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Misleading the reader all the way to the big reveal... Good or bad?

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TheCuriousOne

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Just curious, as you all have more experience than me...

I have just finished this book, and the whole experience has been a massive disappointment on many levels, so that's why I'm asking for other opinions, I think I'm a little biased and require some objectivity.

To make it very short, the book starts with a car crash against a tree. One of the passengers survives and goes on with his life. Meets a girl and gets married, etc. etc. In the end, you find out that the guy "lived" that stuff while on the brink of death, still at the crash scene, and that his wife was actually the passenger of another car that got smashed in the crash. I've gone back to the accident scene, and there is absolutely no mention of another car at all.

I'd have felt happier with the ending if the author had mentioned that the driver had swerved and smashed into the tree to avoid another car (he was under the influence), but as it reads, he just "misjudged a curve". As a reader, I feel that was misleading, and that the "big reveal" was therefore rather "meh". There's something about not picking up clues that make you go all "aaaaaah I've got it now!" at the end, but if you can't even get the chance to guess, what's the point?

Just wondering if deliberately omitting details is common practice among authors, or if there really is a certain craft in building up a plot to get a big reveal and that this author kind of failed meaning another disappointment to add to my list.

Don't get me wrong, though, the disappointments caused lots of thinking, and there was lots of learning done in the process :)
 

rwm4768

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That would bother me as well. There probably should have been a mention of the other car.
 

Fruitbat

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Yep, I think the author goofed on that one.
 

Sonsofthepharaohs

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That would be a *bookwall* moment for me. By the time you get that far it's probably too late to stop reading, and pointless not to finish, but I'd never buy another book by that author.

The thing with twists is that they have to be surprising, but also obvious in hindsight, or at least make complete logical sense. Anything that comes right out of the clear blue sky with no hint beforehand, and either cheats or stretches credulity, is just as bad as a deus ex machina to get your hero out of a sticky situation.

I have a small twist in my novel. I don't really consider it a twist, because to me it is so obvious it might as well be footnoted on every page, and it makes so much sense, but it's not spelled out directly. If you went hunting for clues with knowledge of the twist you could find them, but unless you had a really devious brain, I don't think you'd guess it beforehand. That's the kind of twist I like to read. The one you described would make me furious.
 

MakanJuu

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I enjoy it well enough when it's done well- some of the better sword of truth novels, or the TV series Nikita, etc, etc- but there are just as many bad instances.
 

Viridian

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The problem with plot twists is that often the writer decides the plot twist is too obvious. So they withhold information, or they distort information.

But readers aren't stupid. When they get to the plot twist, they realize the author was withholding information. They look back and see all the places they should have had hints. The places the twist doesn't make sense. And that's a goddamn irritating feeling to feel: the feeling of being deliberately lied to in order to make a twist more twisty.

Plot twists don't necessarily need to be obvious in retrospect. You don't need to spend time obscuring information -- or planting information. Just tell the story how it is. If it's obvious, that's fine. If it's not obvious, that's also fine. Just don't make the reader distrust you.
 

jaksen

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I've read books like this. So it all depends, is it a mystery? Do you lay down a few clues here and there to subtly tell the reader that 'all might not be the way it seems?'

You have to do twists carefully, almost artfully, so the reader says - damn, shoulda seen that coming!

And not: Huh, wth? Whatever.
 

VoireyLinger

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I'm okay with leaving a mystery to be solved, but being led down a false path annoys me.

I dropped one author's RomSus series after two books deliberately misled the readers. Book one, a character mentioned as elderly and bed-bound, but never seen on-page through the story, appeared in the climax as the stalker and in another, a twin brother who was said to have died at age ten made a miraculous and unexplained entrance as the baddie. In both cases, the villains were mentioned as throw away characters... the creepy guy takes care of his aging mom and twins run in the family. That was it.

I love a good plot twist, but it has to make sense with the rest of the storyline. Something you can't see coming, but can look back and see the signs when it happens.
 

Sonsofthepharaohs

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Plot twists don't necessarily need to be obvious in retrospect. You don't need to spend time obscuring information -- or planting information. Just tell the story how it is. If it's obvious, that's fine. If it's not obvious, that's also fine. Just don't make the reader distrust you.

I agree with the last sentence, but I disagree that it's ok for a plot twist to be obvious - if it is, then it's not a TWIST, is it? A plot twist is by definition something you didn't see coming, and the enjoyment is in the surprise - some might guess it beforehand, but that generally ruins it (unless they're the sort that like to feel clever because they worked it out) :D

I love a good plot twist, but it has to make sense with the rest of the storyline. Something you can't see coming, but can look back and see the signs when it happens.

That's exactly why M Knight Shamalamadingdong slamdunked it with the Sixth Sense - the clues were there, but they were so subtle most people missed them. But when you know the twist, the plot suddenly makes perfect sense.

Shame he couldn't repeat that successful execution of a twist with any of his other films ;)
 

RedWombat

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Shame he couldn't repeat that successful execution of a twist with any of his other films ;)

Part of the problem was that we were all expecting a twist after that, so nobody took anything in his movies at face value. I walked into The Village (which had legitimately scary trailers!) and the minute they panned across the tombstones with the dates in the opening scene, I thought "Yeah, so you say."

I mean, there was a lot of other stupid stuff involved there, but when people are playing spot-the-twist it's harder.

Last year, purely by coincidence, I read three books in a row with unreliable narrators. The first two, I was surprised, but the third, even though I had no reason to doubt the narrator, I started playing spot-the- twist just because of the other two books, and when the big reveal happened, I was like "Yep. Figured it was something like that."

I suspect you've got to write like an angel to make "lives whole life in last few seconds before death" work these days. It's been done too often. Jacob's Ladder for example.
 

Viridian

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I agree with the last sentence, but I disagree that it's ok for a plot twist to be obvious - if it is, then it's not a TWIST, is it? A plot twist is by definition something you didn't see coming, and the enjoyment is in the surprise - some might guess it beforehand, but that generally ruins it (unless they're the sort that like to feel clever because they worked it out) :D

When I was a kid, I read Eragon (by Christopher Paolini). I figured out pretty quickly that two of the main characters were secretly brothers. And I wasn't annoyed about how obvious it was -- I was so. Fucking. Excited. Because I wanted to see what happened when they found out.

An obvious plot twist isn't annoying. It's exciting.

JMO, but the difference between "I'm so fucking excited for this upcoming plot twist" and "wow, what a stupid and obvious plot twist" is whether it creates a problem or solves a problem. If the obvious plot twist is going to solve everything, that's annoying. If the obvious plot twist is going to create problems or complicate a situation, then it's exciting.

If it was obvious in Signs that water would kill the aliens, then yeah, that would be bad. But there are times that knowing ahead of time is fun.
 

ElaineA

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Most everyone has covered what I would say...it's the trust issue. There's a fine line between leaving a reader saying OH, wow! and feeling utterly betrayed. I would say this one falls on the betrayal side. Beyond failing to give that key hint, the whole "book as life-flashing-before-my-eyes" is a sell-out to me, too. Just like the It Was All A Dream trope. No thank you.
 

RedWombat

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If it was obvious in Signs that water would kill the aliens, then yeah, that would be bad. But there are times that knowing ahead of time is fun.

And you'd think aliens that don't wear clothes and can melt in water would know better than to come to a planet mostly covered in oceans with that crap floating in the atmosphere and frequently falling out of the sky! HOW STUPID ARE THESE ALIENS?!

...ahem. Sorry, still miffed about that one.
 

mirandashell

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The best author of plot twists I ever read is Agatha Christie. I've read every book she wrote and not once have I ended a book and thought 'Eh? What? Hang on minute, how did that happen?'

There were always clues so that when I read it again I thought 'of course! Should have seen that! Duh!'.

And that is what a twist needs to be. In fact, sometimes it doesn't matter if the twist is obvious because the reader will keep going to see if they are right. A lot of readers get a kick out of that.

It's when the twist comes absolutely out of the blue that the author pisses off everybody.
 

Viridian

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And you'd think aliens that don't wear clothes and can melt in water would know better than to come to a planet mostly covered in oceans with that crap floating in the atmosphere and frequently falling out of the sky! HOW STUPID ARE THESE ALIENS?!

To be fair, we're desperately trying to get to Mars, and we can't even breathe there.
 

TheCuriousOne

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Thanks everyone, sorry I couldn't get back to you sooner, I was working :)

This book was actually a horror novel. I guess, from your replies, that it wasn't done very well then :( The reveal was pages into the end, so there wasn't much excitement to be felt, it's like he finds out and then goes walking into the light kind of thing. Even the blurb is misleading, with hindsight, because it's about love transcending death, and in the end, you find out that there was no love at all, since the wife of the guy was actually with her fiancé in another car (and the main character had never noticed her before, until she comes to him later on when he's still "alive," so it's not like he had a secret crush for her or anything)

I am SO disappointed with this whole thing. Misleading pretty sums my entire experience. I was misled by the ending, but I was also misled into believing it would be a great story. The author is well-known in my circle (although I don't know him). I was told by an author friend that the story was fantastic, but I'm not actually sure she read it. I have lots of quibbles with the writing, but I don't know much so I can't complain. Let's just say that the separate sentences tagged to each other by a comma, the constant POV changes, the missing scene breaks, the inaccuracies I've spotted, and the cringey unnecessary and incorrect French words (and I'd know about those!) kept me distracted throughout. The book hasn't been edited, but it's been out for a couple of years, and has some glowing reviews. I've checked out the negative reviews and they pretty much complain about the same stuff as I do, and then the reviewers felt the wrath of the troll-fans. I'm not interested in this author's other stories because they're in a genre I tend not to read anymore, but I certainly won't pick up any other of his stories, and won't be recommending him, that's for sure.

I kept going because I wanted to find all the things I didn't agree with so I didn't repeat them in my own stories, and because I was curious as how the story would end. There are hints that the MC might have died, because his mother acts like she's grieving. Yet he goes on with school, job, life, interacts with other people, etc. At that point, the ending felt like a Bobby-Ewing-returns kind of thing. It's like "let's just wipe everything off and you've read 250 pages for nothing." I felt let down. But I was so biased because of all the negativity I had been feeling that I thought I'd just check I was right in feeling that way. Looks like it. Thanks everyone for your answers.
 

Bicyclefish

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A well done thoughtfully planned twist is fun, but in my opinion too many writers take the lazy way out. It's easy to slap on a "it was all a dream" type of ending, but that feels like I wasted my time.

That's exactly why M Knight Shamalamadingdong slamdunked it with the Sixth Sense - the clues were there, but they were so subtle most people missed them.
I'm amused I'm not the only one who does that to his name.
 

jjdebenedictis

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This sort of thing can work so well, if executed well, but yeah, when it falls flat? It's twice as annoying as it would have been if the author hadn't attempted to be ambitious.

Which is a pity; you don't want bravery in storytelling to be punished, but until the author becomes skilled with their technique, they often are punished (with abject failure) for trying to create something clever. It's a bit like learning to play the bagpipes; until you're really, really good at it, you sound completely freakin' awful.

The Life of Pi is an example of a book where the reader is misled almost to the end of the story, but the clues were there. When all the nagging-at-the-back-of-your-mind, doesn't-quite-fit puzzle pieces finally snap together, it's exhilarating.

Off-topic: I really liked Signs, but the ending was terrible, partly because it was so very, very stupid that water would kill the aliens and that they couldn't figure out how to operate basic human mechanisms. But the scariness, the setting, the underlying premise, the acting (and OMG, that freakin' scene with the kitchen knife) -- all of that was well done. For the next week after watching the movie, I was jumping half out of my skin every time I glimpsed one of those abstracted, monotone store mannequins out of the corner of my eye. Brrr...aliens.
 

TheCuriousOne

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This sort of thing can work so well, if executed well, but yeah, when it falls flat? It's twice as annoying as it would have been if the author hadn't attempted to be ambitious.

Which is a pity; you don't want bravery in storytelling to be punished, but until the author becomes skilled with their technique, they often are punished (with abject failure) for trying to create something clever. It's a bit like learning to play the bagpipes; until you're really, really good at it, you sound completely freakin' awful.

Yes, I'm all for trying new stuff. We've seen it in all forms of art, people who create something new, that might become their own "signature" or create a whole new genre. I thought at first that's what the author was trying to do with the whole let's-put-several-sentences-into-one-sentence-with-plenty-of-commas-thing. But he doesn't do that with his other novels, from what I got from the Look Inside features. And the other books have been edited. So I really don't know what's what, here. With all the other mistakes, I just think it's poor writing. And when you read reviews that say "wait until the end, he ties all the loose ends," well, if that's how one ties loose ends, I think it's a bit lazy, there's no real effort here.
 

Jamesaritchie

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The OP's example is not a plot twist, it's just a bad writer lying to his readers. That wouldn't just annoy me, it would put that writer on my never, ever read again list.
 

quicklime

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Ever read "An Occurrance at Owl Creek Bridge"?

Possibly one of the most famous, and well-done, examples of what you're citing. And incredibly bitter and cutting because of how well it was done (Bierce was a fucking genius, though)......sounds like what you read was a shitty and poorly executed raping of that story and multiple others....

so it can be done well, certainly, but I agree, from the (very) limited info in your post it sounds like a ripoff and a shit move. But at the same time, in far more skilled hands, it can be an incredibly effective tool
 

TheCuriousOne

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But at the same time, in far more skilled hands, it can be an incredibly effective tool

I think so, quicklime. The story had a good premise, it just didn't end up going in the right direction, and ended up rubbishly. I'm sure having an editor in the first place would have made a world of difference already, because if some, if not all, or more (I'm not an editor so goodness knows what else I missed) of these things were picked up and acted on, the book would have at least been easier to read and would have some inaccuracies corrected. Why he didn't bother getting this one edited when all the others were, I have no idea. I think I'm not feeling quite right because I was an easy reader but learning about writing has spoiled it and now I'm much more critical. Kind of worried I'm going to be a bitchy reader forever now :) Hopefully it's just a one-off experience. But no more author friends trying to push their books or their buddies' books onto me now. I'm doing all the choosing :)
 

Samsonet

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Is there a difference between a plot twist that takes place in the middle of the story (say the suspicious witness is proved innocent) and one that takes place at the end (turns out the detective was the real murderer)?
 
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