21.36: Twists: How to Make the Unexpected Feel Inevitable

Crafting the Unexpected Narrative

0:00This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com slash writingexcuses. Season 21, episode 36.

0:19This is Writing Excuses. Twists. How to make the unexpected feel inevitable. Tools, not rules. For writers, by writers. I'm Mary Robinette. I'm Dong Wan. I'm Erin. And I'm Howard. This week, we are talking about one of the most hotly contested topics, I think, in any kind of narrative, which is how to do a twist. When you get it right, everyone loves it. When you have a surprising element that comes in at the end, and it feels like this is how it was always going to happen, but you didn't see it coming.

0:53I think a twist is something that people reach for a lot, and in its failure states can either be very expected and therefore not that exciting, or feel incredibly random and therefore disappointing in a very different direction, where it just feels like a deus ex machina or unconnected to everything else that's happening. So, I'm going to toss this to the rest of the crew. How do you all think about setting up a twist so it feels like it was always going to happen that way without people seeing it coming?

1:27So, I'm going to say a thing that is going to probably put people into despair, which is that my best twists are ones that I did not plan. Mm-hmm. Where I was setting up something else, and so you can deconstruct this and figure out how to do it when you want to, which is that I was setting up something else, and I was aiming for a particular trajectory. And then, as I'm writing, realize I've got all of these other elements that are on the page that were these ingredients. And I'm like, oh, secretly, she's been a duck the entire time.

2:02I like that approach, just the idea that I know I'm going to twist, I just don't know exactly how, so I'm going to put the things in the story that need to be in this story, plus maybe some extras, and then we'll figure out where the twist is, and we have to edit and prune later. I love that approach. The approach that I don't like is the one that I got from a fellow comic book panelist a decade and a half ago, where he said, yeah, I'd read the letters in the back of the, you know, letter, and anybody who had guessed how my series was going to end, I decided if that was one of my endings, I couldn't use it.

2:47And I remember listening to that and thinking, okay, I mean, but you guys were getting an email weekly. You were, weekly, you were having people guess at the end of your story, and if somebody got it right, you just had to can the whole thing. I will allow myself for some readers to figure it out. I do not have to be, I have never been the smartest person in the room, you know, but I don't have to outwit all of my readers.

3:18I actually think the most masterful execution of a twist is when the reader figures it out half a second before your protagonists do. You want your reader to feel smart. You don't want them to be completely surprised. You want them to go, oh, my God, and then the twist happens. And I think that is the most satisfying experience. I think Rian Johnson in his The Glass Onion and Knives Out movies nails this vibe perfectly. He's very good at setting things up in a way that you get it right before it happens.

3:51Well, in the horror genre, it's critical that that happened. And so that, you know, you're imagining as you're reading, what's the worst thing that could happen to these characters? And then the surprising but inevitable comes to you, the reader, and this huge sense of dread, which accompanies you on the page turn to when you find out you're right. To talk about a show that recently came out when we were recording this, which is Widow's Bay, there is a thing that they do at one point in that show, which is a significant twist. And everyone I've talked to figured it out an entire episode before, and they make you sit in a conversation for at least 30 minutes of the next episode where you know what the twist is, but they're just not giving it to you in a way that is beautifully done.

4:37They do it just long enough that I go, maybe I am wrong. And then you're right. Well, I think that points to one of the things that twists can do well. So first of all, like, I think that an ideal twist to me is one in which the story works, like, with the twist and without it, where the twist is not holding up the story. Like, the only reason this is a great thing is because you didn't see this coming. I read a story recently that had, like, an absolutely masterful twist in it, sadly not out yet, but it is, like, what's great about it is all the elements are there.

5:11They're just hidden. So I think, first of all, it's a lot of misdirection. You can have, you know, there's, like, an obvious interpretation of what's going on, and then the story does the thing that is the, I would have never thought of that interpretation, what's going on. It's very similar to how a lot of really great humor works, where you go for the thing that the audience is thinking, and then you go slightly off from that, but they're like, I see how you got there. But also, I read the story, and I did not get the twist the first time.

You know, I was not the careful reader. And when I got it, it was hilarious. And then I reread the story and loved it just as much for seeing all the moments I had missed that were obvious clues in retrospect to where it was going, but just made the story so much more delightful.

5:51Yeah, and I think that that's really the key is, especially if you want people to do rereads, that if you write a book or a story that only works when people read it once, then that's not going to be satisfying. But if the second time through, if that twist adds another element of tension, whether because you get to enjoy the, ha-ha, see how clever they are, or because you're like, oh, no, doesn't anyone see this? Then for the people who guess the twist before they get there, they're getting that tension.

6:27So if you're thinking about it as a backbone of tension in addition to the, ha-ha, look how clever I as the writer am. And I think that's the failure motive of a twist, is when you are writing it not for an emotional punch for the characters, but for the reader to go, look how clever that writer is. Two excellent twists that we've seen in cinema in the last 30 years. One is The Sixth Sense, and we come back to that because that was Shyamalan's trademark, practically.

7:08And then The Matrix from, I think, a few years later. Yeah, I think so. I don't remember the timing. I don't remember the timing exactly. Point is, in both cases, our protagonist realizes that they are not in the real world. Bruce Willis discovers he's a ghost, and Neo discovers he's a Duracell battery. Spoilers for 27-year-old movies. I literally was like, spoilers!

7:38Wait, he's a, yeah. But here's the thing. Okay, I have watched Sixth Sense twice.

7:48I will watch The Matrix any old time it's on. And that's because Sixth Sense completely depended on that twist and invited me to go back and watch it again to see if I could spot the clues and be clever this time. Matrix gave the twist expanded, you know, this whole worldview. And when I watch it again, well, yeah, I just have the expanded worldview. Now I'm going to watch the bullet time over and over and over. And it's fascinating to me how they're both really good twists.

8:23So there's a, I learned about the twist, since we're talking about things from last century, from a writer. That was an act of cruelty saying it that way. My bones! Did I earn it? I earned it. Yeah, yeah.

O Henry and Recontextualization

8:41So, but I seriously learned about this from a writer from the 1910s, which was O. Henry. And most people know him from The Gift of the Magi. What people don't realize is he was an incredibly prolific short story writer. And what he was known for was that all of his stories had a twist. The thing that he did was that the twist causes you to recontextualize everything that came before that. And that, I think, is one of the keys is, like, how does it make you view things differently?

9:14Not just, oh, I didn't expect this, but how does this make you view things differently? So when you look at The Gift of the Magi, which is this, you know, it's been remade, and it's this young couple, and she's a pianist. And he, I can't remember what his fancy job was, but they both are like, yes, I'm going to my work today. And it turns out he's actually had to take a job doing boiler repairs, and she is working as a scullery maid.

9:47And they sell their most precious possessions, each of them, in order to buy Christmas presents that are the Christmas presents that, like, she buys him a watch fob for the watch that he has sold in order to buy her the combs for her hair. What people don't notice when they talk about this, or forget when they're talking about that, they talk about the sale. But that's not actually the twist. The twist is that she, the reason they, that they realize that she has a burn on her arm, and he knows, he realizes that she got her arm burned as a scullery maid,

10:28because he was working in the boiler room and had to send up a grease-soaked rag for that maid who had been burned, and he realizes, oh my God, that's my wife. And so, it recontextualizes everything that they both realize that they haven't had this fancy job the entire time, but they are so in love with each other that that love continues as the through line. And so, anyway, O'Henry is really great, but I think it's, the point is that that recontextualization does, recontextualizes not just that single thread of the twist line, but also everything that connects to it.

11:08The thing we've been circling around in all this conversation is reader expectation and how to play with reader expectation. So, we're going to take a break, but when we come back, I want to talk more about expectation and how that dovetails with your character motivations. Years ago, I changed my diet to include lots of fresh foods. After a couple of months of that, I grabbed a fast food burger, and it tasted fake. The burger hadn't changed. I had. I'd trained, and perhaps refined, my palate accidentally. I've trained it deliberately since then, and I thought I was doing a good job at raising my game.

11:43And then I watched episode four of Cooking One from Gordon Ramsay. I had no idea that it was possible to incorrectly chop basil. Or that it would actually affect the flavor of the dish. Ramsay may be a big meanie on the reality TV cooking shows, but as an instructor at MasterClass.com, he is a friendly font of helpful information. Like this. Eat foods in season. Don't expect your favorite dish to hold up for 12 months out of the year. Create favorites for each season, and create them from the herbs and vegetables that are in season at that time.

12:17So, MasterClass.com. There are over 200 classes across 13 major categories, and you can fit them into just about any schedule. Gordon Ramsay explained how to handle herbs while I was sketching in the backs of books. Every new membership comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee, and plans start at just $10 per month, billed annually. MasterClass keeps adding new classes, so there's never been a better time to get in. Right now, as a listener of this show, you get at least 15% off any annual membership at MasterClass.com slash excuses.

12:47That's 15% off at MasterClass.com slash excuses. Head to MasterClass.com slash excuses to see the latest offer. Okay, before the break, we've been talking about twists and how to make them feel inevitable, and the thing that kept coming up was audience expectation.

Character Motivations and Misdirection

13:06What does the audience think the story is? What do they think is about to happen? And then how do you reveal that what they thought wasn't, but also is connected to what's been happening all along? That recontextualization that Mary Robinette was talking about. But for me, how I think about that a lot of times, I mean, when I'm setting up a twist, when I'm doing creative work, is usually in a GMing context, right? So it's an interesting thing because I have to plan the twist ahead of time, but how we get to that point. I'm doing the opposite of what you're doing, Mary Robinette, which is you're setting up plot points, and then Agatha Christie-like realizing what the twist is halfway through.

13:42I'm kind of setting a twist out as a destination somewhere down the road, and then we're improv-ing our way to that point. And that is kind of, so the way that I have to do that is to play with character motivations. What do my characters want? What do my villains want? And then how do I get those to intersect in a way that will feel really surprising for the players? I do have twists that I have plotted, but I was also just recently on a panel where we were talking about twists, and all of us were like, yeah, my best ones just happen.

14:15But when I plan them, for instance, without telling you which book, in one of the novels, I kill someone. And I knew from the beginning that I was going to kill them. But the arc that I set up was not the—you know when you're watching a film and you're like, oh, okay, I'm sorry that person's dead. Look how happy they are. But if you set up a—what I did was I set up an argument arc, and so the obvious thing that was going to happen was that they were going to drift apart and they were going to come back together, and the resolution of that arc was them reconciling their differences.

14:51And I truncate it so I don't set up the, we're so in love. I interrupt the—an arc that is planned that I make very clear and very obvious to the reader, this is the journey that we are on. We are on a reconciliation journey. And then I just murder someone. Always the solution, I think. It's funny because we're talking a lot about twists on sort of a macro level because we're talking about structures, but I always often think of them on a micro level because I love to play with unreliable narrators where they're like, it's not necessarily a twist so much as, you know, you don't realize this person's true motivations or you don't realize what this person is truly about.

15:37And so I just wanted to share, in the spirit of tools, not rules, a couple of, like, micro things that help me as I'm trying to, like, create this kind of arc or set these kind of things. One is to play with where, like, actual information that would help you discern the twist or the information is within a paragraph or page. Humans really are into primacy and recency. We tend to remember the first thing and the last thing, so last lines of paragraphs and pages and first lines really stick with us.

16:07So if you have something you want to hide, it's always great to put it in the middle. This is also true of sentences. If you have a list of several items and something important is, like, the third from the last, a lot of times people will just get into, oh, this is a list and just kind of not fully skim it, but kind of get into, like, okay, okay, I see what this list is. And not pay as much attention to the individual items so you can sort of, like, hide them in there. And I think a lot of this has to do with, like, focus. Like, where are you, you know, where are you directing focus?

16:37In a film, you can actually miss focus, put something out of focus that you don't want people to pay attention to and in focus, zoom in on what you want them to, even if that isn't the important thing. But we can do this as writers as well by really putting more description towards an item that isn't as important. Because if it has a lot of adjectives or lush description, we draw focus and then take something that isn't as important and kind of downplay it by not making it as, not making, giving it the amount of richness. Because the richness will come from the context that is driven by the twist that you read later.

17:09I think of this as overwhelming the reader with detail, right? You describe a bunch of things or you give a bunch of different information. Half of it is not relevant. Half of it leads directly into the thing. I think the other thing that you can do to sort of, in a microwave, set up these reveals is lie to your readers, right? And I think it's really important that you, the narrator, you, the writer, are not lying to your audience. But you can have a character misdirector audience, right? So when you reveal information, somebody says, oh, yes, of course, that was because somebody did X, Y, Z, which has nothing to do with anything.

17:43That person is just wrong. You can have a character be wrong in a scene, and then that will lead your readers down one direction when really what's happening is another direction. So it's a way to give people information. You also have to show that the person who was wrong is an idiot in some way or, you know, set up ways. Or that they have a real reason for thinking that. Yeah, exactly. It's helpful to, for me anyway, to categorize plot twists at a high level. And like simple stuff. Friend is an enemy.

18:13Enemy is a friend. Truth is a lie. A lie is the truth. Just thinking about it at that high a level and say, oh, enemy is a friend. Oh, goodness. Wow, that gives me a whole, just by having the category handy. The last one is that I could think of was world building. And it's very, very, very general. And all I could think of to say was McMuffin is a MacGuffin. Something about the world building is not what we thought it was.

18:43Something unimportant is magical. Or something magical is useless. But like I said, that category is early days. Well, I think one thing that is really important in all of this is connecting your twist to character motivations. What your protagonists want and what your antagonists want and the way that those move in different directions and the way that the twist should reveal something that the protagonist, your POV character, didn't understand about the forces that oppose them and what they want.

19:17And so I think the best twists are ones, the reason the Matrix twist works better than the Sixth Sense twist, right? The Sixth Sense is famous for a rug pull moment, but it's not narratively satisfying in a rich way, the way the Matrix one is. Because what the Matrix one does is it reveals here's what the heroes want and here's what the villains want and how diametrically opposed they are. And then that changes the status and then the whole back half of that movie is contending with that. Versus Sixth Sense is just a, oh my God, and now the movie's over. So I think what you really want is a recontextualization in that moment that echoes back through the story.

19:52And that means that character motivations have to be aligned in a way that connect with that. That's interesting because I think like twists can sort of be seated in the world or seated in the character. So you can have the character isn't who I thought they were like type of moment in which it turns out that probably you understood their motivations, but not the actual thing they were trying to get to. So I wanted love, but I wanted it by killing everyone in the room is a very different motivation than I wanted love by hugging everyone in the room. And since those are both physical actions, you could write a story in which you think a very weird story, like a character is going in for a group hug, but it's murder.

20:27And so please write that story, someone out there and send it to us. So that I don't have to. Welcome to Aaron's free story idea. Good luck. But you can also have something where, and I think this is more typical, especially in the movie world, where a lot of what we're seeing is externalized is like we're talking about the motivations and the character remains the same, but their understanding of the world around them shifts radically. And they then have to understand how to reseat their motivation in this new world. It's a misunderstanding of the systems that they're embedded in, right?

20:58I think Brandon Sanderson does that a lot with his magic systems where you realize, oh, the magic is different than I thought. And that says something about how we thought the world worked and how my character was interacting with that world. And so I think if you don't have an antagonist involved in the twist and it's more the world response or them understanding the world in a different way, I think that still has to connect with ideally or ideologically what your POV character hoped the world was. And now they're realizing something different or vice versa.

Heist Structure and Hidden Motives

21:29Yeah.

Heist Structure and Hidden Motives

21:30As you were talking, you made me think about another category of twist, which is the twist that happens in a heist. Which is that all of the characters are in on the twist, but the reader is not. And that is the thing where you have to have, or a thing that I have found, I guess, a tool that I have found is that the giving the character something else to worry about that still points at the problem,

22:04but points at it in a way that the reader thinks that they understand a different thing. So it's a form of lying to the reader. But like, if the, like, I used a situation where there was a magic system that was in, you know, a danger of having a seizure. And so when a character goes through the motions of faking a seizure, the reader does not know that they're faking it.

22:36I have set up the entire time, this is a dangerous thing that might happen as a result of doing this. And so the reader believes that they understand what is happening. And my character's reaction is, this is, this is the sound out of her nightmares, which is true. I have not lied to them at any point, but I have pointed all of my, all of the things that I've pointed at are, look over here. And instead of this is the thing that's happening. I think the role of Julia Roberts in Ocean's Eleven is a great example of this, because it gives Danny Ocean a different motive other than just pulling off the heist.

23:15And so at parts in that movie, we just think, oh, he's going off script. He's leaving the heist behind, going after his own personal goals. But really what's happening is this is all part of the plan. This is all connected. And what he's doing is deceiving the villain, whose name I'm forgetting, he's deceiving that character and us at the same time. And then it puts us in the seat of everyone around Danny Ocean, which then is the joyful reveal at the end of like, oh, this is all connected. And he's going to get the girl.

23:46Again, spoilers for a movie that's over 20 years old. I feel like we should put on this episode, caution, old people spoilers about. Yes. Yes. 20th century spoilers. Exactly. Well, I think maybe we should go ahead and leave it there.

Writer Homework and Practice

24:03That was a really fun conversation about how to set these things up. So I have a little bit of homework for you, which is putting this into practice. If your work in progress has a twist in it, what I want you to do is write out all the logical steps that lead up to that reveal. How do you get there as a writer? Why did you put this into place? So lay all those out. And then take that list and begin to remove details until you reach the breaking point where your twist no longer makes sense.

24:35What can you take out that isn't load-bearing? Play around with this. Take some out. See if that works. And then swap some back in, right? And until you can find the breaking point of that and then see if that's a better way to structure your reveal in the story. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

24:58Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Kowal, Dong Wan Song, Aaron Roberts, and Howard Taylor. This episode was engineered by Marshall Carr, Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds. For more information, visit writingexcuses.com. In the series Oké겠습니다.

25:26Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

25:35Thank you.