How to create a good TWIST?

[ebonyzer]

Hi, I'm new...

My name is Ebony, I live in Australia, Im a uni student & I have a group oral presentation on the 'Short Story'...

Our group has chosen to focus on one aspect of the Short Story, i.e 'The Twist' (or Climax or which ever the correct term is)

I'm just after some advice/ guidance/ opinion on a few questions:

1. What are the elements of a good 'Twist'?

2. Where does it appear in a Short Story?

3. How do you create a good Twist?

4. Any other relevant info in relation to creating a Twist in a short story?

Your help will be greatly appreciated - I look forward to reading your replies!

ebonyzer :)

[Bunkly]

If you're talking about the type of twist ending usually found in the "coffee break" section of women's interest magazines (err, I read them when I'm bored sometimes), then you might find this useful. Just for the record, I'm not crazy about twist-enders.


---

What makes a good twist? Well, something that nobody will expect is a good climax for a twist-ending story (obviously). This twist will usually occur in the very last sentence. Keep a vital piece of information from your reader and then reveal this in the very last few words of your story. Make it something that will have your reader kicking themselves because they didn't realise it sooner. Make it something that your reader could possibly guess. Drop subtle hints through the course of the story so your reader doesn't feel cheated at the end. Don't make it something which would be impossible to guess. Look at the Shawshank Redemption (the film, not the novella). We knew right from the beginning that the prison warden was evil, but did we still expect him to have that young kid shot? (watch that film if you haven't.)

It's important that the story you write would still read well, even with the twist-ending removed. These types of stories are usually short (800 words) and have a fairly simple, cartoony feel to them, from what I've personally read of them. Load of junk. lol. But good luck with your studies.


Billy

[arrowqueen]

I write them for mags like 'Take a Break' across here and 'That's Life'* in Oz - and Billy's right. You have to mislead your reader right until the last paragraph , while still giving enough clues so that when they come to the end it all clicks into place.

If you actually contact the magzines with an sae, they'll send you a copy of their writers' guidlines. which you might find useful for your research.

Good luck with it - and your studies.

Cheers,
aq

* under 'Catherine Ferguson.

[RGame]

A twist in a short story would always happen at the end. And the twist ending that should never be done is the "it's only a dream" one.

[Torin]

I play with twists in short-shorts. Please visit here (http://www.cebarrett.com/story.shtml) and click on the "short short" button for a few samples. :)

[Fresie]

You have to mislead your reader right until the last paragraph , while still giving enough clues so that when they come to the end it all clicks into place.

Yes, but that's the whole trick, isn't it? :faint: Giving just enough clues... that's the hardest bit!

[rich]

...and also the fun part.

[maestrowork]

Someone said to me the other day: Write backward.

Start with your twist ending and work backward. Leave crumbs. Steer the plot away from the ending, etc. etc.

[arrowqueen]

Quite right, maestro. I do that all the time: get a snappy ending and then stick the story on top.

[katee]

Take a look at the short story by Shirley Jackson, The Lottery.

It blew me away the first time I read it. It's also considered one of the classics.

Kate

[emeraldcite]

i've been teaching the lottery for years and still don't get tired of it. the students seem to love it too. I liken the event to the reason we americans put christmas trees in our homes: we no longer know why we do it, we do it for ritual's sake.

boy, does that scare the kids...

[Jamesaritchie]

Hi, I'm new...

My name is Ebony, I live in Australia, Im a uni student & I have a group oral presentation on the 'Short Story'...

Our group has chosen to focus on one aspect of the Short Story, i.e 'The Twist' (or Climax or which ever the correct term is)

I'm just after some advice/ guidance/ opinion on a few questions:

1. What are the elements of a good 'Twist'?

2. Where does it appear in a Short Story?

3. How do you create a good Twist?

4. Any other relevant info in relation to creating a Twist in a short story?

Your help will be greatly appreciated - I look forward to reading your replies!

ebonyzer :)

I don't agree at all with misleading the reader. This is a cheap way of getting to a twist, and one that usually doesn't sell very well. There simply is no need to mislead the read in order to have a twist ending. Read O. Henry, who was the absolute master of the twist ending story. He never misleads the reader, but many of his stories have twists that have made his stories popular for generations.

And twists can come at any stage of a story, not just at the ending. Better stories have twists and turns all the way through.

[Fresie]

Read O. Henry, who was the absolute master of the twist ending story. He never misleads the reader, but many of his stories have twists that have made his stories popular for generations.

James, you're a genius! I've done just that (no need to reread them even as I think I remember quite a few almost by heart), and what do I see? In all of them, O.Henry makes the readers sympathise with the hero's goal so badly that they block out any other possible outcome. The telling signs of the trouble to come are all there, but just like in real life, both the reader and the hero believe everything will work out well and refuse to consider the worst. And when the story goes not the way they planned... surprise!

Thank you, James! Now I know, now I know!!...:banana: or I think I know?

[BlueTexas]

i've been teaching the lottery for years and still don't get tired of it. the students seem to love it too. I liken the event to the reason we americans put christmas trees in our homes: we no longer know why we do it, we do it for ritual's sake.

boy, does that scare the kids...

I read that book in school, and had a teacher creep me out in a similiar way. It's still one of my favorites. Wonder if I was in your class :)

[firehorse]

Take a look at the short story by Shirley Jackson, The Lottery.
Brilliant story!

I once heard a writer talk about the types of clues that are good for twists and suspense. I'm completely paraphrasing (and I hope this is accurate), but he said that when the final twist is revealed, the reader should say "Of course it was X!" But leading up to that, you should make the reader (subconsciously) vacillate between "It can't be X" and "It has to be X." The last twist, then would be one of the former.

Easier said that done. I have yet to accomplish this.

The other thing I recommend is reading Robert McKee's book Story. Though he teaches about screenwriting, his lessons can be extrapolated to every style and genre. With regard to twists, he recommends (again, paraphrasing) brainstorming every possible twist and then picking the one that you haven't seen used before.

Whatever you may think of McKee, he's got good ideas.

I like the idea of developing the story backwards. I'll have to try that.

Sarah

[realitychuck]

I don't agree at all with misleading the reader. This is a cheap way of getting to a twist, and one that usually doesn't sell very well. There simply is no need to mislead the read in order to have a twist ending. Read O. Henry, who was the absolute master of the twist ending story. He never misleads the reader, but many of his stories have twists that have made his stories popular for generations.You need to mislead the reader enough to that the twist doesn't become obvious. The hardest part of a twist ending is preventing the reader from guessing the twist, so you have to do two things at once to make it work:

1. You need to put clues to the twist (otherwise, it's a no different from "It was all a dream.")
2. The clues should appear on the surface to be there for something unrelated to the twist. The reader cannot read them and think, "this means he's really a dog" when that's the twist.

A good twist ending needs to come from something the reader isn't expecting, but which makes perfect sense on retrospect.

For instance, in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," the guy does all the fancy swordwork and you start to think about how Indy might use his bullwhip to win the fight. Then comes the twist -- perfectly unexpected (or, at least, it was when the movie first came out -- everyone knows about it by now), and perfectly logical. That's the effect you want to go for.

But it wouldn't have worked if it hadn't been established that Indy carried a gun. So you need to put the elements required for the twist in the hands of the reader, and do it in such a manner that they don't see it coming.

[Lady Brick]

A good twist ending needs to come from something the reader isn't expecting, but which makes perfect sense on retrospect.

That's really the best advice. Like any ending, you need to follow the logic of the story, or else you'll end up annoying/alienating readers who will see it as insulting their intelligence.

One of my favorite twist endings is the anti-climactic ending. Make it look like you are building up to something huge, and then bring out something small. This works better in a more comedic piece, though.

[firehorse]

A good twist ending needs to come from something the reader isn't expecting, but which makes perfect sense on retrospect.


Well-said! http://www.coolsmilies.net/happy/clap.gif One of my favorite twists (which everyone knows by now) is in the novel Fight Club. The minute I got to the end - long before the movie was released - I had to re-read it, and every last detail made sense.

Short stories - The Lottery (mentioned above) and Occurrance at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce. The latter has been used so often as a template that it's on the verge of entering "it was all a dream" territory. But I still love it. One of the first movies to use it as a structural guideline was Jacob's Ladder - also a great twist, but now bordering on cliche.

[arrowqueen]

Okay, perhaps 'mislead' is a poor choice of word. A twist-in-the-tale story is more like the literary equivalent of one of those optical illusions, which changes depending on how you look at it. The story is the same, but the twist at the end alters the reader's perception of it.


Anyway, it appears to be a moot point since the original querant has disappeared. I suspect he/she has been devoured by dragons.

Cheers,
aq

[Jamesaritchie]

You need to mislead the reader enough to that the twist doesn't become obvious. The hardest part of a twist ending is preventing the reader from guessing the twist, so you have to do two things at once to make it work:

1. You need to put clues to the twist (otherwise, it's a no different from "It was all a dream.")
2. The clues should appear on the surface to be there for something unrelated to the twist. The reader cannot read them and think, "this means he's really a dog" when that's the twist.

A good twist ending needs to come from something the reader isn't expecting, but which makes perfect sense on retrospect.

For instance, in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," the guy does all the fancy swordwork and you start to think about how Indy might use his bullwhip to win the fight. Then comes the twist -- perfectly unexpected (or, at least, it was when the movie first came out -- everyone knows about it by now), and perfectly logical. That's the effect you want to go for.

But it wouldn't have worked if it hadn't been established that Indy carried a gun. So you need to put the elements required for the twist in the hands of the reader, and do it in such a manner that they don't see it coming.

There's nothing misleading about the scene in Lost Ark, except possibly the fact that Indiana Jones has the whip and the gun is holstered, it's out of sight and out of mind, so we expect the whip to be used. And, of course, nothing in the movie intentionally led up to this. The writer doens't get any credit at all for that scene. There are no carefully planted clues. That scene was supposed to be shot with Indiana Jones beating the guy with his whip. The pistol was used solely because Harrison Ford was exhausted after a hard day of action scenes, and he said, "Look, I've got a gun. Why don't I just shoot the guy?" It works because it's so logical.

We've talked about "The Lottery," and it works for one primary reason, and that's reader expectations. In modern times, we expect a lottery to give a good reward to the winner. The world of "The Lottery" is set up as a dismal place, and because of our modern expectations of what a lottery is, we think the winner of the lottery will be rewarded. It's the old "Turn an idea on its head" method of writing a scene or a story.

But the classic twist ending story isn't "The Lottery," it's "The Gift of the Magi" by O. Henry. This is the magician's trick, the slight of hand. We're watching the right hand, Della, and though we're told about the left hand, Jim, we aren't watching it, and so don't remember that the left hand can, and probably will, do anything the right hand does. But we aren't mislead in any way, we're simply wacthng the right hand, and don't take the time to wonder whatthe left hand is doing. When the left hand does the same thing as the right, we're surprised by the twist, not because we were mislead, but only because it's so completely logical, and we rrealize we should have known it would happen.

Logic is the key to good twist endings.

And there's a big difference between a twist ending and a surprise ending. Surprise endings are usually very bad things. These are the "dream" endings, the "It was all a video game" endings, etc. Surprise endings come from the writer, and have nothing to do with the story, or with reader expectations. A twist ending is the logical conclusion of a story. To be more specific, a twist ending is one of two or more logical endings to a story.

To go further, it's the MOST logical ending to a story, but the one we don't expect for a host of reasons.

I don't like the term "misleading the reader," but I do think "sleight of hand" fits very well for certain twist ending stories.

I'm not really big on the idea of planting clues, either. I know it's a commonly use phrase, and mystery writers talk about it all the time, but I don't really see the good mystery writers doing this. Planted clues tend to stick out like a raisin in a cookie. I think good clues aren't planted, they're simply outgrowths of the story itself. More often than not, we don't even know they are clues until somewhere down the line when sonmethng happens that makes the "clue" meaningful. Neither does the writer.

Anyway, there are several methods of arriving at a twist ending, and all of them can work, as long as the ending is the most logical way the story could possibly end, and as long as the reader doesn't see it coming, but should have.

And as long as the writer doesn't confuse a twist ending with a surprise ending.

[katiemac]

James has it.

"Slight of hand," like he said, rather than "mislead." If you mislead, you're going to have an awful lot of readers pissed at you. If instead you use "slight of hand," you might have quite a few people in awe of you.

[MissKathyClarke]

A twist in a short story would always happen at the end. And the twist ending that should never be done is the "it's only a dream" one.
Amen to that! No one will read any more of your stories once you've done the 'it's only a dream' thing. The only books I have known to be successful when they were like that was The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland. I think twists can also happen toward the middle of the book, sort of you think the stories ending, and then suddenly something else happens to un-fix the problem or to complicate it.

[Julie Worth]

Try “A Twist in the Tale,” by Jeffrey Archer. The book contains twelve short stories, each with a twist at the end, as you might gather from the title.

[Bunkly]

You can't really compare twists in novels to twists in short stories though...

[Bunkly]

Actually, ignore me. I think I mis-read something. I don't know. I'm tired. lol

[brokenfingers]

I like "twist" endings that make you look at the (short) story in a whole new light.

When you think the story is about one thing, but upon conclusion, you realize that the story is about something else entirely.

It usually takes serious revision and editing to get it right though (at least for me). Once I get through a first draft, I can then go through the story, fine-tuning and sanding the words and sentences until I think I have reached the desired effect.

I think....

[Starwryder]

I think that everyone has offered the fact that a "twist" is somewhat important in the way you finish the story. I love to guide the reader into one direction then at the very end I put a fork in the road and instead of going straight for the logical end, I quickly turn the direction to an illogical end or as I put it, is it the end or just another begining?
Everyone who reads a thriller or reads a tale of the unknown, finds the twists and turns and does not find the true meaning until he or she learns how to read between the lines.
I write this way to wake people up. I find it difficult to write something of a mundane nature. I wish you are able to know how the twist is done and I did not mean to mislead you in any way or did I?
Starwryder

[stormie]

I write the story, then at some point I ask "What if?" and go in a different direction than I originally planned. Usually works for me. I even end up surprising myself.

[firehorse]

I never thought I could write a twist, and when I accidentally created one while writing my Idol entry for this week, I was thrilled. It just popped out; I then went back and planted some clues along the way. I probably planted too many, but just that I could do it, even at that level, excited me and wanted to make me write more stories with twists.

I felt like I'd bungee-jumped with words :D

The weird thing is that I'm not at all sure I could've done it if I planned it out. Maybe that's the next step in my learning curve.

I'll check out the Archer book.

[zeprosnepsid]

i agree misleading is probably not the right choice of words.

i think for a twist to work it really has to come from the story or the character. And one good way to do that, as mentioned, is playing with audience expectations. Or also, as mentioned, having them looking one way. But it can't come out of nowhere, that is the 'surprise', it has to come from the story itself.

Also, it helps not to think of it as a 'twist'. It's too much pressure. It's just the way it is. In The Lottery, that's the way it is in that town. It's as simple as that. It works because the people in the town don't think of it as a twist. It's the story, it's their lives.

I really like the stories of Pierre Boulle. He most notably wrote Planet of the Apes, which has a real big twist ending, (and Bridge on the River Kwai, which had a twist ending in its way) but he wrote a lot of short stories. Most of his work is twist endings and most of them are very good. But he wrote in French and a lot of his books were translated in the 50s and are now out of print. You can find them used or in libraries though.

[Mike Coombes]

The dreaded twist... please, don't ever write one. This is a form that should have dies out 100 years ago - it's a lazy cop out for those that can't write well rounded 3 dimensional prose. Aside from the occasional trad ghost story, there is no place in modern literature for the twist.

While editing for NFG I read far too many twist endings, and joyfully rejected every last one of them.

Read short stories by Chekov, Ballard, Eggers, anyone of quality - you won't find any twists.