The X Factor
Remember that plot twist scientist we discussed back in Chapter 1? Imagine yourself as that scientist now. You’re hard at work in your lab, peering at a beaker to which you’ve just added the two essential ingredients: surprise and support. Your mixture is fizzing along nicely, and everything is working just as it’s meant to. But are you done? It depends on the type of experience you’re trying to give your reader.
Just now, what your plot twist is delivering is primarily a cognitive experience. A jolt of disbelief, a wowza of surprise. If you’re writing a mystery novel, this is exactly the promise that you implicitly made to the reader when she picked up the book. She gives you her time; you give her a big shocker in the last chapter. So far, so good.
But it is not, as yet, an emotional experience. And that’s what’s delivered by the plot twists that mean the most to us—that stick in our heads and tug at our hearts. A truly phenomenal plot twist will be more than surprising and supported. It will also be resonant—full of meaning, for the characters and the readers.
Let’s look at a few of the ways it can be accomplished.
First, we’ll turn once again to Ender’s Game. When last we left Ender, he had just learned that he had annihilated an entire alien race. So how does Ender take it? There are any number of ways he might react. He might feel profound triumph at having won the war. Relief would also be a possibility: he’s not only saved humanity from an existential threat, but also closed the curtain on his days of endless battle.
Ender’s reaction, though, is devastation. He can’t help but feel grief and shame over the loss of all those lives, alien though they may be. The emotional fallout from this experience is the focus of the last few chapters, and also the beating heart of the novel. It challenges us to think about the nature of warfare—are those we perceive as our enemies also, on some level, like us? When we hurt someone, even an enemy, isn’t it natural to find ourselves scarred by that action? Don’t we feel ourselves in need of redemption?
But here’s the thing—like the twist itself, Ender’s reaction doesn’t come out of nowhere. In the last chapter, we spoke of the clue support needed to make us believe in the book’s central twist. If we look, we can also identify a secondary set of supports seeded throughout the book. Rather than helping us believe in the reality of Ender’s battles, they help us understand Ender’s perspective on violence. Among them:
We see inside Ender’s head during several hand-to-hand battles, and realize that his incredible savagery is not motivated by anger or hatred. Instead, it’s a cold, calculated effort to put an end to the conflict once and for all.
When one of these battles ends in the death of his classmate, Bonzo Madrid, Ender is so traumatized that he is unable to continue at Battle School for several months.
Colonel Graff calls out Ender’s empathy as a key part of his success. Earth needed a commander with enough compassion to understand the Formics’ thought processes and values.
Speaking with his sister, Ender gives us the biggest insight into his worldview. He says, “In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand someday, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”
With all of these supports in place, it’s easy for the reader to identify with Ender. Even before we’re told his reaction, we know there will be no triumph for him in this victory. Our emotional experience is immediate and intense; we experience Ender’s devastation right along with him.
Things often operate somewhat differently in a mystery, though. In this genre, the full picture of characters’ perspectives and backstories are frequently hidden from the reader until after the Villain is revealed. Therefore, it may be necessary to give the reader a scene or two after the twist is revealed, to explore its emotional impact.
That’s exactly how things go down in Gosford Park. When last we left this story, Mrs. Wilson, the dedicated and efficient housekeeper of the McCordle country estate, had been revealed as the killer of her employer, Sir William McCordle. She had done the deed not out of malice, but to prevent her son—who grew up in an orphanage and does not know her—from murdering McCordle and going to the gallows.
The revelation of Mrs. Wilson’s guilt gives us that wonderful frisson of cognitive dissonance that marks a good plot twist. We realize that the world was not as we thought it to be, and we watch the assembled facts slot themselves into place to form a new, convincing picture of what actually happened.
But the emotional piece isn’t there. Throughout the film, Mrs. Wilson’s sentiments have been kept entirely under wraps. In her reserved demeanor and smooth efficiency, she has seemed cold, almost robotic. To give the audience the emotional punch from this crime, we will have to expose the beating heart of the woman who committed it. We will have to follow her back to her room, where she collapses on the bed, sobbing. Not about the murder, but about the loss of all the years she might have spent with her son. He doesn’t know what she did for him. He’ll never know her. She’s saved him, but she’s lost him, too.
It’s a gut wrenching scene, and, like the plot twist in Ender’s Game, it tells us something true. That a mother’s love, even suppressed for years, remains one of the most enduring passions to seize the human heart. That nothing—not loyalty nor service nor self-preservation—can stop a mother from acting to save her child.
These two elements—characters who feel deeply, and a truth that speaks to the audience—can take a stunning plot twist and turn it into something absolutely world class. It really is best if you can arrange to give the audience the cognitive and emotional impact of the twist at the same time, as in Ender’s Game. But, plots being what they are—and especially in the mystery genre, where motivations often remain concealed—you may sometimes need to employ the one-two punch of Gosford Park.
What plot twists have hit you the hardest? Let me know in the comments!
Have you picked up a copy of The Tangled Web, my mystery writing textbook? I am so grateful for how the mystery writing community has responded to it, rocketing it to bestseller status on Amazon! If you have read it, I would be very grateful if you could leave a review!
