BY ALICE FONTANESI
STAFF WRITER
For some reason, when I was starting my first book I put in one of the most obvious plot twists in all of my years of reducing myself to half a brain cell over a fictional story. That is half the reason why I recycled that story because everything is chaos. How to avoid this? Write good plot twists. Guess what, it’s a lot harder than you think.
I believed that doing a bunch of plot twists would make my story better and it can, but a lot of the time it doesn’t work. Sometimes it’s too predictable, sometimes it came out of nowhere, and many other issues.
As said by Alfred Hitchcock, the director of Psycho, if you make something blow up in a scene the audience will be shocked, but if you show the bomb shortly before the explosion it will create suspense. How a plot twist works is if it feels relevant and your audience also feelings the suspense it’s supposed to convey.
While I was writing a series I was conflicted on which book should go first. The first two books were to set up the series, but either of them could have worked as the first one. The issue was that there were many twists that I thought wouldn’t and would work. But then there’s the element of suspense that I didn’t realize before. I decided to go in chronological order, and it works a lot better than the second book being the first one. The reason for that was because of certain plot twists.
I’m going to show two plot twists that worked, didn’t work, and why.
One of the biggest plot twists in the series is that the character Blake turns out to be an enemy and is basically insane. He had fallen madly in love with the character Hallow because he believed that she was the only person who understood him. But during his confession things turned south when Hallow revealed that she wasn’t interested in him. She wouldn’t really call them friends in the first place and she wasn’t very interested in love. Blake goes berserk and threatens to set everything on fire including him and her. He has a match in his hands over a pool of gasoline while Hallow sets in motion her unclear plan to avoid death. Hallow tells one of her friends through text to pull a fire alarm while she completely disregards her own safety as she and Blake fight over the match. Hallow loses and everything catches fire, but luckily all of the students are out except for Blake and Hallow. We get a tense moment in which everyone is debating whether or not she was actually dead. Then she comes out of nowhere intact and reveals how she survived. Since the apparition she had made a contract with two years ago didn’t fulfill his side of the contract yet she took advantage of the moment to fulfill the contract. The contract was that if she did what the apparition wanted then she could get whatever she wanted. The apparition was able to get her out of there and the contract is finally fulfilled.
If the first book was the second then just revealing that Blake was a yandere and showing what had happened before wouldn’t be a very good plot twist. The first book creates suspension up until the point where Blake snaps, and we are hinted that Blake would be the main love interest of Hallow. As the book progressed we saw Blake’s personality more, and had suspicions at the start.
The twist also works well with the overall plot. Without the plot twist the first book would end pretty blandly and we’d probably end up with an unnecessary love triangle between Hallow, Blake, and Gene (no one ends up with another though and everyone is single forever). We get an enemy that has personal drama with an important character, and Blake becomes an interesting character who kind of existed to be a love interest at first.
A plot twist is meant to change the direction of the story, so you’ve also gotta keep in mind what would happen if it didn’t. The plot twist for my story added to the drama in the series as well as giving the first book a banger of an ending.
Another plot twist that required fixing was that one of the enemies turned out to be one of the main narrator’s, Nathan Joic, dad. This twist didn’t work because it was too predictable. In the context of the first book we already know about the dad, and once we’re introduced to Nathan in the second book it is blatantly obvious that he is his son. We aren’t told directly that Nathan is Fyodor’s, the enemy, son in the first book, but we are given the context. Instead of taking out the plot twist I decided to tone it down. Fyodor tells Hallow about his son and that he wanted her to find him for reasons that I won’t explain right now because it would be too complicated. When we get the second book it’s already quite obvious that Nathan is Fyodor’s son both through looks and where he lived. Around the end of the first book Nathan figures out on his own that Fyodor is his father, and has a talk about it with Hallow who knew the entire time. Hallow tells him that it was inevitable that he would figure it out, but she kept it a secret from him because she knew that Nathan would be conflicted. That’s why she wanted for them to have that conversation, so she can remind him the importance of the situation and how he should let Fyodor go.
There isn’t much build up or hype about it, so it becomes just a certain plot point that sets Nathan’s character development in motion. The plot twist was replaced with the reveal that Fyodor helped someone frame Hallow of a murder. Fyodor was presented as a caring man who didn’t deserve what came his way, but the reveal of his true motives completely shattered his old facade.
As you can see the reason why the first one worked was because it created suspense and added to the plot. The second one didn’t work because it was too predictable. From what we can tell the elements to a perfect plot twist is suspense, relevance, and surprise.
A good example of suspense is Shou Tucker from Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Spoilers are ahead. Any FMAB fan can tell you that Shou Tucker is a terrible person. We’re introduced to him in the beginning of the anime as a state alchemist. His wife left him and he was left to support his daughter, Nina, and her dog. Shou studied chimeras and was trying to figure out a way to create a chimera that was capable of speech. If Shou wants to keep his state certification then he has to make a groundbreaking discovery or anything like that, so he and his daughter could keep a good life. We can see during the time with Shou that the desperation is breaking him down through visual storytelling. Despite how we know something bad is going to happen it’s still a shock when we discover Shou fused Nina and the dog together to create a talking chimera. Despite how we knew a bad thing was going to happen we still didn’t want it because the suspense was around during the time Edward and Alphonse weren’t at his house. We also deeply care about Nina and her dog already despite the small amount of screen time they had. Edward and Alphonse cared a lot about Nina and the dog and their interactions made the twist just as heartbreaking. Despite how FMAB rushed it compared to FMA the amount of suspense is still enough to make us just as heart broken and shocked. Heck, I’m not even halfway through the series and it already twisted my heart a million times.
Relevance is also extremely important because if you don’t acknowledge the twist then it was just thrown in there for the sake of having a twist.
Everyone knows that to create surprise you have to make it sudden and unexpected. For a plot twist you have to conclude some kind of foreshadowing and suspense to make it work.
Now, before I go off about good plot twists I also want to talk about two kinds of plot twists that I think are worth talking about. I’m talking about twist endings and twist villains.
Twist villains are basically Disney and Pixar’s thing that can sometimes be good, but most of the time they fall flat on their face. Hans from Frozen didn’t work because there wasn’t any foreshadowing to his villainous role nor did the story need it.
This also includes betrayals in stories that have the same issue as Disney’s twist villains.
Let’s take a look at a good twist villain. Technically this person wasn’t a villain, but she was still a traitor and it was executed well. Spoilers to Percy Jackson and the Last Olypian are ahead.
We all remember the heart breaking moment when Selena revealed that she was the spy. The reason why this twist worked well was because there was suspense with just enough evidence from everyone. We knew that there was a spy in the camp and everyone was a possible candidate. The reason why we were shocked when it was Selena was because she didn’t show any suspicious behavior and her reaction to Beckandorf’s death. She also regretted being a spy, and probably would’ve betrayed Luke if she lived.
Hans from Frozen didn’t work because there was no build up to the twist nor did the story need it. The movie could have been just as good without a twist villain and there was plenty of lost potential.
So plot twists will only work if they have the right amount of suspense, relevance, and how surprising it is. Plot twists are great ways to surprise your audience, but making one can be quite hard.
Another way plot twists work is because they completely avert what the audience predicted. This is usually common when a story decides to take a trope in a different direction or completely flip the story on their head like a twist ending. Sometimes people will also unexpectedly stop a story as a twist ending.
Though a twist ending doesn’t work so well if it’s over done, so use your shots wisely.
So my last tip for you guys is to study other stories with good plot twists to figure out how they work. I would recommend Jujutsu Kaisen, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood for your studying and thanks for reading.