Tugging on Reader Expectations: Setup and Payoff for Twists

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I love a good roller coaster ride of a plot with stomach dropping plummets and twists that you never anticipated but that ultimately still feel grounded in the story. (Honestly I do think that last piece is key, because as a reader I can both love and hate when a twist upends my expectations, and it often has to do with how authentic the twist feels to the story I initially bought into.)

So today, we’re going to look at a couple ways to set up and pay off twists to subvert reader expectations without disappointing them, and how to choose which type of twists aligns with your goals. And we’ll look at a real time example from a current writing project where I caught myself trying to pay off a twist that I hadn’t set up correctly.

But first, let’s look at a couple possible twists you can set up and pay off. (And no, this is by no means an exhaustive list.)

The Shock-Value Twist

This twist draws its power from propelling the story in new and hitherto unfathomable directions. It’s not so much surprising in the sense that there is no way readers could have anticipated it happening (in fact, I’d argue that it should be grounded in foreshadowing), but it’s startling because of how it escalates your plot by creating such drastic consequences or such far-reaching revelations that there is no going back to before.

What’s interesting about this kind of twist? It demolishes a sense of safety (in a good way), leaving readers unsure what might happen next, increasing their tension, their emotional connection to the threats characters face, and their need to see the fallout.

Where can this go wrong? This kind of a twist can feel cheap or manipulative when characters act out of their established characterization purely for shock value, and their reasoning isn’t fully explored in the story, the fallout is glossed over, and/or it doesn’t feeling grounded in what readers know of their motivations.

The Reframing Twist

This twist reframes everything we’ve seen and thought we understood and casts it in a wholly different light. It relies on sleight of hand and misdirection to set it up. It draws its power from subtly planted clues that characters (and readers) rare meant to misinterpret, until, once the twist is revealed, that truth reframes everything we saw before, creating a compellingly different narrative.

What’s interesting about this kind of twist? It prompts readers to rethink everything. Suddenly, they’re poring back over the events of the story, looking to see what they missed and where their thinking went wrong. It can be particularly effective as a midpoint twist or heading into the final act of the story, leading characters (and readers) into a new understanding prior to the final conflict and resolution.

Where can this go wrong? When the misdirection is too wild to explain away and isn’t grounded in realistic character choices so revealing the twist ends up creating more questions rather than providing a believable alternate explanation—in essence, this fails to be a true reframing. The tricky pieces to setting up this type of a twist is creating events that readers can believably misinterpret while also ensuring that those events feel grounded in the truth when the correct explanation is ultimately revealed, and yes, creating that truly satisfactory and believable payoff is just as difficult as it sounds.

The World Turned Upside Down Twist

This sort of twist subverts readers expectations to the nth degree by systematically and strategically priming them to anticipate one set of events, and then presenting them with the exact opposite outcome. It requires planting enough evidence on the page that readers are nodding along, anticipating the logical result, certain of what’s coming next, and then … it’s doesn’t … for reasons the story then gets to explore for pages to come.

What’s interesting about this kind of twist? It hooks readers by building certain anticipation for the clear next step, and then the gap between expectation and reality becomes the puzzle that they must solve. Unpacking why things played out differently becomes the deep, nagging questions that pulls them on through the pages.

It can be a great way to introduce a character or to kick off an inciting incident that pulls your character out the door into adventure. It works because we’re intrigued by contrast and contradiction. That lingering “why,” that break in the pattern, that sense that something-is-out-of-place-and-we-don’t-understand is enthralling and compels us to get to the bottom of it.

Where can this go wrong? To set up this kind of twist, you need to plant evidence guiding readers in an anticipated direction before you turn their expectations upside down. Readers need a reason to believe that they know where this is going. So, it has to feel rooted in proof that you’ve deliberately placed on the page.

But this twist can fail on the payoff as well, because when you established this sort of a contradiction in the story, and you use that lingering “why” to draw readers in, then the explanation has to feel grounded, believable, and worth the pages of questions. The longer you delay that reveal, the bigger the payoff needs to be to match the weight of all the next expectations that readers are going to build up. Because while subverting reader expectations can be a powerful writing tool, there’s nothing worse than disappointing them.

Ready for a real time writing example?

Recently, I started brainstorming a short story to explore the backstory of a new main character and her storyworld. I dreamed up a scenario, the premise, and some rich, cinematic images to serve as the story’s core, and best of all, there was a twist too.

Feeling well-armed, I sat down to begin writing … and quickly stalled out. So, as one does, I shoved the project to the back burner and kept working on another one. A few months later, I found myself with time to spare at a writer’s conference where I was presenting, so I decided to sneak into the back of a workshop on “subverting reader expectations.”

The presenter, Moses Ose Utomi, author of The Lies of the Ajungo, invited the audience to do on the spot brainstorming on twist setups and payoffs. So, I pulled my short story off the back burner, and lo and behold, realized that I had failed on the set up.

I had started my short story too close to the twist payoff for readers to form any false expectations for where the story was going. Okay, then, I’d shift the opening. Problem solved. Or so I thought. But life and other projects proving more demanding, it wasn’t until I was driving home on July 4^th (literally with fireworks exploding thematically on either side of the highway) that the lightbulb went off, and I realized what else my short story was missing.

Not only had I picked the wrong set up, I had selected a point of view character who already knew the twist. Her actions were the twist. And she knew going in what she was planning to do, so because it wasn’t a surprise for her, and the narrative style I’d chosen was Deep 3^rd, readers’ expectations weren’t going to be subverted through her point of view. Unless I opted to make her a wholly unreliable narrator (which didn’t match her voice), I needed to rethink.

The twist was there in the plot and the premise, but I needed to select another perspective to let readers fully experience the payoff too!

The True Payoff = Reader Satisfaction

I share that example to show that a) you don’t always get it right the first time, or even the second time, and b) so many factors can contribute to setting up and paying off twists. If you’re stuck on a twist that you can’t quite figure out, it can help to identify what you want that twist to accomplish in the story. Once you know that, it’s a little easier to zero in on the exact kind of set up and pay off that will accomplish that goal and to identify the rest of the factors that will contribute to it.

No matter how long you’ve been writing, twists can be a tricky element, and it can take trial and error to find just the right pieces to set up and pay them off effectively, but when you get that perfect combination of factors working together, there’s nothing quite so satisfying to read!

Where have you found twists particularly tricky to write?