Twists in your stories

[Jabrosky]

I was musing over the small number of short stories I've managed to complete in the last few years, and it occurred to me that a high proportion of them have some kind of twist towards the end. Let me name a few examples:

The Redemption of Buikhu: Set in prehistoric Egypt circa 4000 BC, this stars a boy whose tribe disowns him for losing his family's cattle while accidentally getting the chief's son killed. Another tribe adopts him and treats him with respect. The big twist is that the second tribe is the one who stole the boy's cattle in the first place, thus bearing responsibility for his misery in the first place, so he runs back to his original tribe and joins them in a battle with the second tribe.

Themba and the Healing Gem: More fantasy in nature, this stars a Conan-type warrior with a violent past named Themba who has an old shaman lead him to a magic gem. The shaman tells Themba that the gem will bring a man he murdered back to life, but the big twist is that the shaman really wants the gem for his own nefarious purposes and merely used Themba to slay its Velociraptor guardians.

Fighting for Food: A human warrior enlists as a mercenary in the service of elves to suppress rebellious orcs. The big twist is that he realizes the elves are the real bad guys in the conflict and reverses his loyalties against them.

The Final Test: A troop of huntresses-in-training must kill a Triceratops as a graduation rite, but their internal bickering makes their first attack fail and so they have to start all over again. The big twist is that when they hunt for the Triceratops the second time, a T. Rex kills it, so they choose to cooperatively take down the T. Rex instead and earn themselves even greater honor in the end.

Does anyone else really like to have major twists in their stories?

 

[Feo Takahari]

I've discovered that every time I create a MASSIVE TWIST, my readers predict it beforehand. The way I've been approaching it lately is to have the twist be incidental, something that isn't necessary to understand the story, but that explains some element of the setting or the characters ("Why does she hate him?", "Where did he learn magic?", "How did that weapon malfunction?", etc.) Because they're not sudden and shocking, I don't have to be as heavy-handed with foreshadowing.

 

[Chilari]

I tend to put twists earlier in stories, as a way to intensify the conflict. For my current WIP, the believed-dead husnad of my protagonist returns from war when my main character has already remarried and is pregnant. His reaction to seeing his wife remarried and pregnant is to reject her and his own children and join the resistance against the town's new steward, who is the main character's new husband's cousin. Not only does this give the resistance a boost, but it also leaves my main character conflicted and her children confused. This happens maybe a third of the way into the story.

 

[The Dark One]

I'm kinda annoyed that I started pretty much this exact thread only a week or so back and hardly anyone responded. Now there's a new thread, but I guess that's the nature of this internet pool into which we occasionally dip. Never mind, it's an interesting topic.

Short stories can get away with one twist but novels need several. I think that one of the secrets to good writing is to include things deep within the fabric of your story that can go more-or-less unnoticed by the reader - lying dormant in their deeper, incidental reading experience until you trigger them later, causing an explosion of perspective that makes the reader see the whole story in a different light and take it off in unexpected directions.

To some extent, every shift in the plot is a twist and I try to cram as many into my novels as I can.

The book I've just finished has a couple of very major twists at the end, and of the 15 or so guinea pig readers so far, no-one has picked either of them, including my agent's reader. This gives me confidence I've got it right.

One of the curses of being a writer (and I'll bet this happens to all of you) is that because you understand the way stories are put together, you're hard to fool. I constantly guess what's going to happen in a novel or film and I LOVE being wrong. Fool me people! Fool me!