I just got back from my annual writers conference in St. Pete Beach.
This was my eighth year attending, and as always, I came home with a notebook full of ideas, and a renewed appreciation for getting to spend a few days with old and new friends who understand this business and write books similar to mine. We talked about storytelling, marketing, and all the things that go into making a living as a writer.
But one idea from the conference has stuck with me more than anything else.
It was about how to write a really good twist.
For years, I thought a great twist was about misdirection. You plant clues. Throw in a red herring or two. Point the reader in one direction, then surprise them near the end.
But that’s not really how the best twists work.
The best stories are actually building two tracks at the same time.
There’s the track the reader believes is the main story. That’s where most of their attention goes. It’s the problem they think needs to be solved, the mystery they think they’re following, the destination they believe the story is heading toward.
Then there’s another track running quietly beside it.
It seems less important. Maybe it’s a relationship. A secondary mystery. A character detail. Something off that the reader notices but assumes is simply part of the scenery.
Until somewhere late in the story…
The tracks switch.
Suddenly, the reader realizes that the thing they thought was the side story was actually the main story all along. And it recontextualizes the entire story altogether.
And if you’ve done it well, the twist doesn’t feel random.
It feels inevitable.
All those little moments that seemed completely insignificant during the first read suddenly mean something different now. The reader looks back at everything that came before that moment and sees the same story through completely different eyes.
I love that.
And the more I’ve thought about it since coming home, the more I’ve wondered whether life sometimes works the same way.
Most of us have a pretty clear idea of what the “main track” is supposed to be.
It’s the job. The responsibilities. The bills. The schedule. The things that demand our attention because they have to get done.
And then, running quietly alongside all of that, there’s something else.
The thing you keep thinking about.
The thing you make time for even when you don’t have much time to spare.
The thing you would probably still do even if nobody ever noticed.
We tend to treat those things like the B story.
Something important, maybe.
But not the main thing.
I’ve spent a lot of time lately wondering if we always get that right. Maybe some of the things that we think are happening on the edges of our lives aren’t on the edges at all.
Maybe they’re telling us something.
Not that we should suddenly abandon everything else. Not that every hobby needs to become a career or every interest needs to become some grand purpose in our lives.
Just that occasionally, it might be worth paying attention to the other track.
Because sometimes the biggest twist isn’t changing the direction of your story.
It’s realizing which story you’ve actually been living all along. -Ken