Why fan-fiction does twist endings better (Trust, Game of Immortals, Happy Ending) · 5:41am Jan 3rd, 2014
A lot of my stories have twist endings. Twist endings are hazardous because the twist itself is typically a small idea that could be expressed in a few sentences, but you need an entire story leading up to it to make the reader care enough that the twist will have impact. It’s easy for the twist to overshadow everything else in the author’s mind, which results in 20,000 words of limp story followed by a one-paragraph zinger.
So you really have to write two stories: the twist, and the story that makes you care about the people involved in the twist. The twist in Memento or The Crying Game can be described in a paragraph, but you need an entire movie with its own plot just to draw the viewer in for the twist.
Then you must make sure these two stories match thematically. The twist in The Crying Game is that after already having gotten misty-eyed over a dead man’s love relationship, the main character suddenly learns the dead man was gay, and has accidentally stumbled into understanding with uncomfortable clarity a point of view that he previously thought was utterly alien to him. The entire movie leading up to that point, the IRA and terrorism and kidnapping, was constructed to mirror that single moment, by leading the anti-terrorist soldier to understand the viewpoint of the IRA terrorists. It’s an extra story that gave us a character we cared about, that can hand that character off to the twist ending story without clashing with it thematically.
Twist endings are much easier to write well in fanfiction, because you don’t need to write an entire second story just to make us care about the characters. I wrote two very short twist-ending stories, “Trust” and “Game of Immortals” (in “The Twilight Zone”, formerly “Pony Tales”), that can be as short as they are because we already know the characters. My latest story, “Happy Ending”, is an even better example of this, because you can compare it to the famous 1948 short story by Henry Kuttner, also called “Happy Ending”, that used the same twist. The 1948 story is clever, but you have to wade through perhaps 15,000 words of an unremarkable space-conquest story just to get to the twist ending. (That was a depressingly common problem with science fiction stories in the 1940s and 1950s, exemplified by the many short stories Isaac Asimov wrote that were merely set-ups for a bad pun.) I think my story works much better, partly because it has an extra twist, but mainly because I didn’t have to spend 10,000 words developing a new character.
(Although now that I think about it, I completely rewrote Blueblood, so perhaps I did develop a new character. Many science fiction authors still say the best science fiction story ever written is Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall”, which takes 14,000 words to build its characters up just enough to throw them away for an utterly-implausible twist ending less entertaining than the single sentence uttered by John Campbell that was the prompt for the story. Really, 1940s science fiction has a lot to answer for.)
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About "Happy Ending":
“Happy Ending” is Safe For Ghost and Other Sensitive Souls. It’s tagged “tragedy” and “dark”, but it should be tagged “impish”. My goal is for you to say “Bad Horse, you bastard,” not “Bad Horse, you monster.” Also, it has a happy ending. Heh. Much thanks to Cypher, who explained to me why the original version of the story was lousy, and pointed out three rough spots in the second version.
It still isn't a very good story, though, except for the twist.
“Happy Ending” has been in the EQD queue for three months now. I clicked “submit” before hearing back from EQD because my last three EQD stories (Moving On, Long Distance, Alicorn Cider) weren’t featured. “Alicorn Cider” got nearly 3,000 views and 230 likes in its first three days, which I think was more than any stories that were featured at that time. So I think knighty changed the featured box algorithm to measure fraction of viewers that like, or favorite, a story (though number of comments also appears to be relevant now). EQD readers are only about half as likely as fimfiction readers to like or favorite, probably because many of them don’t have fimfiction accounts. So, whereas a year ago releasing a story on EQD and fimfiction at the same time guaranteed being featured, now it might prevent you from being featured. It certainly doesn’t seem to help.
Although I'd agree that twist endings are easier to do in fanfic, not sure I'd agree that:
Honestly, if you're gonna put a twist ending in, you need to stop as soon as possible after the big reveal. The Twilight Zone (the show) did this wonderfully. Yes, they had 22-ish minutes to fill up first, but the twist only mattered because of the expectations we had from the earlier part. Imagine a famous twist, except the reveal isn't hidden. It's the first line. AKA the premise. Very different, right?
1677039 I don't understand your point. You put the twist at the end in either case. Fan-fiction has the advantage that you can get to that ending faster, and without facing the problem of blending what are in some sense two different stories.
Safe for Ghost? Well, alright then. Guess i'll give it a looksy.
Well, I liked the Foundation Trilogy in any case, though I suppose the only other story by Asimov I have read was a short story I can't recall the name of, where humans waging war had forgotten how to math, due to reliance on computers, and had thus come to view computers as more valuable than human life. When I was younger I was impressed, but now it seems kind of anvilicious.
1677076
Sorry, maybe wasn't clear. The twist only matters when it's subverting the status quo you've established. My disagreement lies with your assertion that the two stories are separate. They aren't. Without whatever you're established as 'normal' to begin with, there's nothing at all to twist in the first place.
Really, I feel like all you're saying is "Fanfic is easier, because you don't have to establish anything. It's all done for you."
I think I'll have to disagree. The fact that fanfic draws on an established world and characters is as much a hindrance to short fiction as it is an aid; when starting a fanfic, you only have a rough idea of a character's personality. You don't know how the individual author envisions the character. If the writer doesn't establish this, then the twist (and any reaction to it) is the only real definition of personality, which makes it more of a premise than a twist. I'm not explaining myself well, and my heat is out so typing is difficult (my fingers are literally numb), but this is the gist of my thoughts. A fanfic with no development will have as weak a twist ending as an original story with no development.
Also, Nightfall was pretty okay. I don't see how anyone puts it as best short ever, but it is pretty good. Better than most other Asimov stories, certainly.
1677105 Most stories need to be long whether they are fanfic or not, in order to be stories at all. Twist endings outside fanfic still need to be long, to suck the reader in. Non-fanfic twist-endings must usually be long; fanfic non-twist-endings must usually be long; fanfic twist endings don't need to be. Also, fanfic twist endings are less likely to suffer from the most-common failing of twist endings, which is having a long, carelessly-written story that the author wrote only to make us care about the characters before springing the twist ending.
I think the actual rule is "twist endings are very powerful in serials, because you've had more time to get used to the characters, and thus, your attachment to them is pulled on more strongly by the twist you've set up." Honestly, this is true of twists in general; the longer the work, the more a twist pulls on you, because you are more invested in how things were. So fanfictions, being parts of serials, or related to them, in effect, allow for more powerful twist endings, and ultimately twists in general.
I think that twist endings CAN be pulled off with pretty short things though, but I think that character-based twist endings are much, much harder to pull off in a short story. You are unlikely to care all that much about the characters, as it is hard to make someone really bond with someone in a few thousand words. The power of Celestia in Trust is that we KNOW the character, and as such, we can better understand what she's saying, and the impact is greater than if she was just manipulating people - she's trapped, and it isn't about power or anything else, she actually IS good, but feels she has no choice but to do what she does.
I mean, there are short stories like The Last Question, The Nine Billion Names of God, The Lottery, and An Ordinary Day, With Peanuts which have twist endings. It is hard to write a short story quite as punchy as Trust is in a thousand words, but I think The Cough is a thousand words long and would actually be MORE effective as a non-pony fic, because it would make more sense, though I think it really would want to be about 2k words long, maybe even 3k. The Writing On the Wall would also have also been better as a non-pony story, I think, and it is also short (4k words).
But those aren't really character-based short stories, and the twists in them are about bigger things - The Cough being an arguable exception.
1677039
It entirely depends on what exactly you're doing. Obviously a twist ending, by definition, happens at the END, but there are definitely stories which have what could be twist endings in the middle which are quite effective. Fight Club, for instance, the twist comes a good chunk before the end of the movie, and it really serves to lead INTO the climax, rather than acting AS the climax.
Moreover, the original Twilight Zone's twist endings didn't always work - some of them were very effective, but others were very meh. Still other episodes didn't even have twist endings, really - the infamous William Shatner episode, for instance, didn't have a twist at all really. When they work, they really work, but some of them really fell flat.
Fanfic already sets up expectations so you can subvert them rather simply using fewer words than in non-fanfic fiction. I'm with you there.
As for why fanfic authors like twist endings so much, well, allow me to be harsh for a moment[1] and say that a twist ending is a bit of a theatrical squib. It's loud and flashy and seems to be so easy to do that it is a great draw. And if you are of a writerly persuasion you've probably always wanted to do one, too.
[1] And note that by this I am absolutely not referring to you. Actually, to be honest, I'm mostly referring to me.
Hmm. I just read a plot summary of Nightfall online, and I've imagined at least two reasons you could find it implausible. I'm curious to know more, and also learn more about your take on the history of speculative fiction. Should I be reading more of the classics?
1677599
I dunno. "The classics" used to mean 1930s "Golden Age" science fiction, but I never figured out why it was called a golden age. Maybe because there were no rules and it seemed anything was possible. But most of what people wrote then was aimed at teenage boys, and so to a mature adult it's crap. Like Buck Rogers (the original novel).
Then there was the John Campbell era of hard yet human science fiction, when stories often took values accepted as universal truths and ran them up against hard facts, as for instance in "The Cold Equations". They usually had a very masculine perspective. There were lots of great writers: Eric Frank Russell, Cordwainer Smith, Algis Budrys. I don't think that the most-famous authors--Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein--are the best from that era. I was a huge Isaac Asimov fan as a kid, though now I realize he couldn't write really human characters unless he made them robots--possibly due to some ingrained distrust of humans as a race, though in person he seemed to have no such taint.
We also had Ray Bradbury, who isn't as much a science fiction author as a--phantasmagorical writer? The word "fantasy" fits his work better than does "science fiction", but still fits poorly. But definitely read Bradbury. Kurt Vonnegut also wrote from outside the SF mainstream, doing something different, but doing it very well.
The 1960s had "New Wave" SF, which brought in more emphasis on sociology, but also on stylistic pretension. Like, the "literary" author of the 1960s was Samuel Delaney, but I found nearly everything he wrote pretentious and empty, though often beautifully and cleverly phrased. Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light and his Amber chronicles are a high point of that period. Some would say Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion instead, but I never read it. And of course Star Trek was very sociological.
The 1970s had Dune and Watership Down, both written outside the SF&F clubhouse. Mainstream at the time was Larry Niven doing SF world-building.
In general I'd recommend starting with short story collections--try reading the Nebula and Hugo award winning short story for every year. That'll give you an idea what was going on. The Nebula is awarded by writers, and when it goes wrong, it's by going to pretentious literary experiments. The Hugo is popular vote at Worldcon, and when it goes wrong, it's by going to popular stories with lots of action but little to say.