That day my plot twist fell completely flat and nobody noticed

I was working on a short story for a local writing group meetup last Tuesday and I had this whole big reveal planned where the narrator was actually a ghost the whole time. I spent like 2 hours setting up subtle clues, dropped a line about how she never cast a shadow, mentioned she couldn't remember her own reflection. When I read it out loud to the group, everyone just nodded along and nobody gasped or even commented on the twist. One guy said "oh yeah, I figured that out by page 2" and another asked if the ending was supposed to be a surprise. I felt so dumb honestly. I realized I was way too obvious with the hints because I was so excited about my own idea that I didn't think about how readers would pick up on them faster. So I scraped the whole thing and rewrote it from scratch with way subtler foreshadowing. Has anyone else had a big twist fall flat and had to go back to the drawing board? How do you balance clues without making it too obvious?

3 comments

3 Comments

ray35627d agoMost Upvoted

Oh man, I feel this in my bones. I once wrote a murder mystery where the killer was the guy who'd been in the room the whole time and I thought I was being so clever. Read it to my buddy and he goes "yeah, you basically just described him as shifty about 40 times." I'm pretty sure if I ever do pull off a real twist, I'll have to write the whole thing backwards so nobody sees it coming. Or just accept that my brain works on "blatant obvious" mode and lean into it.

spencer_park2626d ago

Writing the whole thing backwards might actually work, not gonna lie. At the very least it'd confuse your buddy enough that they wouldn't see anything coming. I tried a similar trick once where I made the narrator unreliable on purpose thinking it'd be genius, but instead everyone just thought I forgot my own plot and was fixing it as I went. My friends are way too honest with me about my writing, which hurts but also keeps me humble. Lean into the obvious mode honestly, I call that style "mystery for people who miss the first three clues" now.

sage30827d ago

Man that really stings. I had a similar thing happen with a story where the "big reveal" was that the best friend was secretly the villain and nobody even blinked at the ending. Sometimes we're so close to our own writing that we can't tell if something is subtle or just plain obvious.

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