Why Books Shouldn’t Depend on Twists
A guest post from Erin Flanagan
Please enjoy the first in our series of guest posts for my maternity leave! I may or may not be timing my contractions as I schedule Erin’s post for publication…
Erin, take it away, because things are heating up over here!!
Almost every blurb I’ve written in the last two years has included the word “twist” in some variation: Twisty! Twists abound! A twist I didn’t see coming! It’s not that I love this word (or even twists as readers think of them), but because “twist” seems to have become coded language for a book that will surprise the reader.
I’ve always considered myself a mystery writer’s ideal audience in that I rarely figure out the final turn until the writer wants me to. That ominous clue that gives the reader a shiver a page before the killer is revealed? That’s when goosebumps pop out on my arms and I think, oooh, I might know what’s going on. And why am I always so surprised? (*whispers*) I don’t care enough about who did it to try and figure it out.
When it comes to mysteries, I don’t put energy into figuring out the plot (not even for my own novels, but more on that soon) because, for me, that’s not the fun part. My reading joy comes in the aftermath, when I fully understand what the plot twist means to the characters, while for some readers, the joy comes in piecing it together ahead of time. These are the people who shake every Christmas gift under the tree and delight in pronouncing what it is. To them, that’s just as joyful (if not more) than the gift itself. But they have always left me with the question: why keep reading?
Sidenote: my mom had a friend in college who used to come home from every date saying, “I think that’s the man I’m going to marry.” This is another kind of reader. If you consider every freaking outcome, you’re bound to be right. These people annoy me, but god bless, and get your kicks where you can.
So why if I could never figure out a whodunit or a twist did I end up writing mysteries? The answer: desperation. Before I wrote my first published novel, Deer Season, I’d stacked four failed novels in a drawer, three of which had been out for submission with my then-agent. I had the sneaking suspicion the reason was because I didn’t understand plot, a word many seemed to sneer at when I was in grad school.
I’d come from the world of short stories, a genre I love, and while it left me with a great understanding of character, I had virtually no understanding of momentum or suspense. I could create interesting people who stir up enough trouble to propel twenty pages forward, but that was about it. After that, much of the story included coded subtext and window gazing, neither of which did any good.
I knew what the problem was but not what to do about it, so I started reading more plot-propelling books. I started with Laura Lippman, my gateway drug, and from there found a world of authors I loved: Gillian Flynn, Alma Katsu, Caroline Kepnes, Megan Abbott. I hoped these kinds of books would help me by osmosis—I’d absorb how to structure a novel—and to some extent, that happened. I read hundreds of books, most of which centered around crimes, and thought: hey, maybe I need a crime in here and not just snarky people in a living room talking about everything except their feelings.
When I set out to write my fifth novel (which would become my first published), I went with a crime trope we all know well: a missing girl. I wrote that novel as blindly as I write everything, but now I had a thread to follow: what happened to the girl? Toward the end of my first draft, when I still hadn’t solved the crime, I took a mystery-writing class in which the instructor told us: the only thing you really need to know at the beginning is who did it and how. I looked at my stack of 280 pages and thought, well that would have been helpful advice a year ago. I was rounding the end of the draft and still didn’t know who had done what crime-wise, beyond knowing that whatever it was, it wasn’t very nice.
So while I knew the whodunit would be a surprise to me, I still assumed it would be obvious to many readers, which left me again with the question: why would they keep reading?
That’s when I started to think that the whodunit has to be thematically linked to the story. This might seem obvious to some, but bear with me. When the twist/killer/whatever is revealed (or has already been figured out by an astute reader), what do they have left to unpack? The answer: the reveal has to open up something deeper than the surprise. Those people who love to shake and guess their Christmas presents? The gift-giver still wants to leave the receiver with a deeper joy beyond that moment they guessed (right or wrong) what the present might be.
Not worrying so much about what actually happens and more about what it means has been surprisingly freeing for me both as a writer and a reader. When I was writing my first mystery and assumed every reader under the sun would know on page four what had happened, I stepped back to think about the larger story. Once the guilty party is revealed, how does that deepen the reader’s understanding about relationships and families in the story? How does that lead to a final twist of understanding for the character regarding their beliefs or comprehension of themselves or others, and as a result (hopefully), the reader? Regarding Deer Season, some readers have written to say they had no idea who “did it” until the end and others have written to let me know they figured it out early on, and both types of readers seemed okay with their outcome.
Two fantastic examples of endings that work regardless of whether or not you see a twist coming are Caitlin’s The Damage and Andromeda’s The Deepest Lake. (I am not just sucking up here to the wonderful women who run this Substack—these two novels blew me away—but please know, too, I’m not above it.)
In both these books I did not see the ending coming, and while as a suspense writer, I was anxious to go back in and examine how they’d kept me from “figuring it out,” my deeper delight came as a reader contemplating what these endings meant for the characters, and how, through the final pages, I was seeing these characters more deeply and clearly than I had before. The final beats in both books open new doors to understanding the characters and their actions.
So, I’m curious: what do you all like in endings? Is it the twist itself, what the twist reveals about the characters, a combination, or something else entirely?
Erin Flanagan is the author of two short-story collections and three novels including Deer Season, winner of the 2022 Edgar for Best First Novel, and the most recent Come with Me. Erin is the Vice President of the Midwest chapter of Mystery Writers of America, a regular book reviewer for Publishers Weekly, and an English professor at Wright State University. For more information about her and her writing, please visit www.erinflanagan.net or say hello on Instagram at @erinlflanagan.
Caitlin again: I’m not sure I’ll be in a commenting place on Thursday when this runs, so I just want to say that my favorite point of Erin’s is the one I bolded: if you’re going to do a twist, it’s gotta open up something deeper for the story! (I will also admit that I am the kind of reader who is like Erin’s mom’s old friend. I never came home from first dates proclaiming I was gonna marry the guy, but boy do I throw spaghetti at the wall when I read. The number of guesses I make is exhausting. I wish I could stop myself! It’s a personality disorder!)
I love thinking about all of this, Erin! Thank you for a great post and the shout-out! Yes, twistiness seems to have become the main benchmark, especially for the big publishers and I've found myself both loving the challenge of writing them and pondering why the need for twistiness (or the way it works in some books) also bothers me. A few of my most most-disliked bestseller reads--not gonna name names publicly!--were incredibly famous for their twists, i.e. the entire book seemed to lead ONLY to the twist, and in the case of those books I didn't believe in the characters or the overall arc so the twist only annoyed me. When a novel is working completely aside from the twist, and THEN the twist adds both surprise and depth, it's a fun reading experience. (I also sometimes worry about blurbs and promo that promise twists. Won't the reader be disappointed if they came ONLY for the twists if the surprises aren't jaw-dropping?)
Thanks also for sharing why you turned to mysteries and suspense in the first place. I find myself mulling this constantly--how propulsive questions and PLOT help both writer and reader. Suspense is such a powerful engine (or Trojan horse, as I tend to think of it).
I’m the sort that figures it out right away but for me the whodunnit is not the interesting part- I like watching the characters figure it out. I want people to care about the characters not the reveal- there are some readers who are so focused on the reveal that I feel like, why don’t you just read a summary of the book if that’s all you want?