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Often we do that by allowing him to use a special gift, skill, or emblem that has been shown to readers earlier but that they aren’t thinking about when they reach the climax. Only when the true villain is revealed will readers see that everything was pointing in that direction all along.įinally, if you’re shooting for the “Oh, yeah!” reaction, you’ll want to emphasize the cleverness with which the main character gets out of the seemingly impossible-to-escape-from climax. You don’t want readers to suspect only one person as the villain but many people. Basically, they’ll be thinking, “Man, I have no idea where this is going.” When writing for this response, you’ll create an unbalanced, uncertain world. Nice!” ending, you want to lead readers into uncertainty. If the twist is satisfying, credible, and inevitable based on what has preceded it, readers will gasp and exclaim, “No way! That’s awesome! I can’t believe he got that one past me.” The more you can convince them that the story world you’ve portrayed is exactly as it appears to be-that only one outcome to the novel is possible-the more you’ll make their jaws drop when you show them that things were not as they appeared to be at all.
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You want them to think that there’s only one possible solution to the story. When aiming for the “No way!” response, you’ll want to lead readers into certainty. Three different types of twists all result in different reactions by readers: (1) “No way!” (2) “Huh. The way you want your readers to respond will determine the way you set up your twist. Have I inadvertently relied on clichés or on any plot turning points that have appeared in other books or movies? How can I recast the story so it’s fresh and original? Will readers feel tricked, deceived, or insulted by this twist? If so, how can I better respect their ability to guess the ending of my story? It can be just as frightening without de-escalating the story’s tension, and it can also end in a way that’s not predictable. How do you solve this? Simply tell the reader it’s a dream beforehand. Showing a character experiencing a harrowing or frightening experience and then having him wake up from a dream is not a twist it’s a tired cliché. These aren’t twists because they almost never escalate the story but often do the very opposite, revealing to readers that things weren’t really that bad after all (de-escalation). This is why dream sequences typically don’t work-the protagonist thinks she’s in a terrible mess, then wakes up and realizes it was all just a dream. Great twists always deepen, never cheapen, readers’ investment in the story. The twist should never occur in a way that makes them feel tricked, deceived, or insulted.
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Readers want their emotional investment to pay off.
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How can I play expectations based on genre conventions against readers to get them to suspect the wrong person as the villain or antagonist? How can I do a better job of burying the clues readers need to have in order to accept the ending? Where do I need to bring those clues to the surface? How can I make better use of the clues that prove the logic of the surface story to create the twist and bring more continuity to the story-but only after the twist is revealed? Will readers have to “put up with” the story that’s being told in anticipation of a twist ending, or will they enjoy it even more because of the twist? How can I improve the pretwist story? How can I drop the gimmicks and depend more on the strength of the narrative to build my twist? What do I need to change to create a more believable world for each separate twist I’m including? No reader should anticipate it, but everyone should nod and smile when it happens. The more impossible the climax is for your protagonist to overcome, the more believable and inevitable the escape or solution needs to be. You’re trying to create an ending that’s so unforeseen that if a million people read your book, not one of them would guess how it ends (or how it will get to the end), but when they finally come to it, every one of those people would think, Yes! That makes perfect sense! Why didn’t I see that coming?