I’m finishing up Detroit: Become Human and I’m going to have some story-writer thoughts on that later but here’s a non-spoilery, writerly, unrelated to DBH rant about How to Write a Twist (according to Avelera):

– A good twist should illuminate the story backwards and forwards in time.

Example of a good twist: (Spoilers) Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense” reveals that our main character was dead the whole time. This recasts the story and invites us to take a second look at the nuances of the scenes before the reveal. We become suddenly aware of elements we were willing to ignore before because of storytelling conventions, such as camera angle, leaps forward in time, and who Willis’s character has spoken to throughout (Hint: no one except the little kid except in flashbacks). The director invited us to ignore these elements the first time as mere film conventions, playing with time and POV. The movie is re-watchable beyond the initial shock of the twist as we look for clues that we missed the first time that reveal the story from an entirely different angle.

Example of a bad twist: (Spoilers) Shyamalan’s “The Village” reveals that the monsters that have terrified this village throughout the story were always in fact the elders putting on silly costumes to scare everyone. It’s a Scooby Doo style “It was old man Jenkins in a mask the whole time!”. This makes the film un-rewatchable, because all the tension has fled. Scenes that scared us initially because we thought there was a monster become ridiculous in retrospect. We also learn that we were never in the past, this is a weird commune of hippy LARPers who decided for some reason to pretend they were living in the goddamn 1600s and decided randomly to talk as if they lived back then, meaning besides there being no supernatural element there was actually never any danger to this community at any point that they didn’t bring on themselves by being dumbasses.

– A good twist should be built into the story from the beginning.

The author cannot just decide to take the most shocking ending and tack it on to the end. You must know your twist and have it built in organically to the fabric of the story from the beginning. Even non-storytellers can feel the underlying direction of a story, even if they can’t articulate how they know it. Readers can tell if you had this idea from the start, or if you just made up a twist at the end ala “Rocks fall, everyone dies.” Even if they are initially shocked by your “twist” they will feel dissatisfied because you did not give them the tools to figure this out on their own.

To this end: you should give your audience all the tools necessary to solve your mystery before the characters do. Ideally, an attentive audience should be one half-step ahead of the characters for maximum satisfaction. A very savvy audience may figure it out well before that, but even people who were not actively trying to solve the mystery should figure it out around the same time the characters do in a way that doesn’t make them feel cheated that they couldn’t have solved it if they looked. An example of a tip to achieve this: if it’s a murder mystery, don’t wait until the very end to have the murderer appear as a character. 

If you want to be particularly devilish, you can tell your audience the answer to your twist waaay back in the beginning, at a point where they might not have even been aware that the mystery was there, so that it’s forgotten by the time the question is raised. An example of this would be Shadow’s cellmate in American Gods (Spoilers) Low-Key Lyesmith, who is introduced well before we’re told that the Norse gods are hiding in plain sight in America. (And if you don’t get that twist, say it aloud to yourself.)

– A good twist should make your story pleasurable to revisit, not pointless.

Going back to point 1: ancient audiences knew the ending of the Trojan War as portrayed in The Iliad and The Odyssey. (Spoilers) They knew Troy falls, Patroclus dies, Hector dies, Achilles dies, frankly everyone except Menelaus and Odysseus dies or meets a bad end, and Helen is reclaimed. They still loved  the stories of the Trojan Cycle. Why is that? Because it’s not about “IF” Troy will fall it’s about “HOW” Troy will fall. Who will suffer? Who will meet their end beautifully, who will meet it ignobly? Which sides with the gods pick? Who will be thwarted? Who will we wish would survive, even knowing that they will not? Homer puts the audience in the position of the gods, having our favorites, yet knowing from the beginning who will live and who will die.

By focusing on the experience of the story rather than focusing all your efforts on a surprising twist, you make a story that can be revisited even if people know the ending. By inserting a good twist, you can invite readers to look at the story again in a new light. Everyone knows that in most stories, the good guys will win, the bad guys will lose, the lovers will end up together, etc. etc. We’re suspending our disbelief in even pretending we don’t know how most movies will end, even on our first viewing. What we care about is how, not if these things will happen. Constructing a twist should play into this principle.

Greek Prophecies play will with this principle. In Herodotus there is a Delphic oracle that states: “If Croesus [King of Sardis] goes to war he will destroy a great empire.” We are told the ending before the story begins but in this instance, the empire he destroyed was his own. Now when re-reading this story we will be filled with foreboding at those words rather than triumph, but the story of the fall of Sardis is still compelling (if you’re a history nerd like me).