Ah, the plot twist! That unexpected swing of the story nobody saw coming that widens the eyes, quickens the heart, and sets the mind to racing. It can be the rousing climax of the book…or a puzzling let down with a “Huh?” or worse “What the…?”
I just finished White Smoke by Andrew Greeley, and overall, it’s a good book. It deals with the political and religious maneuvers surrounding the election of a new pope, and Greeley (an ordained priest) shows a wonderful knowledge of the Church, the process, and Catholicism in general. I’m not Catholic, but you cannot be a student of history without an appreciation of the significance of the Catholic Church, and I was quite taken by some of Greeley’s insights.
But from the start, the book was creeping from a political novel to a political thriller, casting the conservative and mysterious institutions of the Opus Dei and Corpus Christi (eerily similar to The Da Vinci Code published some 5 years later) as maneuvering to derail the election of a liberal cardinal as the new pope. Greeley establishes a financial scandal that ups the stakes in this struggle, and he does a nice job of intensifying the story through mudslinging and good old fashion yellow journalism. His plot twists when he has the main female character kidnapped by “the bad guys” in order to stop the daily stories helping the liberal cardinal, a major departure from a war of words. OK, an unforeseen escalation, but while the use of force crossed a major line, it could be seen as the increasing desperation of the antagonists.
Until he had the kidnappers intent on rape and torture in advance of killing her, regardless of the political outcome. Way over the top for a supposedly Christian institution, but Greeley doesn’t stop there. He has to compound the sin by having the main male character go along on the police raid to free his beloved, despite having no training and being emotional involved in the situation. Political novel to political thriller to borderline action/adventure.
So, the first lesson is a plot twist does not entail a change of genres. If it’s a murder mystery, you don’t invoke magic at the ending. If it’s a light summer romance, you don’t finish with heavy handed political commentary. And please God, don’t let your suspense novel descend into thriller (or worse, horror) in the final chapter, something quite easy to do when the blood begins to gush.
Second, the plot twist requires foreshadowing. You can’t have deranged Uncle Milton show up at the climax as the killer determined to purify the blood of his rapidly shrinking family, unless you’ve already provided that there is an Uncle Milton, that someone is preying on the family, or that there is blood that could use purifying in some manner. Preferably, all three, since the more you reveal in advance, the more effective is the plot twist. If you can pull it off. You want the reader to realize they’ve been holding that last piece of the jigsaw puzzle in their hands all along.
The plot twist is the author outsmarting the reader. Not the author ending by introducing an entire new storyline.
Many years and type-filled pages ago, I was writing a supernatural thriller about a reluctant pair of ghost-hunters who had success because one of the duo was a powerful psychic…although he didn’t know it. The first novel was set in western Pennsylvania (hometown) and established how the system worked: psychic in a ghostly environment is frightened, making his “aura visible” and causing the spirits to manifest (hey, I was young). So, for the second novel, I moved my team to the American northwest, to a ski resort that seemed to be struggling with an indigenous people’s curse, complete with a haunted valley, a lurking holy man, and a malignant totem pole. All the usual suspects.
I set the stage with several intriguing details: it always snowed on the same three days of the year (though it might vary in intensity), the electrical grid would fail for those three days, and there were always reports of ghosts or spirits seen roaming about the area. I also dangled a few red herrings to divert and confuse characters and readers alike. That period was the high holy days of the indigenous tribe when the gods came forth to reclaim the land. Those dates were the anniversary of the massacre of the last of the tribe’s descendants. Or the resort’s owner was gaslighting everybody with special effects to weave mystery and interest around the area.
My answer? An ancient alien spaceship, buried at the bottom of the lake, was sending out the same automated distress signals to its distant home base every year at the same time. The powerful signals were impacting the surrounding environment in bizarre and seemingly incomprehensible ways, and the humans in the area, from the earliest tribes to modern day skiers, were left trying to explain the inexplicable.
I realized my error when I received a phone call in the middle of the night from a proofreader who had just stumbled across my unexpected spaceship. An author always dreams of getting a call from a reader gushing about the power and inspiration of the writing, unable to wait to the end to extoll the virtues of the prose. This was the exact opposite, a close-the-book offense that poisoned an otherwise not totally unacceptable work. (In my defense, Stephen King tried a similar approach in Tommyknockers. Didn’t work for him, either.)
A good plot twist is like throwing open a door to blinding sunshine and a beautiful vista with the reader proclaiming “Oh, now I see!” A bad one opens onto a dark labyrinth that looks like a burnt pretzel with a confused “I don’t get it.”. So, save the spaceships for sci-fi, and do a better job of foreshadowing Uncle Milton for the climax of your thriller.
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