Film Courage: What are the best ways to build plot twists?
Andrew Warren, Author/Screenwriter: I think you have to find what’s organic to your story. I do think you need to surprise the reader. I’ll try to think Okay, this is the way the scene would go but what if we went this way instead? I haven’t seen that. But I also think you need to be honest with yourself when you’re doing that, Does this work better? Just because you haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it works. I would rather be effective than novel. I mean sure it’s good. I do try to create new things, I do try to go in unexpected directions but if you’re going in a direction that’s not satisfying, I think you’re writing for yourself and not for your readers at that point.
As an example, I wrote a short story once about a guy who is a werewolf and every time the full moon comes out he chains himself up in the basement and he tranquilizes himself so that he won’t hurt anyone and then he has this whole process of how he gets out of it the next day. Then one day he does all this but someone is still mauled in the town he’s in. It’s sort of trying to figure out How could this have happened? I know I was chained up. I know I did everything and he’s trying to figure out what’s going on. When you get to the end of the story you find out there’s another werewolf that came to town and to me I thought that was really cool, but I remember one of my friends read it and was like I was kind of disappointed because I wanted to see how he figured out how to get out. I thought that was going to be the whole thing that maybe the wolf side of him is becoming smarter (something along those lines). I had never even thought about that but it made me think that for him he found that story unsatisfying. I think it’s better to satisfy the reader when you can than be different for the sake of being different…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
Film Courage - Empowering Creatives 