Twist
realitychuck said:
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.
or I think I know?
