 Short Stories: May 14, 2025 Issue [#13126] |
This week: Writing The Short Story Twist Edited by: W.D.Wilcox  
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Good twists are enormously hard to come by, and I think the best ones are earned ones. The idea that a story can take a left turn on you, it's easy to do, but it has to be done very, very carefully, or else you risk losing the audience's trust.
-Damon Lindelof
The more secrets and twists in a character, the better.
-Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
Before I start, I trick myself into thinking I know what's going to happen in the story, but the characters have ideas of their own, and I always go with the character's choices. Most of the time I discover plot twists and directions that are better than what I originally had planned.
-Neal Shusterman
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The Short Story Twist
Writing is a tricky craft. Sometimes getting a story started is the hardest part. Other times, it's figuring out the grand finale. And then, there are all the twists and turns between the beginning and the end.
1) The never-saw-it-coming twist, where, out of nowhere, there is a sudden shift in the narrative direction. This is the type of twist that Raymond Chandler was referring to when he said that if a writer gets stuck in a story, they simply need to have someone show up at the door with a gun. No one sees it coming because there is no way to see it coming. Like when you learn at the end that the main character is actually an alien.
2) The tricked twist, where the audience is not told key information so they can be “surprised.” Oh…so he was in a hospital the whole time. You find this type of twist often in the work of new writers who think a story is all about the O’Henry twist at the end.
3) The plot-line twist, where the story is thrown in a substantially different direction by happenstance or coincidence. In this type, a particular storyline is established and then thrown by some event. Like if we see a character work up the courage to finally confront his parents about childhood events, only to discover when he arrives that his parents are not his parents.
4) The naturally evolving twist, where everything the audience has been exposed to in the narrative was leading to that moment but the audience mistakenly thought it was leading somewhere else. Like the big twist in The Usual Suspects or The Sixth Sense, where you can go back through the story and find that all the information was there, you just couldn’t put it together.
#4 is the best type because it evolves naturally throughout the story. It is also the most difficult to achieve. It requires careful planning, forethought, and serious writing acumen. #2 is a cheap trick and usually just irritates your audience, thus having the opposite effect of what you want a twist to do. #3 is part and parcel of any skilled writer's arsenal as it helps them to avoid writing stories that merely unroll. #1 is useful because it is effective and easy to deploy; however, it lacks the power of #4 and relies a lot on the surprise factor.
W.D.Wilcox
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My question for you is: Do your short stories have twists?
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