Welcome back to Behind the Scenes! I'f you’ve been following along with Death Casts a Spell, you know that in yesterday’s chapter, I finally got to reveal the book’s first major plot twist. Kitty and Mr. Gallo had been tracking a missing girl, Jeannette Jacoby. Thus far, the case had been pretty boilerplate: we searched her room, found a clue, investigated a new location, and found Jeannette, working as a magician’s assistant in a seedy dive. And then…
We found ourselves in a narrow, poorly lit corridor backstage. The lefthand side was lined with dressing room doors, and from behind one of these we heard a pair of voices—soft, lilting feminine voices, both full of the same youthful timbre and merry laughter. We hurried toward the door, and Mr. Gallo raised his hand to knock.
But after two hours of having Vetrovsky’s lovely tricks spoiled, I was officially out of patience. I twisted the handle, and the door swung open.
Inside the dressing room were two young women. One sat in front of a lighted mirror wearing a robe, carefully unwinding the strands of costume jewelry that were woven through her hair. The other, still wearing her stage costume, stood behind her, helping her detach the more troublesome pieces. At the sound of the door opening, they turned to regard us with guarded looks.
And they were both Jeannette Jacoby.
When we talk about plot twists as mystery writers, we are most often talking about Climactic Plot Twists—twists that bring the book to a conclusion by revealing that an unexpected character is the villain. And it’s true that a good Climactic Twist is, indeed, de rigeuer.
But for my money, it’s just as important to throw the reader a few twists along the way. You want to keep her off balance, and let her know that the plot is not riding on rails. She may think she knows where the book is going to end up—but you’re in the driver’s seat, and you may be taking her somewhere completely different.
That’s why I talk so much about the importance of Midpoint plot twists. While yesterday’s twist—learning that Jeannette has a secret twin—is a little too early to be a Midpoint twist, it still gives the book a shakeup and sets the investigation on new footing. We thought we had a case about a missing girl. Now we have a case about separated twins. Unraveling the mystery is now going to demand that we dig into the girls’ backgrounds, and learn exactly how they came to be separated.
I like the idea of this—a twist that opens our investigation up into new, broader territory—so well that I think I’ll coin a name for it: a Frame-Setting Twist. We thought our case was small: a missing teen, likely a runaway, easily found. Instead, we now know that it is large: two families, distorted by a sixteen-year-old lie.
I can’t remember, exactly, when this twist came to me. Maybe it was the very moment I decided that Jeannette’s sister would be the character to hire my Sleuths, because Jeannette’s parents didn’t care to find her. That implied a broken relationship between parents and daughter, and may have been the initial spark that gave me the twist.
But it’s true that twists don’t always come that easily. Sometimes they have to be teased out of the innermost reaches of my brain. When that’s the case, these are the steps I’ll generally take:
Scan through my big list of twists. For any twist that catches my eye, ask, “In this plot, what would this twist look like?”
Ask "What assumptions are inherent in my premise? How could I violate those assumptions?”
Use a List of Five to generate more twist ideas than I really need.
When all else fails, I just sit at my keyboard and let it all out. I type a stream of consciousness to myself in the hope (usually justified) that I’ll find some gold within.
For more help coming up with your own twists, try this post: