Come On Baby, Let’s Do the Twist!

I got asked recently about plot twists. I’ve been thinking about them since, and here is what I’ve come up with.

At its simplest, a plot twist is something happening that the audience doesn’t expect.

A truly effective twist has to be two things: 1) unexpected and 2) still in keeping with your characters. It should also carry some emotional risk or baggage with it.

Let’s think about kidnapping, particularly as portrayed in television and then in the movies. In the typical hour-long TV drama, one of three things happens: the ransom drop is made and the person either is or is not recovered alive (that’s one and two) or the cops interfere with the ransom drop, catch the bad guys and recover the victim (three). None of these are twists, per se, because we’ve seen them so often that all are television clichés by now. Twists would be hard to set up here because an hour in television terms isn’t long enough to set up expectations that would be betrayed by a twist — and, also, typically these are cop dramas, and kidnapping twists aren’t usually going to come from the cops. The characters who would do it — the suspects or the victims — aren’t well enough developed to take advantage of it, and the story isn’t usually told from their point of view.

Kidnapping in the movies is a different story. Twists are not only possible in this scenario, they’re practically de rigeur if you want anyone to go see your film. Here are a couple of examples:

In “Ransom,” Mel Gibson’s character turns the basic “kidnap, ransom, recovery” plot on its ear by offering the ransom to the public at large as a reward for turning in the kidnappers. The emotional risks are 1) living with himself if it is unsuccessful and his son dies and 2) his wife’s reaction — NOT good. It’s in keeping with his character — he’s a self-made millionaire, so clearly he’s not afraid to take risks for large rewards. He lives large, and it’s a large gesture.

In “Ruthless People,” Bette Midler is kidnapped by two completely inept criminals. When they contact her husband, played by Danny DeVito, with the ransom offer, the twist occurs — he doesn’t want her back. In fact, he wants them to dispatch her with, well, dispatch. The emotional baggage here is for the kidnappers — they’re screwed. They never intended to kill her, they’re just not that sort of people. But she’s being a bitch, so they don’t want to keep her either — and they clearly can’t let her go.

Some twists turn on a character’s identity. In “Sixth Sense” the twist is that Bruce Willis’ character is dead the whole time. In the Wizard of Oz, the twist is that the wizard isn’t a wizard at all, that it’s all been one huge joke played by a quite ordinary, scared little man. In the Scarlet Pimpernel, it’s the fact that a completely useless fop turns out to be the Pimpernel — master strategist, cunning, skilled, daring, brave, useful. (If you want to stick with the original definition — something unexpected — the producers of “Robin Hood — Prince of Thieves” pulled off a beaut in the uncredited surprise appearance of Sean Connery as Richard II — and everyone in the theatre gasped when he came out.)

Twists often get associated with drama, but comedy can turn on them also. “Ruthless People” is a very funny movie. Another comedy that makes use of a twist is “The Marrying Man,” in which the main character marries the same woman four times. The twist is NOT that he marries her four times. That’s the plot. The twist is how he winds up married to her the first time (go watch the movie!).

Now, a twist can’t be just what allows the main character to survive, although that can be a side effect (the twist in “The Marrying Man” is an example). Survival is an accepted function of main characters in most fiction. So if your character ends up being chased by a knife-wielding maniac and somehow gets the knife away and stabs him instead, that generally won’t be considered a twist — because your main character is EXPECTED to survive, and twists have to be unexpected, remember?

A couple of points from Robert Kernen’s excellent book, “Building Better Plots,” spring to mind: the twist can’t be implausible or too wildly out there, because it not only won’t be believed, it will ruin your story. (And you could well come off looking like you wrote the whole book just to find a way to use that cute little twist you thought up, and your reader will feel used and be heartily irritated about it!) Kernen also advises that it’s better to put the twist just before the climax — as a catalyst to it — than have it be the climax itself. I think that’s good advice.

I can think of one instance where it came after the climax — in Gone with the Wind. To me, the climactic moment is when Scarlet realizes she doesn’t love Ashley, hasn’t for years. She really loves Rhett — and she can’t wait to tell him. She realizes how desperately he loves her. She rushes home to finally get her happily ever after — and discovers him packing to leave. He doesn’t love her anymore. (For years, every time I read that book, I’d stop one chapter shy of the ending because that upset me so much. I wanted her to have the happy ending.)

I can also think of one where the twist comes near the beginning, and sets up everything that comes after: “Prizzi’s Honor” — where Jack Nicholson’s character discovers the woman he’s intensely attracted to is, like himself, a hitman. (Hitperson?)

Something that doesn’t work, in my opinion: making the twist be that something less than what’s expected has actually occurred. Here’s a scenario, using the kidnapping theme again — only this time it’s a missing 4-year old. The kid is gone, and all the resources are mobilized, a beat-up old white van was seen leaving the area at the time he disappeared, a sex offender lives less than a mile away and drives a beat-up old white van, high drama throughout. Then it turns out the kid wasn’t kidnapped at all — he’d crawled up under the house and fallen asleep.

That’s not a twist, it’s a letdown. At a minimum, twists should be at the level of the drama that the reader expects, just not the specific action the reader expects. They can be used to ratchet the drama up a bit, but they shouldn’t be below its level, or reduce the entire plot to something below its current level.

How to come up with twists? Well, sometimes they just occur to you. Others you have to come up with. One way is to look at the “cliché” pattern of a story (Kidnap, ransom, recovery. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. Murder, tracking, capture. Poor girl, ball, glass slipper, prince. Love, betrayal, revenge. Goal, strive, achieve.). Pick an element, and ask some what-if questions.

What if, after all that, Cinderella turns the prince down? What if Oedipus was totally ok with the idea of sleeping with his mother? What if someone turned down Brando’s offer that couldn’t be refused, and somehow got away with it? What if Little Red Riding Hood bargains with the wolf by giving him her little sister?

What if, indeed?

~ by seriouswriter on November 3, 2007.