Twisting Your Plot Like a Knife

Making your book's most unexpected beat feel totally natural.

When it comes to mysteries and thrillers, sometimes the story’s big twist is the most memorable part. Ask someone their opinion of Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl,” Dennis Lehane’s “Shutter Island,” or Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express” (to name just three examples) and chances are good they’ll bring up the plot flips that made each of those books so memorable.

From a writer’s perspective, what are the top things to keep in mind when trying to build a surprising revelation into your mystery or thriller narrative? And what separates a bad twist from a good or truly unforgettable one?

Giving Yourself Space

When M. Night Shyamalan was writing his script for “The Sixth Sense,” he didn’t come up with that movie’s jaw-dropping surprise on the first try. The initial drafts didn’t quite work for him (and looked quite different from the final film). But as he kept rewriting, sharpening the characters, the ending snapped into focus: “I kept thinking, ‘How can I go deeper into this subject,’ and it kind of evolved outward and flowered at that moment. And so it was a very organic moment of just writing,” he later told GQ.

There’s a good lesson there: if you approach your story from the outset with the desire to build in a big, totally unique twist—even if you’re not sure what it’ll look like, just that you want something surprising—you might stall out, because the best ones are an outgrowth of plot, character, and theme. You may need to mash out multiple drafts, and get a solid grip on every other aspect of your narrative, before an ideal flip suddenly jumps out at you.

In other words, trust that your best ideas about a narrative bombshell will emerge organically during your drafting and writing process. When I was writing “Where the Bones Lie,” my mystery novel about a woman trying to figure out how her father, a criminal mastermind who disappeared decades before, ended up in a rusty barrel at the bottom of a dried-up lake, I didn’t intend to build a huge twist that upends the plot during its final third. My first two drafts didn’t work; the plot ran on rails toward an ending that was easy to guess.

But then a really wild flip dropped into my mind unbidden. I realized that, if I executed on the idea correctly, it would allow my characters to more fully realize their respective emotional arcs—forcing them to confront their pasts in a direct, extremely dramatic way. (Shameless plug: if you’ve read “Bones,” I’d be in your debt if you felt inclined to leave a review on your platform of choice—Amazon, Goodreads, whatever. Every little bit helps in terms of getting the word out.)

Building Your Twist

No matter what your genre or story, a good twist integrates seamlessly with your plot and characters. As I wrote my third draft, I reverse-engineered the narrative to fit my big reveal. Here are my takeaways:

• Adjust Plot: Re-read your manuscript with your trusty pen (or if you’re working from a screen, the tracking and comment tools). What do you need to adjust for the plot to logically support this new twist? A radical story alteration will almost always tear open some plot holes, big and small; how can you close those holes in a way that works?

• Adjust Character Arcs: Depending on the nature of the twist, you may need to tweak your characters. For example, when I revamped the plot of my novel to take the new reveal into account, it led me to “fix” one character’s timeline and their opinion of their family. A big revelation could likewise have a seismic impact where your characters end up, emotionally and physically.

• Details are Key: This is the fun part: what kind of details can you build into your story that will effectively foreshadow the flip? Remember, subtlety is key; you don’t want to give away things too soon, and selectively withholding information until the right moment is usually critical if you want your twist to truly hit. While it can be difficult to “dial in” the right level of foreshadowing, your advance readers can tell you if you’re being too indistinct or too heavy-handed.

• Red Herrings are Fun: Audiences are smart, and they’re often trying to out-guess the author. Use that as impetus to plant some “red herrings” to distract from your stunning revelation.

  Rob Hart
  ’s “Assassins Anonymous,” about a world-class assassin who’s trying to give up killing people, is an excellent example of a recent book that uses red herrings well—he hides not one, but two massive endgame twists.

• Keep an Eye on Point of View: Are you writing in the first, second or third person? That can have a huge effect on the effectiveness and logic of your twist. One of my favorite plot flips comes in

  Chuck Palahniuk
  ’s “Fight Club,” where the true nature of the narrator’s identity is revealed toward the end; the book would have been difficult (or potentially impossible) to write in the third person, but the first-person perspective, with its bias and limited information, makes it possible for Palahniuk to deliver his surprise in an organic way.

Making Sure It Actually Works

As with any other kind of writing, it’s critical to get feedback from your trusted beta readers about whether your flip works. When you’ve spent weeks, months, or even years tooling away at your manuscript, you risk losing objectivity over whether your ending is surprising, logical, and satisfying. Your plot should never cheat the reader (mystery fans get very upset when you try to do that, with good reason).

When you’re getting feedback, ask your readers if (and when) they guessed the twist in advance, and whether the twist felt “artificial” or took away from the overall reading experience. While a good twist can help a story really stick in the reader’s mind, it shouldn’t dominate everything else you’ve worked so hard on, such as character arcs and themes. At their best, twists resolve major plot points while also advancing character development.