Writing 101
How to Write a Plot Twist
The subtle art of surprise, foreshadowing, and follow-through
As someone who writes mystery and thriller novels, the “plot twist” is very close to my heart.
Since guiding the AI language model ChatGPT to generate a list of plot twists as part of my ongoing Promptly Written promptilicious segment “AI Made Me Do It,” I’ve been thinking a lot about what defines a plot twist and how writers can craft compelling twists that will leave readers both surprised and satisfied.
In order to work through these questions, I’m going to use a flash fiction I published a few months ago as a case study. If you want to avoid spoilers, read the story first:
In December 2022, Furious Fiction put out the challenge to write a 500-word flash fiction story using the following prompts and restrictions:
- Your story must OPEN with a 12-word sentence.
- Your story must include the sale of a second-hand item.
- Your story must include at least five (5) different words that end in the letters -ICE.
Even without these restrictions, flash fiction can be a challenging genre to work in. It is hard to set up a good plot twist in just 500 words, but good stories usually have some sort of twist. In order to have a twist, you first need to have a plot: a cohesive narrative that leads logically from one event to the next.
A good plot has ‘setup,’ ‘motivation,’ and ‘follow-through’ as its basic components. Then you can get to the fiddly bits like foreshadowing, red herrings, and, of course, twists. With flash fiction, you already have to keep things punchy. Your characters need to be introduced and fleshed out in very few words and your plot needs to have minimal setup beyond your character introductions. If your characters and plot require extensive exposition, it won’t fit in flash fiction.
Laying the Foundation: Setup
For my entry for Furious Fiction, I first generated a list of “-ice” words (requirement 3) I thought worked together: vice, voice, choice, advice; police, accomplice, prejudice; price, service, invoice, office. Using these lists as a jumping-off point, I created a character and a situation that could link these words cohesively together, and put together a twelve-word first sentence (requirement 1) that I thought would hook a reader:
“Mary had made a business out of keeping people’s deepest, darkest secrets.”
From this hook, I created the basic plot: Someone comes to Mary to reveal an unexpected secret. The secret must involve the purchase of a second-hand item (requirement 2), but I also wanted there to be a dark twist.
Imagining this story as a murder mystery, like my debut novel, the secret clicked into place quite easily:
“I know where my daughter is.”
The ‘missing person’ is always a good base for a mystery. My initial idea for what the ending might be was a cliché, a ‘non-twist’ ending:
- The father killed his daughter and needs to confess it to someone.
This would be the easy route. No twist, no intrigue. An open-and-shut case, perfect for the genre of flash fiction. The drama is all about how Mary reacts to this information and her internal conflict about breaching her contract if she goes to the police.
Pouring Concrete: Motivation
Every major character should have a motivation — what makes them do what they do? Even if you reader never sees it, you should know it, because motivation is what drives plot and gives oomph to twists.
In “Business as Usual,” Mary’s motivations are pretty clear from the offset: she is trying to run a somewhat shady business and earn money being a “confidante”. Her decision-making as the story unfolds is influenced by this core motivation and how it conflicts with her ethical and legal obligations.
She’d never even considered going to the police before, but these were special circumstances.
When the story implies that the father is the murderer (the straightforward resolution to the plot setup), Mary’s motivations create plot. Her covert gathering of information for the police and internal conflict are a series of actions and dialogue that slowly reveal more information, including foreshadowing and red herrings.
Adding Supports: Foreshadowing
Once you’ve established a solid narrative foundation based on logical cause-and-effect and the motivation of your main character(s), you can consider your plot twist. Foreshadowing and dropping subtle clues throughout the story will prepare readers for unexpected developments and make the transition from one idea (what they expect to happen) to a new idea (the twist) seem natural rather than forced.
In flash fiction, you don’t have a ton of real estate in which to plant your foreshadowing, but because foreshadowing can take various forms, it is definitely possible (and recommended) to include some sort of hint that all is not what it seems, even if it’s just a character’s intuition.
Here are some examples of ways to integrate foreshadowing:
- Use dialogue: characters may unknowingly (or knowingly) drop hints that allude to future events. Internal monologue, such as a character’s thoughts or intuition, also fall into this category.
- Consider symbolism: objects, settings, or actions with symbolic significance can foreshadow events that will occur later in the story.
- Build and reinforce imagery: vivid descriptions or recurring imagery can be used to create anticipation and cohesion.
- Change the pace or tone: alterations in the atmosphere via the writing itself can foreshadow upcoming conflicts or plot twists.
In “Business as Usual,” the repeated phrase “I did what I needed to do” acts as both foreshadowing and a slight red herring. Mary assumes that this is an admission of guilt that the father murdered his daughter.
The first twist of the plot is that Mary’s assumptions about the secret she is hearing are incorrect. When the ambiguity of the father’s confession becomes clear, it is later revealed that what he “needed” to do was not to kill his daughter, but to protect her from another threat.
Doors to Nowhere: Red Herrings
If you’re working on a larger project like a novel, introducing red herrings, or false foreshadowing, can help make a twist less expected by increasing the possible number of outcomes.
A red herring is a misleading clue that diverts the reader’s attention away from the real solution. The term “red herring” originated from the practice of using smelly fish to distract hunting dogs so that they lose the trail.
Red herrings can be a character, event, piece of information, or any element that appears significant but ultimately proves to be unrelated or insignificant to the main storyline. In “Business as Usual,” the purchase of the truck is a red herring because it reinforces an incorrect assumption, especially when paired with Mary’s interpretation of the evidence.
The purpose of incorporating a red herring is to encourage readers to form similar incorrect assumptions. By presenting false leads, authors can heighten suspense, add layers of mystery, and enhance the surprise when the true solution is eventually revealed.
However, it is important for authors to use red herrings judiciously and ensure they do not undermine the overall coherence or believability of the narrative. When used effectively, red herrings can be a powerful tool.
A story like “Business as Usual” could have taken several different turns based on the setup, motivation, and foreshadowing. When deciding how I wanted the story to end, a very sinister twist occurred to me, which I rejected because it didn’t suit the tone I was going for:
- The father is keeping the daughter hostage somewhere.
While this would be a somewhat typical twist on the murder mystery setup (i.e., there has been no murder), I wasn’t comfortable venturing into the implications of that kind of story, especially since I’d recently seen trailers for Girl in the Basement, a film based on the real story of Elisabeth Fritzl. I didn’t want the horror of the story to be the implication of incest/abuse.
Stay Out of the Fridge
Violence against women, and especially sexual violence, is very frequently used as a plot device to further the storyline of a male protagonist — this trope is called “fridging,” popularized by comic book writer Gail Simone. The term comes from the iconic Green Lantern storyline in which the body of the protagonist’s girlfriend is left in a refrigerator for him to find.
“Fridging” has come to mean the killing off, raping, or otherwise injuring, incapacitating, or brainwashing of female characters to further the story of the (typically male) hero or as the tragic backstory which turns a villain to a life of crime. TV Tropes writes that fridging is known as “a hallmark of supremely lazy writing.”
It is easy to create emotional trauma this way, which is why flash horror often turns to the fridge as a means of fast-tracking the emotional depth of a story. 500 words aren’t much to get a reader to care about a character or the outcome of a story — but nor is it enough to deal with the implications of that trauma in any meaningful way, and will therefore either feel flat or exploitative.
Sexual violence is overused as a twist because it is shocking and emotionally resonant; I didn’t want to go there with this story because 500 words didn’t feel like enough space to do the topic justice.
Blow the Roof Off: Subvert Expectations
A good plot twist follows through on both the setup and the foreshadowing with a logical but unexpected solution. Ideally, you want your reader to both be surprised and satisfied that the ending fulfills the promises of the setup, which is a difficult balance to strike.
Too much setup and foreshadowing, and the twist will be too expected — your reader will know what’s going to happen, and the twist won’t be a twist. Too little, however, and your reader may feel cheated. Readers want to know that they could have solved it themselves, having had all the information. The key is to balance surprise with believability.
The best kind of plot twists use a reader’s own biases against them. That’s why subverting expectations is a useful benchmark: readers come to expect certain things of a genre or setup, and by reversing (within reason) those conventions, a surprising twist can be achieved.
In “Business as Usual,” I manage to squeeze a second plot twist into the closing lines that subvert the expectations:
“I need you to get rid of him. Name your price.”
Mary began rifling through her papers for a different contract. “I offer a multiservice discount!”
The second twist is the reveal that the father has come to hire Mary not in her capacity as confidante but as a hitman, thus challenging what we believe we know about Mary and her ethical code. The levity of the closing joke — which turns murder-for-hire into a sales add-on — defies the seriousness of both the story up to that point and the genre more generally.
Subverting genre expectations requires a deep understanding of the genre you’re working within and the expectations your readers will have of the story. In order to satisfy readers, you will still need to include enough of what they came for, but also ~add a little spice~.
Let’s use another example, this time of a story I wrote in 2021. If you want to avoid spoilers, read the story first:
The prompt was: “You are a day-trader with an unusual nightlife. […] Something goes horribly wrong.”
My interpretation of this prompt added a supernatural element as well as two distinct plot twists. First, the perspectival character slowly emerges not as your run-of-the-mill predator picking up a drunk girl at a bar for sex, but as a vampire looking for a meal. Second, the girl he picks up turns out to have been hunting him right back — she’s a succubus, and intended to feed on him as well.
The first twist adds the supernatural element, a slight shift in tone and genre from the setup. The second, similarly, adds levity and humour by having these two supernatural creatures unintentionally thwart the others’ efforts to feed that night on unsuspecting human prey:
“Oh fuck not again,” she says in far too sober a voice, and then pulls away from me with unexpected strength. She flips on the light and I see her eyes have turned a soulless black, and inky blood drips from her neck wound into her cleavage. “A vampire? Really?”
I sigh and begin rebuttoning my shirt. “A succubus. Figures.”
She climbs onto the bed beside me, lights a cigarette, and offers me a puff. We will both go home unsatisfied tonight.
What can I say? I like my stories to have a bit of a laugh at the end, especially when the setup is dark.
For me, a humorous “double-twist” is actually easier to set up in a small amount of space than a more complex twist, like one I might use for a novel.
My plot twists for stories under 1K words are often these double-barreled reveals. In “Business as Usual,” the two prongs of the plot twist — the father isn’t a killer, but Mary is — jerk the plot off course at the last second. In “The Hunt,” the denouement of the shared cigarette leaves the reader as unsatisfied as the unfulfilled characters, which contrasts the building tension of the story to a nonexistent climax.
It Really Was the Butler
As a writer, embracing the opportunity to subvert genre expectations allows you to push the boundaries of storytelling. It invites readers to question assumptions and experience genres in fresh new ways.
Engaging readers’ emotions, challenging their biases, and delivering a satisfying payoff are just as important as “shocking” them, if not more so. Foreshadowing, timing, and maintaining plausibility are essential elements in laying the groundwork for a compelling twist, but sometimes the twisty twist of all is no twist.
Sometimes, the butler really did do it. Obviously, that’s the biggest cliché of the whodunit genre. But if it’s never the butler, wouldn’t it be more surprising to actually have the butler do it? Playing right into the conventions of a genre can be just as exciting as outright subverting them. It’s all about how you do it.
Crafting a memorable plot twist thus requires careful planning (setup and motivation), strategic execution (foreshadowing, red herrings), and a deep understanding of your story’s dynamics (genre and conventions). The key is to surprise and engage readers without alienating them or losing the essence of the genre they love.
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