Yuffie's Writing How-To's

How to ADD PLOT TWISTS

Another wonderful article linked to me by Limpid-Purity! Original at terribleminds.com/ramble/2013/03/19/25-turns-pivots-and-twists-to-complicate-your-story/

This one contains a lot of vulgar and mature language, so I've reworded the article below in more politically correct terms. Any words I changed will be in [brackets]. But the original article by author Chuck Wendig definitely has a bigger punch, so it's linked to in the EXTERNAL LINK. But YOUR DISCRETION IS ADVISED if you click that link. You've been warned.

25 TURNS, PIVOTS, AND TWISTS TO COMPLICATE YOUR STORY

1. The Heinous Problem Is Revealed

This is the "first turn" of the story: something happens that disrupts the status quo and this event pushes the protagonist (and perhaps the world around him) into the tale. The king dies! Terrorists attack! My beloved pony has been pony-napped! A vampire just joined your Little League team! This turn, unlike all the others in this list, isn't optional: storytelling is an act of taking the straight line that is the status quo and kinking it like a garden hose. This first turn — known sometimes as the inciting incident — is why the story exists in the first place.

2. The Actual Heinous [Problem] Is Actually Really Revealed

In some stories we chug along thinking we know what the problem is ("My boyfriend broke up with me!") but at some point during the tale, perhaps around the midpoint of the narrative, we learn of the real problem lurks behind the scenes ("My boyfriend broke up with me because he's actually a robot hell-bent on invading our high school and turning us all to robots and now I have to save us all!") The initial problem, the one presented by the inciting incident, is something of a stalking horse — it's a bit of magical misdirection that the protagonist and the readers fall for while the real problem waits in the shadows to be exposed.

3. The Truly Villainous [Person] Is Revealed

Similar, but different: the problem is connected to a particular antagonist, and we think we know who the true antagonist is, but oops, there's a meaner scarier malevolenter (not a word) [person] in the wings: Darth Vader steps aside and it's The Emperor! We think it's George Bush but it's really Dick Cheney! Agent Smith is the bad guy but really it's a bunch of, uhh, squidbots and spider-borgs and whatever it doesn't matter because it turns again and actually it's really Agent Smith anyway haw haw haw you just got played, audience!

4. Oh, [Shoot]

This turn is also fairly essential: "Oh, [Shoot]," means, "We just escalated the problem." One tiger got loose? Now it's ten. The protagonist's love interest is getting married? His fiancee is also pregnant. The hero is being hunted by terrorists? Now the terrorists can psychically control bees. This turn is a very simple one to understand: you have a pot of water on the stove, now it's time to turn the knob click by click until it gets hotter and hotter and eventually boils over.

5. Holy [Shoes], It Looks Like We're Gonna Lose

In many stories you'll have that moment where it looks like everything is basically [manure]. In the original Star Wars trilogy, this is perhaps best embodied by the end of Empire Strikes Back. You reach the end of that film you're like, "Oh, okay, so, that's it. Obi-Wan's long dead, Luke lost his hand, the Rebellion is against the ropes, Vader's way too powerful and also Luke's... uncle or whatever, Han Solo got turned into a coffee table for a slimy turd-skinned space gangster. Okay, everybody. Time to pack it up and go home." This is the dark pit, the bleak moment, the part in the aerial acrobatics show where the plane dives right toward the ground and you think it's impossible to pull up in time but then vvvooooooom there it goes.