TWISTY BUSINESS

How to stress test a plot twist.

- JEFF SOMERS

When I was a wee lad and just getting started on my writing journey, I was enamored with the twist ending.¹ Every single story I cranked out as a kid ended with a sort of "Monkey's Paw" twist I imagined would really knock people for a loop and establish me as one of the greatest provocateurs of modern writing, right up there with O. Henry and Rod Serling.² 

Blame it on those afternoon "Twilight Zone" marathons that used to run on local TV. I eventually grew out of the need to make every story a celebration of crazy plot twists-though I still love a good twist, especially if I'm the one who thought of it.³ One reason I grew tired of the trick was how often it failed.4

TWISTS ARE TRICKY

Twists fail a lot because they are delicate things. A good twist requires that you surprise your reader, but also that you don't cheat your reader-you have to give them enough information to make the twist feel like something they missed and not brand-new information they couldn't possibly have figured out on their own.

And even if you work hard to play fair, you're sometimes tripped up by your own blind spots. This can happen to any writer, no matter their track record or career stage. Consider the classic film The Shawshank Redemption, written by Frank Darabont (based on Stephen King's novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption). The twist (spoilers!) in the story comes when it's revealed that a falsely convicted prisoner named Andy Dufresne has escaped via a tunnel hidden behind a poster on the wall of his cell-a tunnel he's spent more than 20 years digging using a tiny rock hammer.5