People love to be surprised.
From the early childhood game of Peek-a-Boo to an unexpected bouquet of roses after a hard day at work, the pay-off, neuroscientists tell us, is a rush of dopamine, intensifying our emotions by as much as four hundred percent (https://www.melissahughes.rocks/post/the-science-of-surprise).
When the unexpected happens, we’re pulled into the moment, engaging with the world in an intensified and pleasurable way. I’m obviously not talking about an unpleasant shock. That also intensifies our emotions, but not in a good way. I’m talking about those unforeseen events in our lives that overturn our expectations and send our thinking in an altogether new direction.
The Four States of the Surprise Response
In the book Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable and Engineer the Unexpected, authors Tania Luna and Leeann Renniger outline four stages of the surprise response:
· Freeze—something unexpected stops us in our tracks
· Find—our brains focus on trying to understand what’s going on and why
· Shift—those new finds prompt us to shift our perspective in some way
· Share—we feel the desire to share our surprise with others
How do we use this affinity for surprise in our mystery fiction?
No mystery there. Overturning the expectations of readers, surprising them, is called a “plot twist,” that moment when everything the reader has been led to believe turns out to be wrong. A plot twist is the reversing of expectations. It doesn’t mean the reader has been fooled. That would be cheating. It means the author has led readers down the wrong path but has at the same time provided every clue along the way, telling them the path is wrong—if only they were paying attention. The secret is distraction, drawing the readers’ attention away from the real clues by laying out lots of shiny red herrings.
Ten crime-fiction novels with amazing plot twists (no spoilers!):
· The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
· The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
· And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
· The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers
· Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
· The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton
· The Likeness by Tana French
· The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
· The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson
· The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware
What Makes a Great Plot Twist
A great plot twist reveals the destination to which the book was always leading.
What is your favorite fictional plot twist? How could you use the four stages of surprise in your writing?
Thanks for the book list - I *love* a good twist! My favorite master of the plot twist is Jeffery Deaver. His Lincoln Rhyme novels often have at least one twist. Start with The Bone Collector. His short stories are also often twisty and wonderful. "Verona" is one of my favorites.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite "shocking development" book is "Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine." My favorite movie is "The Sixth Sense." Both delivered. And both had me scrambling back to see what I had missed.
ReplyDeleteTo me, the book that had the greatest plot twist was Anthony Horowitz’s The Magpie Murders. The story was handled differently in the movie, so you don’t get that plot twist, but when I read it in the book, I was absolutely astounded. The films version made it obvious from the very beginning what was going to happen.
ReplyDeleteThank you for mentioning this. It's been on my wish list for a long time. Now it's on my Kindle!
DeletePD James, Devices and Desires, about the Norfolk whistler.
ReplyDeleteSometimes, at the end of a mystery, the crisis averted and the perp arrested, there are still 20-30 pages left. I read on, hoping it's not the first chapter of the next book in the series, wondering what else could happen.
Devices and Desires came immediately to mind.
ReplyDelete