: Re: How can I get in the Habit of Writing with Twists? I've always felt that my writing is very sequential. It's a chain of events. This happens, then this happens, then this happens, and so

@Martha805

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If you think about it, the majority of stories ever have twists for the characters, they're just not always the ones that the story is about. In a classic hero's journey, the villain usually has grand plans to take over the world or some such, and everything is going smoothly, and suddenly some upstart shows up at the end to finish them and ruin their plans.

To the villain, this is a massive twist. They were fully planning on being successful in their evil scheme, expecting that their minions would sort out anyone who tried to prevent that, but at the last second they discover there is a chosen one or a magical artifact that can actually stop them.

When a twist happens to the protagonist of a story, it's usually an antagonist simply doing this same thing to them: they had expectations of how their story was going to end, but someone else had other ideas. But, as they're the protagonist, they live to fight another day and come back to fight the villain again, and this time win.

So in order to write a twist for a protagonist, you need something else that is going to derail their story. This will usually be a side character's normal straightforward storyline where nothing goes wrong, they just cause problems from the point of view of the protagonist. This side character can be the antagonist, or someone who provides some information, or even an inanimate object like a statue or a note, but whilst their story is straightforward, it causes problems for the story the reader is experiencing.

So rather than practice what twists you can put in for your character, think about how they may have somehow suddenly affected the personal story of other characters, and the twists that they might be experiencing. This should help to think about how other side characters can affect the story that you are writing in order to create a twist that the protagonist, and the reader, didn't see coming.

Being a plotter is very useful for this, because it allows you to plot the entire storyline for a potentially minor character, see where it intersects with the main narrative, and see the effects that it has to the twist the story from its original linear plot.

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