Please excuse me while I assign already well-loved terms new meanings for my own benefit. (This is to say, writing terminology means something slightly different or goes by slightly different terms depending on who you ask. Two of the definitions I use here are based ones that stuck with me, while the third is something I pulled right out of my backside because it didn’t quite fit with my acquired definitions of the other two. Other terms and definitions are equally valid; I’m just using these ones until I figure out how to telepathically funnel wordless concepts.)
First let’s get basic: What’s a plot anyway? Tis a bunch of things that happen to move your character toward something. Usually this something is a goal. Win the war. Find the killer. Survive the winter. Get through the wedding. Kill the dragon.
Plots (should) have important scenes within them which propel them along. A full book that’s just a knight walking on a path for twenty-five chapters thinking about killing a dragon and then finally reaching the dragon to do so it boring. A book about a knight facing random trials that have nothing to do with the dragon she’s set out to kill is more interesting then walking. But the most engaging version of this plot would be if each trial she faced was connected to the dragon killing in some way.
We could, if we wanted to, label each of these trials with terms like plot point, a plot twist, or a plot hinge, depending on how they interact with the story as a whole. (Now I have to define what each of these terms mean to me. I set myself up here, didn’t I?)
We probably all know what a plot twist is. A big reveal. A shocking conclusion. A revelation that puts the whole story into a new light. (Luke, I am your father!)
Most writers will describe a plot point as some version of ‘an event which progresses the plot.’ This is all fine and dandy until you have to decide what counts as progress and how much of it you need for something to genuinely be a plot point. For the sake of this article, I’m going to call it anything that has a noticeable effect on either the ultimate or immediate goal of the story.
A plot hinge is a type of plot point. It can also include a plot twist. But not all plot twists or plot points are plot hinges, because a hinge actively swings the plot in a new direction. It takes the goal the story is set upon, and it rattles that mother-fork until its eyes pop out.
Let’s have some examples, shall we?
A knight is crossing a mountain on her way to slay a dragon.
While at the mountain, she fights a random dwarf. It’s a nice action bit where she’s in peril a few times and at the end, she kills the dwarf and continues down the other side of the mountain. A real page turner. (Spoilers: it’s probably, actually, not.) It’s also not a plot point (or, a plot anything), because the entire segment could have been cut without anything else changing. This whole scenario has no effect on what the plot’s current goal is, how it’s being accomplished, or how we perceive it.
If instead, while at the mountain, our valiant knight fights a dwarf with ancient knowledge on forging dragon-killing weaponry and convinces him to forge her a dragon-killing sword that ends up being the only reason she can kill the dragon at all, then you have what’s purely a plot point. The goal of the plot hasn’t been altered, nor our perception of it, but we’ve taken an irremovable step towards accomplishing it.
If instead, while at the mountain, our valiant knight uncovers ancient knowledge that reveals the villainous dragon is actually part of a much larger system of dragons with magical human form, and her own mother was secretly a dragon, giving her dragon blood of her own, this is purely a plot twist. The goal of the plot hasn’t changed, and we’re not closer to having killed the dragon, but our perception of the plot, how our main character fits within it, and what it should mean to us as readers, has been altered.
Pretty basic, yes?
Now imagine that those two things both happen while our knight is at the mountain, but as she’s leaving, the dragon she’s been riding out to face finds her. They battle. Barely prepared, our knight is losing terribly. She tries to flee, making it to the nearest town before the dragon finds her. In order to lay him low, his must use both her dwarfish weapon and her secret dragon powers. The town sees this, and decides she, too, is the enemy. A town guard steals her dragon-killing sword and tries to slay her with it. In a moment of compassion, the dragon she nearly killed helps her escape the town, but every knight our valiant half-dragon once fought alongside now sees her as a monster. And they’re coming for her.
This is a plot hinge. We just flipped out perception of the plot, tackled and crashed right through our main goal, and opened the doors for a new goal that’s still adjacent to our original one (and might still lead back to it by the end of the book—who knows, the villainous dragon might still need to be killed after all).
The trick with plot hinges, is the throw the reader for just enough of a loop to make the story fresh and interesting, without letting them question why the story before and after the plot hinge aren’t separate books. For a plot hinge to work, the plot must be pushed without being torn off the hinges. The old goal can’t be left dangling, limp with unfulfilled promise, and the new goal must build off everything the book has already established.
When done well, though, a plot hinge can turn a “this is enjoyable!” story into one that makes readers go “oh god, please read this, I NEED someone to scream at, I’m literally dying.”
I’m not going to tell you how many of these you should have in any given story. I’m not even going to tell you that you need to have any of them. (That would be hypocritical, as not all of my own stories do. Some are pulled along by simply plot points and twists, and they’re still perfectly enjoyable, if I do say so myself.)
You can also slip plot hinges into side plots, and make cases for what constitutes a hinge in character development. And at the end of the day, there’s a hundred different ways to build tension into a story and engage the reader. This is just the one I’m having fun identifying and analyzing at the moment.
And I hope you can set out and have fun with it to.
(Also, call it by my personal terminology. Pretend I, and I alone, invented a brand-new kind of plot point. Buy my book. Ascend me to godhood. Rebel and kill god-me to take back the world for humanity. Something like that.)
Do you have any advice on how coincidental is too coincidental? Like, any good way to figure out if a coincidences in a story is good enough?
I remember reading somewhere that any coincidence which gets your characters out of trouble is bad, and any coincidence which puts them into trouble is good. While you do have to take this with a grain of salt, there’s still a lot of truth to that saying.
A more thorough look at coincidences:
Make your coincidences not so coincidental. The best “coincidences” are ones which are foreshadowed in some way.
An ex who was mentioned briefly in a side comment five chapters ago suddenly running into the protagonist can be jarring to the reader, but an ex randomly showing up after the protagonist spent a conversation sobbing over them the scene before inspires a glorious moment of “oh shit” from the reader.
In the same manner, a character arriving near the end of the story to brilliantly inspire the plot and character arcs to move forward feels like cheating until you sprinkle hints that the character was always looking to do that very thing, so when the readers reach it, they’re willing to ignore any coincidences in favor of the glee they feel in putting the pieces together.
Characters must (usually) save themselves. Coincidences which allow your characters to avoid taking action and making choices are bad, especially towards the end of the story.
There are certain methods you can use to get around this, such as very heavy foreshadowing combined with a good portion of the characters using their agency and making character developing choices, or forcing your characters to sacrifice something in order to take advantage of the coincidence, but in general, stay away from any coincidences which get your characters out of trouble.
As an example, in one of my novels the protag and their friends are about to be executed, but two side characters who were foreshadowed on multiple occasions coincidentally choose that moment to show up and kill the executioners. The drawback is that they’re here to save one of the protag’s friends – but to kill the protag.
Coincidentally up the tension. A coincidence that gets a character in deeper trouble, is a whole lot easier to excuse. If you make the characters have an “oh shit” moment, there’s a higher chance that will pass on to the readers as well.
Beta readers: attack! If you can’t figure out whether a coincidence feels like too much Authorial Hand, let your beta readers decide. They’re not submerged in the story the way you are, and they have a much easier time picking out what feels forced and what doesn’t.
Hi! I'm currently planning on writing a murder mystery. Basically, the main character's best friend's dad is murdered and then near the end of the story the main character finds out that her friend killed her own father. I want this to be a plot twist, but I've never really written a plot twist before. How do I sprinkle in clues that she did it without straight up giving away that she did it? How do I write a good plot twist?
Writing Plot Twists.
For a successful plot twist, don’t give the reader so many details that they piece together the plot twist before it happens, but scatter enough information that when the plot twist appears, they have a moment of damn, I should have known; all the signs were there!
Here’s some tips to help you achieve that:
1. Give subtle clues. You don’t want to hit them over your reader’s head!
Give a strange action without specifying that it’s strange. Have a character mention something odd before the conversation is suddenly drawn away. Put an object someplace it shouldn’t belong, but don’t give the pov character time to think about why it’s there.
Instead of just planting clues like a reverse sleuth, you can also try creating openings for the reader to notice something is missing. Always try to put both clues and openings in places where they stick out a tiny bit, but could still be rationalized away.
2. Try not to bury your clues under a mount of details. If you give too much superfluous information, it’s unlikely a reader will pick up on half of it.
Oh the other hand, if you give the sense that all the details mean something specific and the reader just don’t know what a few of them are for yet, then they’ll be more inclined to care about the details, especially if they’re given immediate positive feedback for remembering them.
3. Don’t flat out contradict* the plot twist while trying to obscure it.
Don’t give the murderer a conformed alibi. Don’t have the wise old magician teach that magic can do anything but reverse death, and then have a character come back from the dead. Don’t claim a piece of world building works a certain way, only to have your plot twist go against it.
The last thing you want is for your reader to reach the plot twist and go, “You jerk! You told me this wasn’t an option! I could never have guessed this! You broke your own canon!”
* The exception to this is having new, better information come up just before or during the plot twist. The main character suddenly receives word that the murder’s alibi has turned out to be false. The character being killed had a piece of the soul of a villain known to split up their soul into parts, and that piece died in their place. Someone uncovers new information showing there have been exceptions to the world building “rule” for centuries.
4. Throw in some red herrings. You certainty don’t need red herrings in order to pull off a good plot twist, but if you’re having trouble hiding your plot twist from the readers, they can work quite nicely.
The vaguer the red herring, the better it generally works. If your world is big or your story complex enough, readers may even create red herrings for themselves by incorrectly combining the clues you set out for *other* plot twists.
5. Edit it later. Whatever you do now, you’ll need to make some adjustments after you get feedback from critiquers or betas. Make sure you keep notes on how and where you hint at your plot twist so you can easily adjust them during the revision stage!
6. Bonus: A plot twist should not be a deus ex machina. If you plot twist saves your characters from doing the work to save themselves, then it takes away from your story instead of adding to it. (On the other hand, a plot twist that makes your character’s life worse is fantastic.)
