Speaker 1: Let's take a little deviation and talk about twists. Every story should have minor twists. Most of these are escalations, like I talked about with Star Wars. You do not need to have a twist ending to have a successful book. A lot of people who are fans of mine know that I like having twists around the ends of my books. But be careful with twists. Escalation twists are almost always a good idea. These are the things where the same plot is happening, but now it's more dangerous, more scary, or larger in scope than you expected. And indeed, some of the Hollywood formulas point out, this is the place where you change the scope of the problem to make it much larger. They'll just say, on page whatever. The Hollywood formats love this. On page this, expand the scope so it becomes more deadly and more dangerous, whatever it is. In Star Wars that's losing Obi-Wan, finding out that the ship is bigger. There's an even bigger ship. There's always bigger fish. And finding out Luke doesn't need just to have adventure, he needs to become a Jedi, and indeed, get revenge on the people who killed his surrogate parents. These are all escalations. None of them are classic twists. Star Wars does not have very many classic twists. The only one that I would call a classic twist is you get to Alderaan and it's been destroyed, and now you have to deal with the Death Star. It does not have a twist ending. If you watched that opening and said, wow, I bet the little ship's going to beat the big ship at the end, and it does, it's not unsatisfying that the reader guessed what's going to happen. If you're properly signposting, they should have an idea of what's coming. That means that when Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy get together, you're not let down. You actually are fulfilled. It doesn't need a twist ending where she realizes that she all along loved this other guy. That works really well in While You Were Sleeping because that movie has different set of signposts. It has a character who has deep flaws and also has made a big lie that's causing all kinds of problems. Different story structure, despite both of them being romances. You don't need one. But if you're going to do one, understand that giving people more than they expected is almost always the best kind of twist. Imagine it as if you are giving a present to your children or your nieces and nephews or whatever young individual in your life, and you find out from them, they're like, I love cars. You're like, oh, you love cars, huh? Do you like matchbox cars? You're like, yes, I love matchbox cars. And they're like, man, I bet Brandon's going to give me a matchbox car for my birthday. And they get really excited by it, and then it sucks. That's a twist. It's not hard to surprise a reader by giving them socks instead of a matchbox car. Really easy to do. And it makes for a terribly unsatisfying experience and is a bad way to use a twist. Twists are easy. Good twists don't do that. Good twists are of a different sort, where the kid opens the thing, and lo and behold, you have learned that they love Super Mario, and you have given them a Super Mario matchbox car. So it combines two of their loves. It's more than they ever wanted. Luke went on his adventure, and he wanted to go on an adventure, but he also found a new surrogate family that's actually kind of more important to him than the adventure. He also saved a whole bunch of people's lives by going on his adventure. That is cooler than just going on an adventure. Luke got, he didn't just give him a matchbox car, he got a whole car. There's like a Mercedes wrapped up under the tree. Because he got what he wanted, plus more. That is the sort of, quote unquote, twist that oftentimes you want to deliver. Now, there are—oh, go ahead. Yeah. STUDENT 1

Speaker 2: So what if you don't know how to build—how are you doing this backwards? You come up with, Luke's going to blow up the Death Star. If I want to have a twist that's going to be more, how do I write that so I give the impression and promise to be smaller than that, to where that's a beneficial thing without it going off the rails? BRANDON Yeah, this is practice. Everything

Speaker 1: is practice. But in this case, there are a couple things you can do. The question is, let's say you want to have Luke destroy the Death Star, and you are planning this and you're ready for it, but you don't want the reader to know that's what you're going to do. You want them to expect something smaller. How do you teach them to accept something smaller, then give them more without them being disappointed they didn't get the small thing, but also make them not sad about the progress of the story? There's lots of ways to go about this. One of the ways is, again, the while you were sleeping way, which is, if you're going to pull a reversal, you show the reader that the character doesn't need what they want. So when they open the package, it's like saying to your nephew, do you want a car for Christmas? Yeah, I like cars. And then you spend the next six months teaching them how cool planes are, and then you give them a drone. So when they open it, instead of being like, oh, it's not what I wanted, they're like, I never realized I actually wanted this other thing, and now you've given it to me. This story is awesome. That's one of the best twists you can pull. It is difficult and requires subtlety, but it is really powerful when it happens. Because it's like, whenever you can do to the reader what is happening to the character. The character thinks they want something. They need something else. When the reader's like, we're not going to get this other thing, but I kind of want it to happen, and then you give it to them through the course of the story, they feel like the character did, and you have a big triumph there. The danger is that they don't get the thing. Usually you try to give them the thing too. You make their quest about vengeance and you put the person that they're getting vengeance on on your metaphoric Death Star and blow it up. They get revenge and they blow up the Death Star. You get that and more. But there are lots of other ways to accomplish this. And it's often this kind of stage illusion magic that writers do where they're telling you to pay attention to this thing while they're foreshadowing this thing. Really powerful when you can do it. Very dangerous because there's a story I like to share about a writer I know, and we are running low on time, but about a writer I know who I met them, my books had taken off and theirs hadn't, and we both released at the same time. And they're like, I don't know why my book didn't take off. I wish it had really done as well as your book. And I had heard of this person's book, and it was a story that I hadn't picked up because a lot of my friends said, this is very like some well-worn fantasy tropes that the genre's just kind of tired of. And so I told him, I heard the buzz around it, that people were just not excited because of these well-worn tropes. He's like, well, no. I upend those all in the third act. I used them all at the beginning, and then I knocked the legs out of the reader, and at the end it's this glorious reveal that it's all postmodern and it's really a good twist. It's a postmodern fantasy book, kind of like Mistborn is, which is one of the things that I did with Mistborn. And this taught me a lesson. It taught me the lesson. I didn't actually go investigate this, because I don't mention the writer's name, and I might be remembering the story wrong. The lesson is important. The lesson is that if all of your promises up front and your progress is pointing towards something very expected, like you are giving someone a by-the-numbers happy romance, and then you twist end, you lose all of your audiences. The ones who picked up that book and kept reading are the ones who wanted the thing you were promising. The people who would love the upsetting of the status quo by the end won't get to your end. So everyone hates this book, except for a small audience. The corollary to that, the counterproposal, is Into the Woods by Sondheim. Into the Woods by Sondheim is the proof that this doesn't hold true for all stories. Into the Woods is all about playing into cliches, upending it, and it becomes this genius work where the second half is a horror story and the first half is the lighthearted fairy tale fantasy. The only thing I can tell you is, remember there are those exceptions, and if you can do what Sondheim did, you can pull off twists like that that completely upend the story. And when those work, because they are the exceptions to the rule, they tend to get a lot of traction and attention, because when that works, it's so surprising and people enjoy it. Unfortunately, most of us, or most authors who are not quite as skilled or don't want in the right situation, have the other thing, where the people who would enjoy the upending of all of the mores of that given genre don't get to that part because they get bored by the opening. And the people who would love that hate it when it happens. So keep that in mind. Yeah?

Speaker 2: Wouldn't you say that part of that too is because people trusted Sondheim?

Speaker 1: Yeah, part of that is people trust Sondheim. That's an unfair part about this. People trust me. Once you establish yourself as an author, like Way of Kings by a new author may not have done as well, because it has a steep learning curve. It hits you with a lot of characters up front, and it's kind of brutal with those characters. But people know that Brandon books generally have these points of light. They know I'm good at endings, and they know I'm good at bringing things together, so they're willing to give me a benefit of doubt that a new author doesn't get. And indeed, I mean, Sondheim had worked on many famous musicals before that. People trusted him and knew he was kind of twisted. And so the people who go to a Sondheim play at that point are like, I kind of want something twisted. Oh, this happy-go-lucky fairy tale is a promise, because Sondheim would never do that, that it's going to go really wrong for these people. And they get what they want, and that's part of why Into the Woods works.