A Tapping At My Door Book Tour – Putting A Twist In The Tale By David Jackson

A twist is an unexpected change of direction in a story. The reader thinks it’s going one way, and then something happens to make it veer off along a completely different route. Even more impactful is when the reader suddenly discovers that the story was on that different path all along, as happens in all the examples I named earlier.

A twist, then, is something that involves what screenwriters call the ‘subversion of expectation’ (see, for example, John Yorke’s excellent book, ‘Into the Woods’). So, to create a twist, you need to consider firstly what the reader might expect, and then dream up events that are as far removed from those expectations as you can make them.

Here’s an example, off the top of my head. An old man comes downstairs on Christmas morning. Underneath his Christmas tree he finds a wrapped present, with a card attached. He sits down and opens the card, and we learn that it has been sent to him by someone called Martha. The man looks up and mouths a silent ‘thank you’.

What’s going on here? Well, the reasoning in most minds will probably be that Martha is the man’s wife. She may be upstairs in bed, or she may even have passed away, and he is sending his thoughts heavenwards.

Those are the expectations, so let’s subvert them. There are lots of ways we could do this. Suppose that we later learn in the story that the old man was looking up at a bird cage, and that Martha is the name of the bird. Every year, the man sends himself a present from Martha, because she is the only companion in his lonely life. Now that would be a twist, and the very fact that it’s not what we were expecting makes the fact of the man’s loneliness all the more hard-hitting. It would be possible to take that basic idea and build on it. Perhaps the reader is led to believe as the story progresses that the man has all kinds of friends, when in fact they all turn out to be pets or even inanimate objects.

Let’s try another. A gardener is employed by a wealthy man to work for him. While digging in the borders he unearths a human hand, presumably attached to a body.

What’s the expectation here? Well, most gardeners in that situation would probably yell in fright, bring it to the attention of the property owner, and call the police. Right, so let’s not do that. Let’s subvert. In our version, the gardener covers the hand up again and says nothing. He’s got other plans.

Why does he do that? Does he know the identity of the body? Is he planning to blackmail his employer? What does he know that we don’t?

I don’t have the answers. I’ll leave that to you. But what I hope we can agree on is that the subversion here has instantly made the story much more interesting.