By Janice Hardy

Twist so gracefully readers never see it coming.

My mother-in-law said she couldn’t have pork because her doctor wanted her to avoid red meat. This made me pause, because we all know pork is “the other white meat.” I’d heard that for years and years and firmly believed it, so I looked it up.

Turned out I was wrong.

Pork is red meat. “The other white meat” was a brilliant advertising campaign from the ’80s that lied to us all.

And while I was down that rabbit hole, I discovered carrots don’t help your eyesight, either. That was a propaganda campaign created by the Brits during World War II to hide the fact they had radar.

These are two “facts” I grew up believing and never doubted for an instant, until the truth blew my mind and changed my views. Neither of these facts were life-changing, but imagine how they could have shaken my world if they’d been truths more profound than food history.

That feeling of everything you thought you knew re-sorting itself at once? That’s the feeling a great plot twist gives your reader.

And one of my favorite ways to create an unforgettable twist, is to make your protagonist absolutely sure of something—and be completely wrong.

Not only does revealing the truth shock the protagonist, it also shocks the reader. It can send the story sideways and into new territory and shake up everything the characters thought they knew.

A great example of this is Bruce Willis’s character in The Sixth Sense.

(Spoiler alert, but the movie is twenty-five years old, so…)

Child psychologist Malcolm Crowe spends the entire film certain of a few things: he survived being shot, his marriage is just going through a cold spell, and he's helping a frightened boy named Cole who sees ghosts.

None of it is true.

He didn't survive. His wife is grieving him. And Cole is the only person who can see him.

Every choice Malcolm makes flows logically from something he's dead certain about and utterly wrong about. He behaves the way a man in his situation would—it’s just not the situation he thinks it is.

The reveal that Malcolm’s been dead the whole time forces viewers to reconsider every scene in the movie, searching for the clues of what was really going on (and they’re there if you look for them).

• Nobody but Cole ever actually speaks to him.
• The door to his study stays shut.
• His wife never responds.
• There’s a subtle hint with the color red.

You’re shown the truth the whole time, but you see it the same way Malcolm does, because you believe “his” truth.

That's the difference between a twist that delights and a twist that infuriates. The clues are there, we just don’t pick up on them.

The bigger the belief, the bigger the twist can be, too. A small wrong assumption, like a detective who’s positive the witness is lying when she isn't, makes for a fun surprise. But shattering a character’s core belief might be the shocker the whole novel was secretly building toward. ("I see dead people!")

Discovering that a long-held truth is really a lie can be devastating—especially if the truth is revealed at the worst possible time. Which is why a false belief is perfect for your All Is Lost moment at the end of Act Two.

Finding out they were wrong about something they were certain of rattles your protagonist to the core, and the fallout of that while they sit in their emotional wreckage and try to come to terms with this new worldview is story gold. Do they cling to the comfortable old belief, or accept the hard new truth?

That choice determines how the rest of the story will unfold.

Here's the catch, though. There's a world of difference between surprising your reader and tricking them.

A surprise makes readers feel entertained. A trick makes them feel lied to—and a reader who feels lied to closes the book and never picks up your next one.

The line between the two is how you drop in the clues. When you reveal that your protagonist (and your reader) had it wrong all along, the reader should be able to flip back through the book and see where the truth was hiding in plain sight the whole time. If there's not a single hint, the reveal will at best feel contrived, at worst look like bad plotting.

Crafting a twist can be challenging, but if you look at how it’s intertwined with the rest of the story, it becomes a lot easier to create. 

If you want a twist that blows minds, examine the thing your character is most sure of, and ask:

What does my protagonist believe so deeply they'd never think to question it? If you can't name it, you're sitting on a missed opportunity. Brainstorm ways to give them a conviction that’s totally wrong.

When's the worst possible moment for them to find out they're wrong? Major turning points are good options, or choose the All Is Lost moment for maximum emotional damage.

If a reader flipped back through the book, would they find the clues? If not, you don't have a twist yet. Go plant the hints so the truth was there all along.

Great twists come from readers and characters being wrong.

So plant those breadcrumbs. Let readers draw the wrong conclusion on their own, fair and square, from information that was never actually a lie.

That way, when the twist arrives and the truth comes out, it’ll feel inevitable, and not like you got it wrong.

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Janice Hardy is the award-winning author of the teen fantasy trilogy The Healing Wars, including The Shifter, Blue Fire, and Darkfall from Balzer+Bray/Harper Collins. and the chapter books Who's Haunting Who? and The Haunting of Cabin 13 for Lerner Publishing. For adults, she writes the Grace Harper urban fantasy series under the name, J.T. Hardy. When she's not writing fiction, she runs the popular writing site Fiction University, and has written multiple books on writing, including Understanding Show, Don't Tell (And Really Getting It), Plotting Your Novel: Ideas and Structure, and the Revising Your Novel: First Draft to Finished Draft series.

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