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On sudden plot twists.

I don’t think plot twists are in any way necessary for a good story but I enjoy some mind-boggling, shocking turn of events. When I start a story I don’t intentionally go for a plot twist but I love secrets and mysteries and as I shape them into a plot it’s easy to turn them into one except it usually doesn’t work the way it was intended?

I don’t know how to properly articulate this or why this is but my plot twists are usually not at the end or near the end of a story. I love to put the twists halfway or two-thirds of the way into the story because these twists turn things upside down, obviously, it challenges everything the characters thought was real or true and they have to change accordingly. And I love giving that time, to let these changes to breathe and have time to blossom into a new setting, a new context to what the characters do.

Take Leaper as an example. It’s about halfway into the story that it turns out that one of the characters has to die in order to fix what’s wrong. Either she dies, or everyone dies (including her). So, naturally, the right thing to do is for her to sacrifice herself. The rest of the story is spent with the characters trying to get over obstacles on their way to where and when this one character can finally sacrifice herself and save the world.

And I just wonder if that’s in any way useful or even the right thing to do cause… maybe the reader would wonder “oh there’s still fifteen chapters left, there’ll be another sudden discovery, another twist, they’ll figure something out so she doesn’t have to discover herself” and then it just doesn’t happen. Is that underwhelming or does it communicate that it was always supposed to happen this way? Is everything that happens after the twist, or most of it, just a glorified epilogue meant to “pad the runtime”?

In July 14th they figure out how to get out of the station like ten chapters before the end, but obviously Eve still has to go get the kidnapped kids so they can leave as well, then the rest of the story is just trying to outrun Zilda.

In Vale something very similar happens to what happened in Leaper. In In Static, well… In Static is a bit different cause technically it’s the same story twice and the big twist is actually disguised as a small twist and then the big twist is actually just an elaboration of the small twist which is at like two-fifths of the way into the story and is actually the big twist…

Anyway. I don’t mean that stories should end after the plot twist or cliffhangers are the only way to write a satisfying and shocking story, I just realised this about the way I write my plot twists and if it is in any way good for something or just bad pacing? 

I was looking at my outlining notes last night (i slept at 3am fight me) and I was actually a bit surprised to see that the plot twist doesn’t go in the middle (its a bit before the 3rd act, apparently.)

I think that the narrative reason for this is that it’s the final push to get your protag to where they should be (ie the resolution), because by this point they’d just undergone The Dark Night of The Soul (so they need something to get them to stop moping.)

Honestly now that I think about it in Happy Endings the plot twist comes in the middle. Of course there’s also another plot twist before the climax… You know? I’m noticing a pattern here. I think pacing naturally lends itself to two plot twists, one at the middle, which focuses on the inner conflict, and the other before the climax, which focuses on the outer conflict. (Now I think that you’d say that there isn’t always a second twist, but I’m defining twist here as ‘something that shows up that the reader doesn’t expect’ (no matter how unsurprising it is) because otherwise the audience would know how it ends.)

Am I onto something here or??

I guess you’re right in the second twist thing. I could find in all of my stories a second twist that is “something that shows up that the reader doesn’t expect”, but in my case they all seem like they weren’t consciously written. Maybe it’s my general instinct to feel how the pacing could be served by another “twist”.

Prepare for super cool illustration

In most cases this last twist is less of a shocking revelation and more like “new information that gives readers a clue about what direction the characters and the world would progress after the novel ends”.

I guess it depends on what you want to achieve with changing the stakes and the context. In Leaper, after the first plot twist if the reader thinks to themselves they could say “if nothing else changes about the situation, this is how the story will end”. And that’s what happens, that’s exactly how the story ends, actually. The character sacrifices themselves and the world is saved. However, in that story it’s kind of what I meant to say, that this was always how it was going to end, that’s the moral of the story.

In Vale it’s very similar because a sacrifice has to be made. The whole time after the first twist the characters keep going on about how they’ll figure out something and solve it so the sacrifice doesn’t have to happen. But in the end it does have to happen. So in a way that’s the twist? That they ultimately fail even though because the first revelation was made so early, you would assume the heroes do figure something out but then they don’t.

It’s weeeiiirrrd.