Twist Endings

Posted on 23 October 2009

Be it the anti-climax, the “bad guy wins”, or even the “inventive, original way for the good guy to win,” twist endings are huge.  I daresay, to some extend, they are required.  Even Lord of the Rings, which is about as straight forward of a hero-quest plot as you can get, has a twist in the Cracks of Doom.  Yet, with a twist always being expected of a good story, how does one do it and not end up being trite? *spoilers of my own work below*

Well, for one, there is the variety of types of twist endings.  I listed three very broad types above, and you could probably spend hours on TVTropes looking up subsections of them.  Even then, you can only do the “dumb luck stab” or “person you thought was dead comes back to save everyone” or “Ian did it!” type endings so many times.  To the point that the Scary Movie franchise made a sharp point to kind of lampoon said twists.

So, what else?  Well, for one, it has to be a believable twist.  Even if it isn’t “inventive”, you can make up for it by cleverly making the reader agree that it is logical.  Another option is to actually allude to one twist then pull another one instead.  This second option, though, requires the first as a prerequisite, and can make for some cumbersome foreshadowing if you are going to be making two believable options for the twist.

There is another thing I’m noticing, on a more personal level.  If there is one type of twist I like, it’s the bittersweet twist.  I think Brandy is the only short I’ve written thus far that does not have some sort of “aw crap, really?” ending.  Be it the bleak outlook of “A Life to Give”, the morbid homecoming of Zed in Apocabilly, or the corruption and failure of Betran in Seconde, they were all twists that espoused failings in societies, people, or species (yes, glowies are a species).  Further twists I know I will use—or have but not published—are twists on character motivation and nobility.  So, I am fairly limited in what I can use, yet I like to think that I’m still being somewhat original.

I guess it comes down to some “truth in television.”  As the saying goes: man plans, God laughs.  Nothing comes off without a hitch, or when it does, it’s almost a twist unto itself that it didn’t get screwed up somehow.  So, in real life, things have twist endings.  And the best stories, the ones that you just love to tell to buddies at the water cooler or the bar, are the ones where an inventive or original method was used to resolve the issue.

So perhaps to call something a “twist ending” is a bit of a misnomer.  Almost every movie has a “twist” at the end now, and every decent book and TV show too.  People want The Sixth Sense and Firefly and Angels and Demons.  Perhaps the greatest twist now is to not have one.

And you saw that coming, so I guess this post doesn’t have a twist ending.  What a twist.