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"How To Write Perfect Twist Endings..." Online Article

The following is an ARTICLE I found online that inspired me to create my twists and ending to this book. I did not write this at all. I copied/pasted it here in case anyone needed inspiration of their own. Some spoilers to other books will be discussed.

Link: https://crimereads.com/how-to-write-perfect-twist-endings/

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HOW TO WRITE PERFECT TWIST ENDINGS (THAT WILL SHOCK AND DELIGHT EVEN JADED SUSPENSE READERS)

Author Stephanie Wrobel breaks down the 9 type of twist endings and the books that executed them best.

MARCH 18, 2020
BY STEPHANIE WROBEL

VIA BERKLEY BOOKS

In the best books, the twist is the icing on the cake. As a reader I don’t want to race through a book for the twist; rather, I want it to take me by delightful surprise as the story reaches its denouement. The best twists are clever, unexpected, and seem effortless—but of course, writers know how much effort goes into devising them.

We should first define what exactly a twist is. I like the description Sophie Hannah came up within her own Crimereads essay: a twist overturns or negates an already drawn conclusion or a firmly entrenched and reasonable assumption. A twist is more than a surprise ending.

I’ve spent a lot of time studying twists: what they are and are not, what makes them satisfying or predictable, whether there are any rules we writers should abide by when concocting them. One piece of advice that has stuck in my head came from my mentor, Mako Yoshikawa, who suggested it was cheating to have a first-person or close-third narrator know something but not share it with the audience. Now I can think of plenty of thrillers that defy this rule—where the twist was something the narrator knew all along—and my enjoyment of those stories certainly didn’t suffer. But I do try to hold myself to this rule. To each their own!

There are loads of types of twists in literature, so I don’t mean to suggest with the title of this essay that there are only nine. But the following nine are prevalent in the suspense genre. If you’re stumped on what to do with your own work in progress, perhaps you can consider one of the following plot twists.

[SPOILER ALERT—I provide examples for each kind of twist. If you don’t want to find out the twists for the following books, do not keep reading: Rebecca, Gone Girl, Sharp Objects, The Woman in the Window, Station Eleven, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Shutter Island, The Silent Patient, The Wife Between Us, Fight Club, My Sister’s Keeper, Before I Go to Sleep. I’ll keep the references vague, but seriously, spoilers are coming! You’ve been warned.]

1. Someone you thought was bad turns out to be good. &

2. Someone you thought was good turns out to be bad.

Caveat: The best characters are both good and bad. None of us is pure evil or a perfect angel. I’ve oversimplified the headings for the sake of clarity. Put simply, these twists are the classic case of the reader trusting the wrong character. Many of us have read hundreds of suspense novels. We know how the “bad guy” is supposed to look and behave. We try to pin down the perpetrator the first chance we get. The sly writer knows this and plays on our innate need to categorize and judge. In books like Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window, and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Sharp Objects, one of the central characters that the reader perceives to be kind, or at least well-meaning, turns out to be the culprit. Then you have a case like the matchless Rebecca, where our perceptions of the main characters bounce between good and bad like a game of table tennis.