How to Create Plot Twists

Creating Plot Twists to Excite Your Audience 

Remember those times a twist in a film knocked you back into your seat while yanking you into the story?   

Think Six Sense, Chinatown, Planet of the Apes, Seven, Shawshank Redemption, and The Searchers.Twists are vital to dramatic storytelling and excited audiences. Do you use twists in your scripts? How many?

A twist or surprise is a big change in a story that the audience was not expecting. Audiences love to be shocked with an electric cattle prod of a good twist. But not too often and always logically.

The surprise or twist has to be set up but not noticed by the audience. Its information was cleverly hidden.When a surprise is revealed, the information in its set up will be remembered by the audience. They will now understand that information in a different context. That makes a twist believable. But still exciting.

Twists knock the story an daudience into new and exciting territories and are often employed at the end of sequences and acts.

But a twist shocks and grabs an audience for only a short time. Then suspense and mystery need again to takeover the thoughts and emotions of the audience until the next twist.

A writer should vary the types of twists he plays. Consider these:

1) Betrayal.

2) Reveal of the unexpected and game changing real meaning of something.

3) Big loss or reversal.  

4) Secret identity revealed.

And

5) Poetic or ironic justice.

The ironic surprise is anespecially effective form of twist.

In Ian Fleming’s classic Bond novel Moonraker, for example, the Russian Soviets supply the atom bomb that the villain Sir Hugo Drax plots to detonate over London, but after the heroics of Bond and Gala Brand it is instead exploded over an escaping Soviet submarine. Drax is in the submarine gleefully awaiting the destruction of London. Boom! Drax is hoisted on his own petard, as it were!  And the radioactive fallout of the bomb drifts towards Russia. Poetic justice or ironic reversals that we cheer.

Besides big twists, writers should also employ smaller surprises in their scenes, especially in their openings and climaxes. This is important also in comedies, where the climax of a joke often entails a twist.

Actionable Creative Takeaway

Don’t just kinda think about twists. Or blithely assume you have them.

Consciously develop and employ big twists in your story. When you are outlining your script, focus on HOW you are telling your story. Check if you have at least 3 big twists/surprises in your plot. For example, at plot points one and two, and in the climax! 

Twists are a mandatory and powerful way to make your story jump from the screen and the audience from their seats. An audience will love you for it. Pros consciously develop twists and all the other dramatic techniques. Amateurs wing it.

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Scott McConnell is a script consultant for producers and screenwriters.