《Wattpad India Awards 2021》Learn: Plot Twists
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Plot twists! Whether you're a writer or a reader, these can be incredibly exciting.
Now, twists are relative to pay-off and they show up in a few forms. Here are some common ones:
- Inversion of expectations
- Deconstruction of expectations
- Change in delivery
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These are most common. It's when you thought one thing was going to happen, and the opposite ended up happening. This is where your romantic couple doesn't get together in the end. This is when Thanos does snap his fingers.
They're pretty straightforward and they mostly happen at the end as part of the pay-off. You do have to be careful though: just because you can do the opposite, doesn't mean you should. It has to make sense. When you get into the twist for the sake of a twist, people notice. And people are outraged.
Ok Google, search 'feelings on the last season of Game of Thrones'.
If a character suddenly flips motivations just so they can betray everyone, it's surprising, but not earned. If they decline or compromise to get with the hottie, that may be okay only if things happened along the way that gave them a chance to learn that relationships need compromise at times.
A common issue writers face on Wattpad is when readers guess the ending. This is fine. Readers like getting an ending right. They like to look forward to the pay-off. It excites them. It's satisfying. Only a very tiny percent of readers ever complain about the 'predictability'. Remember, you set this up. Readers are going to pick up on the clues. Their brains are going to make connections.
If people start trying to guess what the ending is, this means they're engaged with your content. If they weren't, they wouldn't even guess. Don't suddenly change your ending just to surprise people because your story probably wasn't building to that kind of ending. Don't just kill the main character because it will shock everyone!
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This is extremely rare and impossibly difficult to get right. It's so unlikely that we won't go into detail, but it generally comes in something that is overall stripping apart the storyline, character arc, or the genre it's in, with the intention of exposing truths about the said arc/storyline/genre.
This means its ending will be a third, unknown option, something entirely different to break the cycle of will they/won't they or slay the villain.
For example, if the heroes failed to reach the evil lord because a plague killed the evil lord first, this would be a deconstruction of the usual narrative and is very difficult to pull off without it feeling lame or deflating.
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This is the other common twist you'll see. It's where your readers do get the ending they were promised and it's the one they expected, but how they're told the answer is the twist.
This is a bit tricky to explain so we'll pull up The Sixth Sense.
At the end of the film, it is revealed that the ghosts are indeed real, or that at least the boy can see them. This was the expected ending (it's a horror film after all), and it delivers upon the original question: are they real? How do we find out though?
Well, it turns out the child psychologist who has been investigating this, and who we've been following, is himself a ghost the entire time and was not aware of it. This is a twist that re-frames how you view the entire film. Dead the whole time has sort of become a bit of a meme at this point, thanks to all the spoofs and copycats from that film (plus the director's knack for such twist endings), so it's not recommended but it serves as a good example of this type of twist.
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They still rely heavily on set-up and pay-off so you can't skip on those details. These sort of twists add a fun wrinkle to the story as opposed to changing the plotline like an inversion.
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First of all, remember that you don't really need them. Most stories are perfectly satisfying running their course. Remember, don't add a twist for the sake of the twist.
If you are adding a twist, don't try to sell it to your audience like a la mystery box. The most satisfying twists are unexpected, but this can't achieved by hiding a twist entirely and making it impossible to guess or by telling someone "there's a twist in this story!"
It's like asking "Who's that Pokémon?" without ever naming the pokémon. Or someone telling you right before you watch something, "It's going to totally blow your mind!" and then that sort of ruins it for you. Your mind is pre-blown...
If you want to deliver a satisfying twist, you'll need to get readers distracted. You'll achieve this by giving them a compelling and interesting narrative that isn't focused exclusively on the final outcome (not the mystery box style), so that they'll get really into it and not so much on figuring out what is going to happen at the end.
The other way is to lean in to them trying to figure it out. You know that readers will try to guess the ending or look for a twist. It's in our nature. Start to put in your necessary hints that something is off, drop your foreshadowing hints. Let people start to guess, let them take themselves down weird rabbit holes and have suspicions.
Some will get it right but a lot of people will get fixated on something and never guess what would otherwise be obvious.
(answer in in-line comments)
1] Best Friends to lovers Enemies to lovers
2] Friend turned nemesis Family turned group of villains
3] Pure-hearted protagonist Cunning main character
4] Definitive expected ending Open ending
5] Epic final battle Happily ever after
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