deployed in the middle of the book, as a Midpoint Plot Twist.

So now you know not only how to use Classic Plot Twists, but also how to develop unique ones. Our discussion of Classic Plot Twists is far from over, though—next week we’ll be talking about how to write Moral Reversals.