Twists and Reveals: The Art of Keeping Your Readers Guessing
By Claire Cooper
An interesting plot and intriguing characters are key ingredients to keep readers turning the pages of any work of fiction. But if you’re writing thrillers, crime, mysteries, or suspense, twists and reveals can be the secret sauce that turns a good story into a great one.
The two terms are often used interchangeably, but twists and reveals are quite different things. What are they? How do you construct them? And most importantly of all, what needs to be in place for them to work well?
The difference between twists and reveals
A reveal is just what it sounds like—new information that answers an important question.
It might be the central question of the plot (who’s the killer?). Or it could be a nugget that brings the reader closer to solving the mystery (that dodgy guy who’s been stalking our heroine is her long-lost brother).
A reveal is essential to any whodunnit. Lucy Foley’s The Hunting Party is a classic example—there’s a cast of characters, one of whom is the murderer. The set-up has readers poring over every word, searching for clues to the killer’s identity. When it comes, the reveal is beautifully satisfying.
And while that happens at the end of the story, there are other, smaller reveals along the way. They keep things interesting, provide clues, and allow the reader to form theories about what’s happening.
Like reveals, twists also impart information—but that’s not all. That information turns everything the reader previously thought they knew on its head.
That creates an exciting reading experience. And it also means readers will recommend your book to all their friends, because they’ll be desperate for other people to talk to about it.
Gone Girl is perhaps the most famous example of a twist in a modern psychological thriller. At the start, it reads as a well-written but conventional mystery: a woman has gone missing, her husband is under suspicion. Has he killed her?
But halfway through, we’re presented with new and shocking information. Everything we thought we knew was wrong. And we’re faced with a different set of questions to keep us reading.
Twists appear in classic crime, too. Agatha Christie’s After the Funeral has one of the most brilliantly constructed twists I’ve ever read. No spoilers: if you haven’t read it, put that right ASAP.
What is it that makes some twists and reveals work so well? And what goes wrong when they fall flat?
Writing a great reveal
Both twists and reveals play on the contract between author and reader. Some people refer to this as the “story promise,” the set-up that tells the reader what to expect if they decide to read the book.
Reveals honor that promise. Twists are an unexpected bonus (although the prevalence of twists in modern fiction means they’re not always unexpected—more on that later).
The reveal in The Hunting Party works so well because it offers readers exactly what they wanted when they started reading the book: they find out who the killer is.
Other reveals along the way answer some questions while posing others, keeping the tension high throughout. At the end, everything is resolved—and crucially, it fits together and makes sense.
That logic is essential. Part of the delight of reading a whodunnit is trying to work out the answer for ourselves. With the best books we fail, whilst knowing we could have succeeded, if only we’d spotted all the clues.
When a reveal goes wrong
When reveals fall flat, on the other hand, it’s often because new information comes out of the blue. There’s no way a reader could have worked it out. And there’s no pay-off for our concentration because nothing we’ve read until that point is relevant. We feel cheated.
The same goes for a reveal that feels implausible. While it could happen in real life, it feels too unlikely to be satisfying. It doesn’t fit comfortably with the world as it’s presented in the book.
Classic reveal fails can be guilty of one or both of these sins. Revealing that a character has an identical twin, say, or that a huge chunk of plot has been a dream—both feel like the author isn’t taking us seriously.
Yes, we know that identical twins exist; and yes, people dream. But if we haven’t been given any clues about what’s going on, the author has essentially been wasting our time. And even if the clues have been seeded, it’s hard to feel that the writer hasn’t taken an easy way out.
The key to a successful twist
The same rules apply to a twist. It has to make sense. It has to be plausible. And it has to tie into what’s been presented before.
But with the twist, that final criterion is especially difficult to pull off. As writers, we need to lead our readers in the wrong direction, while still playing fair. Our characters can say things that aren’t true—they can be unreliable narrators. But we ourselves can never lie.
In Gone Girl, the twist is set up by the way we’re persuaded to think about the two main characters. One character reveals they’re lying to the police—they must have something to hide. We hear from the other in a context that makes it seem impossible that they’re lying.
That belief colors our interpretation of everything else. When it’s flipped on its head, we realize all our preconceptions are wrong.
The twist here works at a meta level, too. It changes our whole perception of the kind of book we’re reading. The story promise we thought we were being presented with at the beginning is something else entirely.
That’s a risky approach. But with Gone Girl, it works because it’s so exciting. You thought you were getting something good—but you’re getting something even better.
With Agatha Christie’s After the Funeral, the twist is set up so subtly you don’t notice it’s been done. Not only are we misdirected, we congratulate ourselves for having worked something out for ourselves. What we don’t discover until right at the end is that we got it completely wrong.
And Christie achieves that while only presenting us with the facts of the story. It’s a masterclass in misdirection.
The role of planning in constructing your twist or reveal
I’d argue that planning is essential to constructing both twists and reveals—even if, for pantsers, it only kicks in at the editing stage.
That planning starts with a clear story promise, the question that will be answered by the end of the book. That gives you the substance for your big reveal.
To get there, there’ll be other questions that need to be answered. And those mini-reveals should pose new questions, too.
Also crucial is to decide what to reveal when. A good rule of thumb is to release important information at the last possible moment, only when readers need it to make sense of what happens next. Reveal it too soon, and suspense will leak away.
If you’re including a twist, you need to walk a tightrope. On one hand, your reader needs enough information that the twist will make perfect sense. On the other hand, you need to disguise that information in a way that doesn’t allow your reader to spot what’s coming.
There are lots of different ways you can do that. Here are a few:
Have a character tell the truth, but make them appear so untrustworthy that your reader won’t believe them
Have a character who lies but appears honest
Include red herrings
Slip out crucial facts alongside revelations that appear more important, so your reader focuses on the wrong thing.
Finally, think about where you want your twist to appear. The only rule here is not to have it happen too soon: you need your reader to have developed a clear (and wrong) idea of what they think is happening for it to have real impact.
The role of the twist in book marketing
Once upon a time, a twist was a relatively rare thing. These days, in genres like psychological thrillers, it’s almost expected.
That presents some challenges. If readers suspect a twist is coming, they’ll be on their guard. And some people complain that blurbs mentioning a twist distract them from the story, diverting their attention to trying to spot it.
It’s a fair point. But it’s also true that a great twist can be the thing that gets readers talking about a book. That, of course, means more sales—and what marketing department or indie author can afford to ignore that?
If savvy readers looking out for a twist are wise to the usual tactics, it’s up to us as authors to respond. Either we find ways to execute those tactics so brilliantly that we still bamboozle our readers, or we come up with new tactics altogether.
That’s pretty daunting—but it’s exciting too. I for one can’t wait for the next book with a “mind-blowing twist!”
Claire Cooper grew up in a small village in Wales before moving to London as a student. She was a civil servant for 17 years, but hung up her bowler hat when she discovered that she much preferred writing about psychotic killers to Ministerial speeches. She lives in London with her husband and a pond full of very cute newts, and also writes as C. J. Cooper. Her latest book, "The Elevator" is set in New York, Bristol and London, and includes lots of reveals (and maybe one or two twists!). It was published on August 25th.
