Bruce Willis was dead the whole time. Tyler Durden was a figment of the main character’s imagination. Cats was actually a real, greenlit major Hollywood feature film and not some fever dream you imagined watching on a redeye from Atlantic City to Virginia Beach. These are all huge plot twists in fiction. And their power comes from taking the reader (or the movie viewer, whatever) by surprise.

Readers connect to plot twists because they so closely mimic the lies that people tell us in real life. We get told we are loved by our closest family members, only for them to fall in love with the private investigator you hired to spy on them. We get told that our new job has great benefits until it turns out it has seven hundred dollar a month health insurance that doesn’t cover anything until you pay five grand out of pocket and then you basically have to get your dick blown off for the healthcare company to not deny your claims. We get told grocery prices are going down on day one and then later get told we were never told that and grocery prices aren’t even that much and it’s your fault for being poor, get three jobs you stupid, lazy fuck and also enjoy this mystery meat.

But readers don’t want to be cheated. Twists need to be satisfying. And they have to feel inevitable in hindsight. For example, when I found out my first wife was married to six other men at the same time she was married to me, it made sense in hindsight. She frequently got my name wrong during sex, for example. At the time, I just wanted to believe I was reminding her of hot celebs and porn stars she fancied.

A good plot twist isn’t just there to get our readers to turn to the next page; it should add a layer of complexity to the characters. In my novel, The Two Jacks, the narrator, a young girl named Sophie who is looking back on her childhood, writes about her struggles being raised by two gay dads named Jack. The twist: she was the child of a single father who just really like musical theater. This throws Sophie and the father character into a whole new light.

You should also ask yourself: Is there any way I can disrupt my genre conventions? If you’re writing a story about a serial killer, it probably seems most natural to make the killer a lone, white male criminal genius. So you could flip the trope on its head and have the twist be that the killer is a queer person or a marginalized minority of some kind.

Finally, you can’t forget that twists should be emotional. You create a twist to add a sense of terror or sadness or triumph. When I read Gone Girl and realized that Amy Dunne had faked her death, I was so terrified my second wife would read the book and get ideas that I burned my copy, blacklisted Amazon on our home computers and bribed the three closest local bookstores to remove all copies from their shelves.

We’ll look at some of the best types of twists and how to utilize them on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Twist Trope 1 – The Real Villain Reveals Themselves

This is one of the classics. In Psycho, for example, a final reveal shows that Norman Bates was actually the killer and just pretending to be the mother. This can be a great way to make your reader confront their biases in a very meaningful way.

In my zombie novel, Bit for Brains, for example, we are led to believe that the zombie virus was created by a South African billionaire tech tycoon who was trying to create smart blood to cure diseases in seconds. But the twist is, we actually learn that the zombie virus was created by a bunch of poor people having unprotected sex. If only that billionaire had another 200 billion dollars or so through tax breaks, his smart blood would’ve stopped the outbreak before it got out of control. I think this led a lot of my readers to understand that extreme inequality might not be such a bad thing.

Twist Trope 2 – It Was All A Dream (or maybe a DMT trip)

This is a tricky one. If there’s any twist that will get dead animals shoved into your mailbox or get your tires slashed after a book signing, it’s this one. So you need to tread carefully.

Stories like Alice in Wonderland and Mulholland Drive work through this twist because the dreams still contain important emotional stakes. Similarly, my novel, There’s No Place Reich Home, gets away with this twist because the main character uses what he learned from his dream about assassinating Hitler to assassinate Nazis in the present-day.

Twist Trope 3 – Oh My God, I Was Wrong, It Was Earth All Along

Sometimes the setting of the story is the centerpiece of the twist. Planet of the Apes turns out to be Earth far in the future, presumably after evolution followed its course and humans went extinct through natural causes.

The change of setting shouldn’t be in poor taste, though. If the twist is simply, hey, this story actually ends with the guy in the twin towers on 9/11, it might not go over great.

Twist Trope 4 – You Did It, You Committed A Genocide!

Sometimes the twist is simply that the good guy we’ve been rooting for the whole time turns out to be a villain. Ender’s Game does this twist as does I am Legend.

In my novel, The End of Us, the twist is that it turns out that the lead detective who arrests a mental disabled man, tortures him until he confesses to the murder case he’s trying to solve and frames his partner who threatens to report him to internal affairs by stuffing a bunch of cocaine into his locker… well, the twist is that he turns out to be the bad guy.