Hinging on a Twist
Who doesn’t like a good twist?
The Sixth sense.
Training day.
Gone Girl.
The above titles include some of the most memorable moments in my movie watching life.
The shock that a writer or director has been able to sneak up on you like that. In the face of all your attempts to decipher the mystery they’re unfolding before your eyes, they still managed to get you!
The end of Inglorious Basterds? Tarantino killed Hitler for God’s sake. Who knew you could even do that?
It’s hard to deny: when done well, a clever twist is one of the most gratifying experiences in literature and film.
I suppose if I were to psycho-analyze myself—I might go as far to say, these memorable cinematic moments have imprinted on me a bit and played a role in my own compulsion to include some element of twist or subversion in my own writing (particularly in my short stories)
But as I’m watching my own writing style develop, I’m beginning to notice a shift away from this tendency.
Previously I didn’t feel like my stories were complete until I’d paid them off with a punchline of sorts.
With each new story I write however, I feel less need to do that.
A quick sidenote…
Before I go any further, I don’t want this to come off as though I’m looking down on “the twist” as a technique altogether.
The “development” I’m referring to in my own writing is not meant as a synonym for evolution or transcendence towards “greater things.” I’m just pointing out how I’ve noticed my personal style branching away from, rather than towards this approach to story.
If you’re looking for that down-the-nose style of commentary, you don’t have to go far to find a critic who’ll write off the twist as a “cheap trick” or “low brow” technique. However, if you’re trying to find a critic who speaks in this way and writes interesting fiction of their own…you might be out there searching for quite some time.
What spurred this development?
In part I think my shift away from the twist is a product of the reading I’ve been doing lately. I’m fairly deliberate about what I consume content wise and when I find something resonating I try to pin down what detail is making it pop in that manner. This naturally breeds experimentation in my own writing as I attempt to replicate that effect.
There’s also the question of sheer volume. The broader the range of narratives you take in, the more options you give yourself on where a story might go. There’s a chance my decision to include so many twists in my early work was born from a lack of options. I didn’t know any other way to do it.
But you could also boil this down to my evolving expectations for what a reader’s reaction to my work will be.
Do I want to make one big climactic point, or do I want to infuse the experience of reading a given story with meaning right from page one?
It’s that old Alfred Hitchcock concept: Do you write a scene where the reader is unaware of the bomb under the table with an eye towards shocking them with one big explosion? Or do you tell them about the bomb from the outset and allow them to sweat through the entire scene waiting for that inevitable moment?
Lately for me, the latter is more interesting. Creating a type of fractal effect, building atmospheric tension by repeating variations of an idea in different ways. Letting an idea take shape in a readers’ unnconscious before it’s literalized in the surface story.
Punchlines are great, don’t get me wrong, but they do hinge on your reader “getting it.”
And then there’s the risk.
Twists are hard to pull off.
If you’re unsuccessful in your attempts to lay down the clues—just overt enough so the reader will remember said detail when it’s all been revealed, just subtle enough so the big reveal isn’t spoiled—you are taking a risk on the whole story being a flop.
And that’s assuming your readers are paying attention in the first place. The twist story requires a certain mindset from a reader. You are entering a type of agreement with your audience that all this work you’re forcing them to do will be worth it in the end. With many twist style stories, you can often find yourself disappointed by the surface story, perhaps even a bit bored, until the hidden layer infuses it with meaning.
This is why I don’t think you should stumble into a twist style story. They should be written with a deliberate, methodical eye towards maximizing that payoff. When you try to shoe-horn one in because you don’t have any better ideas, you begin falling into the territory of that “cheap trick” I referenced earlier.
And there’s the question of the frame through which a reader is viewing your story. If you’re not a recognizable wizard of the twist like M. Night Shyamalan, you’re running the risk that readers may lose interest before you’ve had a chance to deliver that killer payoff.
Based on the judge feedback I’ve received on certain competition entries, this phenomenon has come back to bite me more than once. Granted I’ve got to wear a bit of blame for that. Clearly I didn’t set up my “point’ skillfully enough.
Meaning over memorable
While I will happily acknowledge that all I’m doing here in the grand scheme of things is scribbling down a few stories that I came up with when I had a coffee buzz going—I will also state that for me, writing is increasingly becoming a means to seek out meaning in the ordinary.
Both in reading and writing, as a story unfolds, I’m looking for it to reveal some truth about the world—or short of that, some assumption about the world that this story is asking me to challenge. I don’t think there is any separating this quality from what most people would identify “resonation.”
The most effective stories trigger memories from your own life which map onto what you’ve just read.
In any writers’ group, it’s always a sign of a good premise when people begin swapping personal anecdotes following a given reading.
Once I’ve stumbled upon a sliver of one of these truths in my own writing, my editing process consists of cranking up the dials on all the other elements of the story that feed into this newly identified theme. As I mentioned above, the goal is to make the atmosphere of the story serve that thing it is “about” in all ways.
No part of the animal is going to waste. If done well, this makes the story sink into your bones—often making you feel something even if you are yet to fully grasp the ultimate point a story is trying to make on an intellectual level.
A fantastic example of this type of story is The Banshees of Inisherin, which jars you from the outset and forces you to grapple with sensations you can’t quite understand in the moment, yet (provided you’ve got a certain type of mind) will lead you to mull and consider those feelings for days, maybe weeks following the reading or viewing in the case of a film.
Once again, this is not denouncement of the Twist Story, it is simply reaching for a different effect. One that is interesting me less at the moment, but one I may come back to once I’ve got a few more writing chops under my belt.