Here’s a post at Jane Friedman’s blog: No Twists for Twists’ Sake: Earn Your Ending
Imagine you’ve just picked up the latest buzzy thriller, the one that has everyone on social media raving about the “shocking twist.” You start reading, and you’re really into it. It’s a murder mystery with no shortage of suspects—the victim Jane’s cheating husband Hugo, her jealous best friend, her unstable coworker, an obsessive delivery person—and you’re having fun guessing which one is the culprit. You turn to the final page, full of anticipation … only to discover the murderer was the victim’s long-lost twin sister, a character who was never once mentioned in the preceding 300+ pages. What?
I’ve seen this, this exact thing, at least twice. I can’t quite remember where, just what. I mean, in one case, there was a lot of blood at the murder scene, great pools of blood, enough to establish the victim must have died even though there was no body. Then it turned out the identical twin sister … maybe there were actually three identical triplets? … not sure I remember for sure, but I do remember the blood was donated by multiple identical twins in order to fake the murder of one of them.
What book WAS that? Does that sound familiar to anybody? It’s on the tip of my tongue, I swear.
Anyway, I didn’t mind all that much. I knew something was up. Maybe the author signaled the identical twin, though … I think not. But I’m not sure, because obviously my memory is vague about the details.
ANYWAY, is there a word for this — I mean, an unfair twist? Because I think there is, or at least sort of. I think this is adjacent to a false miracle — I mean to deus ex machina / diabolus ex machina. It’s really close to the same thing! Because a deus ex ending comes out of nowhere, and this is a plot twist out of nowhere. The difference is a deus ex ending is a false miracle, while this … what is this? It’s a real plot twist, but it’s unfair. Okay, it’s an unjustified plot twist, and deus ex is an unjustified miracle. That’s why they’re sort of the same thing: they both come at the end of a story (or important scene) and they’re both unjustified.
And they’re both added to the story because the author lacks the judgment to realize the solution is unjustified, or else because the author lacks the creativity to either justify the solution or find a different way to handle the ending.
Anyway, a plot twist that isn’t justified is indeed a problem, sometimes a big problem. The linked post offers ten solutions if an author is struggling to justify the twist at the end, starting with the extremely obvious (scatter relevant details throughout the story so the source of the twist doesn’t come out of nowhere).
A clever suggestion is the addition of what the post calls “interstitial elements,” meaning newspaper clippings or social media posts or other such elements, which might be used to set up the twist. I like that sort of thing, so I think that’s a neat idea.
Other suggestions at the linked post, which is slanted toward mysteries and thrillers, but of course plot twists are a thing for lots of stories in basically every genre.
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Specifically for murder mysteries, there’s a set of rules, including the reader should have all relevant information. Should be able to solve the mystery.
Mysteries have the advantage that you can set up a plot twist because they are intellectual. Other works may suffer because a plot twist would also need to be dramatic.
^ Not necessarily. (Sherlock Holmes). Although an argument can be made that those aren’t murder mysteries, but stories about a detective investigating murder.
I personally am fond of one called Murder with Peacocks. While the reader is presented with the clues, there is also an amazing count of extraneous things unrelated to the murder all going on at once. They kind of get in the way. Of course, the confounded peacocks do save our narrator’s life at a critical moment during the finale. It may even in her opinion make up for the headache they’ve been all through the book. I will say, that at several points during the story, the killer is nearly fingered, but they can’t get past a particular hurdle for how he could have done it in the window of time it was done.
Hard to do social media in a non-high tech fantasy or historical setting. I guess you could do market place gossip and travelers carrying news/rumors instead.
I flinched when I saw unreliable narrator suggested as a way to handle it. Over the last few years I’ve seen far too many sloppy claims of ‘x book has an unreliable narrator’ when it doesn’t. It’s maybe a non-standard third person POV, or omniscient or something else, but it’s rarely an actual unreliable narrator. I’ve gotten as wary of those claims as of ‘x is Mary Sue’ because competent. Or something.
Elaine, do they maybe mean that the first person (or close third) narrator makes mistakes / has opinions / isn’t always right about everything? I could see how ‘unreliable narrator’ might have as broad a range of usage as ‘Mary Sue’ sometimes does.
This is a really interesting observation, Elaine. I wonder if it’s just as Craig suggests — the narrator is mistaken about something — which I don’t think ought to qualify because it’s juuuuuust about universally true that the author will be mistaken about things over the course of the story.
As a rule, the term “unreliable narrator” pushes me away from a story, because I’m afraid the narrator will be really screwed up somehow, as in Chime by Billingsley; or be deliberately lying to the reader, but the author isn’t really good enough to make that work. Yet, if the author IS good enough to make this work, as Dorothy Dunnett did in one of her (really good, and look at this, they’ve been reissued as ebooks) Dolly novels. Wow, it was so much trouble to track them all down twenty years ago or whenever I did it.
Anyway, my point is, if it’s done well enough and the narrator isn’t too angsty a character, I can like unreliable narrators. But a lot of the time, I don’t.
It’s often the narrator is mistaken (the narrator or POV character, not the author has forgotten something) has the wrong idea – that doesn’t make the narrator unreliable. It means that character is wrong about whatever it is. Maybe it will be corrected over the course of the story.
sometimes it’s that the narrator’s mind has been messed with. Would you categorize Sevastien from Invictus unreliable? I think not. I’m not sure I could spell out why, and this isn’t the time, I’m expecting an interruption soon. I’ll think about it.
Unreliable to me, is the narrator of Chime, or the child who is describing and interpreting things the adults are doing with no knowledge of what those actions and words are conveying to someone more experience. It isn’t someone who is simply wrong, especially if other parts of the text make the error clear. It can be someone lying to everyone including the reader, like I think Christie had.
Wasn’t it Dorothy L Sayers who set out the “rules” for detective fiction writers?
Ooh the Dolly books as ebooks! I do actually possess (ancient and tattered) copies of most of these, but I think I need to treat myself to one or two favourites!
The best known list of rules is from Ronald Knox. This essay includes his commentary:
https://www.umsl.edu/~gradyf/film/knoxdecalogue.htm
A solid and admirable list of rules, Mary Catelli! Fun to read as well.
Back on the unreliable narrator here: I went off and did some thinking, and realized I needed to figure out what an actual well written deliberate unreliable narrator IS. And came up with a couple categories that all get conflated into the one moniker:
1) The tall-tale teller “and there I was hanging by one hand from the cliff, raging water below me, raging fire above me….” I suppose that might be an actual occurrence, but odds are it’s exaggerated if anything involving cliffs or fire happened.
2)the narrator who is lying to everyone and the reader.
3) the narrator who genuinely thinks X and is wrong, what is true/accurate/correct is YZ. This often leads to statements of fact that turn out to be just not so. Can be about anything from how the actual metaphysics of the world work, to how to fix the bicycle. Middle of DEERSKIN, when Lissar has run away, and thinks she’s ok, but the reader can tell she’s not may count as an example. Some of Corwin’s statements about Amber in the early books.
3a) Or whether or not their upbringing was abusive, or they have PTSD. This came up when the Teen brought up gaslighting, and what would that make the narrator?
4) the narrator who lacks context or experience or something to interpret and relay the scene accurately. Most frequently seen with child narrators. Could also be a person with brain damage, or SF induced unbreakable deep cover (Sevastien from Invictus), or Tristan from Fortress, especially early on.
5) the one who withholds important information that would put a very different interpretation on what is going on. See Turner’s The Thief, Dunnett’s Game of Kings.
6) however one would categorize the interpretation that Patricia Wrede found: “I actually saw an article that argued that a ghost was automatically an “unreliable narrator” because ghosts don’t exist.”
7) Seen in fandom discussions – the narrator who hasn’t yet had the realization that they do by the end of the book. No, they are not necessarily unreliable in the middle of the book on that subject. It depends on how the author wrote it. And this is probably a subset of the third category. My parents aren’t abusive! -> I guess they are. I don’t love Mr B. -> I love Mr B, and want to spend my life with him. That’s growing and learning and rethinking, not necessarily being unreliable.
In my opinion only the second and fourth are the true unreliable narrator, assuming that in all the other examples narratives the mistakes are corrected (if important). And even in the case of type #2, the lies need to be laid out – or enough of them – to set things straight for the reader at the end.
I hope someone finds this helpful.
That’s a really neat list, Elaine! I almost always think of “unreliable narrators” as #2, but I think you’re right about Syova, where he keeps thinking “I have nothing to hide,” and “I’m telling the truth,” and believes it. Of course the reader is supposed to get that maybe there’s something hinky going on.
In Chime, the narrator isn’t deliberately lying, but she’s so wrong. Does she know she’s wrong, deep down? Is that why this feels like a great example of an unreliable narrator? Or doesn’t it seem that way to you? Is Chime an example of #7?
The first examples of unreliable narrators that I always think of are the madmen who narrate a lot of Poe’s stories. I’m surprised not to see that type on your list — not that I read a lot of them, but Poe left a strong impression on me as a child.
Poe’s stories made absolutely no impression on me, which is how I missed that example. But if they’re lunatics, they may fall into – or mix – #3 or #4. Completely wrong foundational assumptions, and misinterpreting everything due to those assumptions and mental illness.