Points of no return
How to write big plot twists
Over the last few weeks all the talk about defining your arcs, identifying themes and planning out your plots and characters might have left you a bit twitchy, especially if you’re a writer who prefers to find your way as you go.
The standard way of writing a book is very controlled, regardless of how much you plan it out. You start writing, and after huge amount of effort and time you have a first draft. The work is entirely private, known only to yourself, and you then go back and edit it multiple times until it is ‘done’.
You can do this exact process prior to the serialisation of a story, and that’s absolutely a legitimate way to go about it. For me, though, the thrill of serialisation - both as a reader and as a writer - comes primarily from it being a ‘live’ experience, with the creator and readers both discovering the story simultaneously, to some degree. You can still have a buffer, of course, which is certainly advisable, but a serial will often not be ‘finished’ at the point when it begins serialising.
As such, the story will evolve and mutate in a very public space. What you think you’re writing at the start may not be what you wind up with down the line, regardless of how much planning and prep you do. And all the way through you’ll have had people reading, commenting and sharing it, which builds up a kind of symbiotic relationship as well as a commitment of trust. You have to play fair with those readers.
Here’s an example. Let’s say in chapter 8 you kill off a major character. If by the time you get to chapter 14 you realise you’ve made a terrible mistake, you can’t just go back and re-write those earlier chapters, like you could with an offline, non-serialised novel. People have already read the story. The death has happened! What’s done is done and you have to keep moving forwards. The best comparison is with a television show, or an on-going comic, rather than a novel. Comics and TV as mediums have explored serialisation for decades, while prose fiction has studiously ignored it for the most part over the last fifty years.
Of course, there’s nothing technically stopping you from going back and editing old chapters - all platforms you might use support editing after publishing. You can continually mutate your story with edits over time if you want, but remember that it’s a fast way to confuse and lose your growing, loyal audience.1
Once something has happened in the story, it has happened. No going back. That’s what makes major plot beats so terrifying to write, and to publish. I plan ahead so I know what’s coming up, and I always find myself becoming increasingly nervous as I near an upcoming plot twist or big reveal.2
No going back
A character being killed off is a serious point of no return. You get to know your characters. Hanging out with them is fun. Killing them off isn’t just impactful on your readers; it also denies you the possibility of writing for them again.
The more I’ve written in a serialised form the more that anxiety around committing to major plot beats has shifted into an appreciation for how much excitement and inertia is generated. I’m uncovering the story at the same time (roughly) as the readers, and knowing that a big plot beat is coming up fills me with anticipation. How are they going to react to this one??
That tension, in having to own my storytelling decisions and live by them, led to A Day of Faces being a much better and more interesting book. Many of its best ideas only emerged during the writing, once I’d had a chance to live in its world. If I’d been trying to slavishly stick to a source plot outline I’d probably have rejected a lot of those ideas before giving them a chance to breathe. Even ideas which I initially feared might be a misstep, subsequently forced me down entirely new creative paths. Serialisation encourages you to go off-piste, and makes it OK to never look back.
There’s a massive plot twist about a third of the way into No Adults Allowed, which I planned from the start. That made it possible to seed the notion, so that retrospectively readers wouldn’t feel cheated - though hopefully they would still be shocked. The Mechanical Crown has character deaths which were very hard to write, but they also gave the story weight and tension. The week of publication for those chapters was definitely an intense time.
Staying agile as you go is the key. Rolling with the punches: those you inflict on yourself through your own story, and those received from the audience as they react and comment on your work. You know that saying about how no plan survives contact with the enemy? Well, the audience certainly isn’t ‘the enemy’ but you should certainly be prepared for your best laid plans to change and for reactions to be unexpected. I’ll add and remove chapters from the plan as I go along, or drastically change upcoming plot points if I come up with something better, sometimes as a reaction to reader feedback. If a minor supporting character turns out to be more interesting than expected, then I’ll let them stick around for longer even if they were only ever meant to be in one chapter. One of A Day of Faces’ leads was intended to be a single appearance but ended up turning into a firm fan favourite. More drastically, the entire second half of A Day of Faces is fundamentally changed from the initial plan - but it became something far more relevant to the story’s themes and the characters’ motivations.
Rather than the characters being shunted around to fit the whims of a pre-defined and locked plot, the plot instead evolved based on the characters’ actions. The plot can always change, but you don’t want to betray your characters or lose your core themes.
There’s a tangible benefit for readers, too. When something big happens in a serialised story, especially for the readers who are there for the initial run, it feels current and active and as if it just happened. There’s an immediacy applied to the story due to the form of writing and publishing. To those readers who are along for the ride from the start, it feels different to reading a completed novel. Holding a novel in your hands is to know that you have all the book: the story is done, it was written months or years prior, and has gone through numerous processes before reading them. An online serial is like reading without a safety net: the story is still happening, still unfolding. As a reader, you’re more vulnerable and also engaged in a subtly different manner. You’re along for the ride, right next to the author.
It’s not just the big plot twist chapters which are points of no return, after all. For the serial fiction writer, every chapter and every week is a point of no return, to a greater or lesser degree.
Thanks for reading, I hope that was useful! Last week chapter 13 of Tales from the Triverse unlocked for everyone to read and can be found here:
Substack are trialling a new feature which makes running an early access model like this considerably simpler. This should mean that paying subscribers get new chapters in early access, and then everyone else automatically receives that chapter when it unlocks five weeks later.
Meanwhile, I finished at the National Centre for Writing last week and begin a new role at One Further tomorrow. Exciting times! I’m both surprised and pleased that I’ve managed to keep the newsletter going out twice a week despite all of that change.
Thanks,
SKJ
Side note: I really want to write a time travel story in which the protagonist travels back to earlier chapters of the book, and I actually edit those chapters in real time, while people are reading
I also become increasingly gleeful, knowing what I’m about to do the readers.
Personally, the point of no return are the most fun to write. There’s so much pressure on getting it just right! There’s nothing like ruining an otherwise good piece of writing by making the “no-return” cliche or superficial!