Do you remember that cultural moment when it felt like everyone was obsessed with illusions? It was all masked magicians and street magic and guys, inexplicably, spending days inside blocks of ice. The magician’s feats became more and more ambitious and at a certain point seemed to stop even being about magic. Right around that time, The Sixth Sense came out, which had its own kind of magic: an unforgettable plot twist. When you think of plot twists, The Sixth Sense is likely one of the first things that comes to mind. Unfortunately, after The Sixth Sense came out, a certain kind of writer felt they had an Icarian calling to attempt more and more ambitious twists of plot. The attempts often found them floundering in the sea.
Student Error
Many years ago, a friend of mine shared with me a short story that his classmate had written. It contained one of the most egregious uses of a twist ending I have probably ever come across, and it’s worth looking at.
Here’s the gist of the story and its twist:
A cop’s sister has an abusive husband but she refuses to press charges or leave him. The cop (who is also the narrator) is frustrated that he can’t do anything to protect his sister and her family. He can only sit idly by while his sister and her kids show up at family functions battered and bruised. He feels it’s only a matter of time before his brother-in-law goes too far and kills the people the narrator loves most. Finally, it happens. The police are called to the burning wreckage of his sister’s house, and the narrator’s sister and children are lost to the inferno. The brother-in-law is apprehended, found guilty of murder, and put on death row. On the day of the man’s execution, the narrator shows up and (I guess because he’s a cop?) is allowed to approach his brother-in-law and whisper in his ear. The brother-in-law becomes hysterical, and the narrator just laughs maniacally.
The twist? The narrator was the one who had burned down the house with his sister and her kids in it. All so he could frame his brother-in-law. You know, because the brother-in-law had been abusive to the narrator’s loved ones… whom the narrator then knowingly killed.
Really?
Substituting Interesting Writing with Plot Twists
I don’t have anything against plot twists. Still (and I don’t know who needs to hear this) not every story needs a twist. The compulsion to add a twist to a story usually stems from a desire to make a story interesting. The problem is, that’s not how it works. You can’t rely on a twist to make a story interesting because twists happen pretty late in the game; If your story hasn’t been interesting up to the big reveal, no one’s going to care about your twist. No one reads a boring story thinking, “Boy, I hope there’s a twist down the road that will make everything I’ve been slogging through worth it.”
Twists are most poorly executed by writers who do not know how to maintain an air of mystery in their writing. Mystery is not limited to Agatha Christie-style whodunnits. Mystery propels readers through stories. Readers keep reading if they want to know what’s going to happen next. If they don’t care, they stop. There needs to be a hint of something they haven’t quite figured out yet. Even if they suspect how things will turn out, they want to see if they’re right. It’s only after a certain level of anticipation has been established that a well-executed plot twist will enrich the reader’s experience.
As the author, you are likely already enamored with your twist ending, otherwise you wouldn’t even consider using it. Drop your eyes from your artistic genius for a moment and ask yourself, honestly: Will this twist make my readers groan and roll their eyes? Is it adding anything to the story? (Most importantly) Does this twist have any actual logic to it?
A good twist should make the reader say “Oh! It was there all along! How did I miss this?” In the case of our sample story’s twist, the reader gets to the end and says “This cop’s an idiot.” No one reading that story is going to say “I should have known the cop would kill his own family to frame that other guy.” I can imagine the author conceiving the twist of that story and thinking, “No one’s going to see this coming!” And he was right, but that didn’t make it good.
I'm curious — would you count the "shaggy dog" story structure as a plot twist?
It's the archetypal story that ends up falling away from its objective: the quest that loses sight of the grail, the journey that never finds the destination and isn't duly concerned with it. To me, it seems like a parody of the plot twist, and I enjoy how it first requires the writer to understand the cliché of such an ending. Funny enough, most of the readers I know dislike the shaggy dog ending (as something that deliberately misleads them).