The Science Behind Plot Twists

Let’s say you’re a scientist in your lab, mixing up a plot twist. There are a lot of things you can add to your solution, without affecting the chemical reaction you hope to get from the finished product. You can pour in a dram of meaning. You can supersaturate with devastation. If you want, you can even sprinkle in a drop of rekindled hope.

But there are two things that absolutely must go into your beaker for your solution to function as intended. Surprise. And support.

Surprise, of course, is a no-brainer. We know that plot twists are supposed to be surprising. But support is just as crucial. While your reader may greet your plot twist with a moment or two of disbelief, she must not reject it. She must be made to feel that the twist, no matter how shocking, is ultimately believable. It makes sense. Perhaps, she will come to realize, it was telegraphed to her all along.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. If we’re going to be digging into plot twists with a scientific mindset, the first thing we need is a working definition of what a plot twist actually is. I’ve read a number of definitions, from a number of different writers, but here’s the one I like: a plot twist is nothing more than something the reader believes that turns out to be false.

Let’s see just how well this definition works by examining some plot twists at work in some well-known stories:

• In Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, we believe that the novel’s child protagonist, Ender, is training for combat by playing out war game scenarios against a computerized battle simulator. This is false. Ender has been waging the war, and the “simulated” warships he controlled were not only crewed by real, living men—they also annihilated a real alien race.

• In Gosford Park, we believe that the murder of Sir William McCordle was committed for financial reasons by some member from his tribe of greedy, grasping relatives. This is false. The murder was committed by servants—and the motive behind it is deeply personal.

• In Fight Club, we believe that the narrator and Tyler Durden are separate characters. This is false. Tyler is a secondary personality invented by the narrator to allow him to live a fantasy life, free from conformity and materialism.

Works every time. But here’s the real reason I like this definition so well: it gives the writer a place to get started. Because if a plot twist is something the reader believes that turns out to be false, then your first job is obvious: You have to make the reader believe something. Something that isn’t true.

How will you implant this crucial belief? There are three basic ways:

• You can have a character lie to them. In Ender’s Game, the adult staff who run Ender’s Battle School constantly lie to Ender, telling him that the battles he plays out are simulations. Ender believes them, and so do we.

• You can present facts that encourage them to make a false assumption. In Gosford Park, we’re treated to scene after scene of McCordle’s relatives dishing on their financial difficulties—and how the death of the family patriarch would solve them. We naturally assume that one of them will be his killer.

• You can rely on an assumption the audience brought with them. In Fight Club, we believe that Tyler and the narrator are separate people because—well, we always assume all of our characters are separate people! No work has to be done to get us on board with this belief; it’s one we had before we even arrived at the theater.

In each of these stories, when we learn the truth, it shocks us—because it violates a belief we held. We thought we understood the world we were reading about. But we were wrong, and the revelation of the the twist forces us to come face to face with a new, unsettling reality. Our new view on the world may make us happier, wiser, sadder, or more ill at ease. But one thing’s for certain: we’ll never be quite the same.

All right, we understand how to give the reader a surprise. In the next chapter, we’ll talk support.