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I love those twists in the stories that you didn't see coming - you know, the ones that absolutely make sense, but you wouldn't have guessed?

Do you enjoy writing them? How do you set the reader up for the twist? Are there certain techniques that you use?

Discuss!

I LOVE plot twists. Big shockers get me riled up, and that's what I'm looking for in books. I think Pendragon, especially the last two books, were really, really good about this, and I found myself sitting there, 8 and 9 books in, going, "HE PLANNED THIS?! THE WHOLE TIME?! GOD, WHAT?!" And just being astonished by the dedication it took on the Author's part to hold on to these tiny threads without being like "LOL GUESS WHAT I'M GOING TO DO TO YOU LATER!" which is what I always want to do when I think of something cool (which isn't often)

Unfortunately, I can't discuss this based on personal experience, because I've never come up with a complete plot in my life, I don't think. *shifty eyes* I think about it a lot, though, like how carefully you have to construct those, and what I have that could be important enough to hide for a while. I'm not really the type of girl who hides much in general, so it's a different way to think.

I'm very much like that. I'll be writing, when all of a sudden I'll have this awesome idea. At first I'll think, "wait, but how will that work?" and then I'll realise that I've sort of been setting it up all along. For example, in my latest trilogy, there is a character who appears in both the first and the second novel under two different names. In fact, she appears throughout the first and the second, hopefully, without the reader even realising that she is the same woman. And then, finally, in the last novel they finally realise that she has been behind much of the unexplained scenes in the first two novels. I'm hoping it will be one of those facepalm moments where people suddenly twig and go "Oh yeah! God that makes so much sense!" but in reality it'll be "But, that doesn't really make sense... How lame..."

So, in short, I do try to come up with these awesome plot twists, but I don't really do them very successfully. I'll have to have somebody read these novels and then tell me how it works (hence why I won't say too much about it, or which character it actually is or anything). In fact, that third character ends up narrating the final novel, and then a lot of things should hopefully fall into place.

I also like to foreshadow these events, but to be perfectly honest I doubt anybody would pick up on it unless they were a Literature student and were picking the novel apart for a class exercise. sweatdrop

I generally have very organic flowing stories, so plot twists tend to come on their own and scare me.

However, there have been times when I've done them on purpose. Usually because it was an assignment. Usually I keep things sort of ambivalent. I had one little story I did for a class that was just two people talking in a room.

The end was one guy getting arrested and you realizing the other guy was a corpse he was talking too.

See, twist eh?

Other times I realized midstream that something won't work at all, so it's either re-write the whole arc or twist it into obedience.

On the whole I love a good twist.

I have a few giant twists in my stories, a character of mine turns out to be someone completely different, it's quite a shocker. And it's HARD to keep it all to myself!

I don't think I've ever set out to write a big plot twist, but I do like to try to have events play out a little differently than expected. I'm just not sure how well I'd be able to pull off a major twist, and I don't really base stories around them.

Though I suppose my current WIP has a few smallish twists throughout. I think for me the difference is that I don't like to hold back and wait for a big reveal, I'd rather have the reveal sooner and then deal with the consequences of it, if that makes sense.