The Art of the Plot Twist by Connie Berry

 

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.

      The reader just didn’t know it. The question authors want readers to answer isn’t “Did you like it?” but “Did you guess it?” We’re happiest when they answer, “No, but I should have because all the clues were there.”

What is your favorite fictional plot twist? How could you use the four stages of surprise in your writing?