The Art of the Twist: A Guest Post by Mary Kubica
From Local Woman Missing to Just the Nicest Couple and now her latest, She’s Not Sorry, Mary Kubica knows how to write a twist you’ll never see coming — but how does she do it? Here’s an exclusive essay from Mary on all things twists.
Hardcover $30.00
She's Not Sorry
She's Not Sorry
By Mary Kubica
In Stock Online
Hardcover $30.00
The author of Local Woman Missing and Just the Nicest Couple is back with another dark and twisty thriller that’ll keep you enthralled from start to finish.
The author of Local Woman Missing and Just the Nicest Couple is back with another dark and twisty thriller that’ll keep you enthralled from start to finish.
These days, mystery and suspense novels are synonymous with a big twist. As an author, if you don’t have one—a good one—you can bet your readers are going to be disappointed. With the sheer number of incredible authors writing in the genre right now, dreaming up their own jaw-dropping and awe-inspiring twists, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to do. Writing a twist is a delicate balance of shocking your reader and yet having them feel like, looking back or on a re-read, the clues were there all along, hidden in plain sight; they should have seen it coming. The reader wants to feel stunned, not manipulated, and the twist needs to feel earned. If the twist is a whodunit (and it doesn’t have to be; some of the best twists aren’t, but are instead that wonderful sense of having the rug pulled completely out from under you, when everything you, as a reader, thought you knew turns out to be not true), then the quote-unquote bad guy needs to be an important enough character that the reader cares about him or her, but not so important that his or her involvement becomes obvious to the reader too soon. It’s a juggling act.
And then comes the placement of the twist. For the longest time, twists happened at the end of the book. Somewhere in our history, writers were taught that we needed to do things in a certain order: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution. But then, years ago when reading Peter Swanson’s The Kind Worth Killing, it dawned on me that it didn’t have to be like this, that the twist, or that climax, could happen at any point in the writing, and that it didn’t have to be limited to just one, but two or more.
There’s a little secret I try to employ to make sure my readers are satisfied every time. Readers in this genre are smart. They’re well read and start predicting the big, shocking revelation that the whole, entire book hinges on by about page two of the novel (no pressure). I’m not confident, or naïve, enough to think that I can fool everyone, every time—though I try. Instead of having the fate of the book depend on whether I can pull off this one twist, I like to add smaller twists to my books. They don’t have to always be mind-blowing, but instead a number of more modest surprises that still pack a punch, like the secret Meghan reveals to her friend Nat in She’s Not Sorry (you’ll have to read it to find out), so that at the end of the book, a reader might say, “I saw X coming, but I had no idea about Y and Z.” There’s fulfillment in that because the reader set out to be surprised and it happened.
Though suspense novels are filled with many wonderful things—slippery characters, a chilling atmosphere, a slow-burn mystery or a pace that moves at warp speed—readers are counting on being jaw dropped by the end of the book. It’s up to us as writers to do our best to make it happen.