Over the last many months, we’ve been explicating the ins and outs of Classic Plot Twists—twists like the Mastermind, the Locked Room, or the Mistaken Identity. I’ve done my best to cover these twists comprehensively, in order to give you an encyclopedia of twists to reference for plot creation.
Our discussion of twists would hardly be complete, though, if we didn’t devote some time to talking about how to dream up unique twists—twists that aren’t based on the essential elements of the mystery genre, but rather on your book’s particular premise.
To kick things off, we’ll need a premise to develop twists for. How about this one? A true crime podcast host is murdered on the air—right before revealing a supposedly startling disclosure he’s been hyping. His widow announces a million dollar prize for the person who can identify his killer. People from all walks of life—police detectives, mystery writers, housewives who happen to be true crime enthusiasts—converge on the town and get in each other’s way as they each try to be the first to uncover the guilty party.
This post continues my series on plot twists. Read from the beginning:
So, what are some twists that work with this premise? Well, let’s go back to our definition of a plot twist—a plot twist is nothing more than something the reader believes that turns out to be false. If this is true, we can find our way to a plot twist simply by asking: what is the reader likely to believe about this premise? What assumptions will she be likely to make? If we identify each of the beliefs she holds, we can violate any one of them, and end up with a killer twist.
Well, for starters, she might assume:
The murder broadcast on the podcast actually happened
The murder has something to do with the true crime story the podcast host was investigating
The widow wants the killer found
These are all solid assumptions, and we could violate any of them with a Classic Plot Twist. To violate Assumption #1, we’d be writing a Faked Death plot, perhaps about a podcast host who knew that the killer he was tracking had begun tracking him. In order to save his own neck, he faked his death. And because he can’t resist chasing clicks, he did it in the most dramatic way possible.
What about Assumption #2, that the murder has something to do with the crime he is investigating? By violating this, we’d be writing a Guilty Group Twist—a twist in which the Villain seems to come from within Group A (those people involved with the original crime) but actually comes from within Group B (those people involved in other aspects of the host’s life). We could decide that the host’s murder has nothing to do with the crime he’s investigating; rather, he’s been killed because he committed fraud, taking advertising dollars from a sponsor and then dissing their product on the air. And, because the reader will be expecting resolution to the original true crime story, we will have one of our Sleuths dig up the solution to that as well.
And what we violated Assumption #3, the widow wants the killer found? I can think of a number of ways to do this, but what if we used a The Frame’s the Thing Twist, and created a widow who, after killing her husband, planted evidence against his girlfriend? Then she gathered up a bevy of rabid fans to hunt down the girlfriend and send that hussy to jail.
Often, the first assumptions you list will lead you to create Classic Plot Twists, simply because the most obvious assumptions have already been sounded out by other writers working on their own plots. There is no problem with this—all of these are fun plots, which would create wonderfully entertaining mystery novels. But what if we want something weirder, a twist that really comes out of left field? Then the assumptions we work from will need to become weirder we well.
Or, more accurately, they will have to become more fundamental. We will have to start questioning the bedrock assumptions that are baked into our plot, the facts that seem too straightforward and obvious to ever be in doubt. So how about:
