Third Act Twist

Writing mystery/action on a pro level, after years of writing romance and training myself to think analytically about it, has been really interesting. Over the last 7(!!) years that I've been doing Zoe, I've read a lot about romance structure and feel like I have a pretty solid handle on how romance beats work, but I don't have nearly as much of a grounding in the theory, so to speak, of mystery, so it's been interesting coming up with a lot of it on my own and feeling out intuitively how it all works.

One of the things I've realized recently that I generally do when I'm plotting mystery or action/thriller - what makes it feel "complete" to me, in the way that romance needs certain beats to be complete - is something I've started calling the "third act twist" in my head, although actually, it doesn't necessarily happen in the third act; my books are not that tightly plotted. It can be anywhere from halfway to most of the way to the end.

What it is, though, is the point when the characters realize there's a second layer to the situation than what they knew about. The mystery isn't just "who did the crime"; in order for it to feel satisfying to me from a plotting perspective (though I don't always manage to do this; I don't think I did it in Dragon and Detective) there's a second level to it, where the characters find out that some aspect of what they thought was going on is just flat wrong, and this reorients their goals, points them at something new, and sets up the transition into a climax that is very different from what they thought the climax was going to be.

Critically, it's not just "you didn't know this" but also "your assumptions were wrong"; it's the rug-pull of thinking that they, and the reader, know approximately what's being set up, if not the exact details, and then finding out there's a second layer to it that's going to come into play in the climax and ends up setting up a different climax than the one the characters thought they were headed to. It's not revealing who the killer is, but rather, revealing that the victim isn't really dead, the entire crime is a cover for some other crime, the person they thought they were on the run from is actually an ally and there's a bigger bad out there, the person they've been trusting all along is about to betray them, etc.

I didn't do it in Dragon and Detective except perhaps in a very tangential way, and did it without realizing I was doing it in the subsequent Keeley books; then when I was plotting out another book this week, my plot was falling flat until I suddenly realized that I needed to add a second, hidden layer to the mystery, and then all of a sudden the whole thing clicked and came alive. It involves a certain level of reality-shifting - in order to get that satisfying "click" feeling, you need to find out that some early plot-driving assumption, on the part of both the reader and the characters, was wrong, and that sets the plot spinning off in a different direction than it looked like it was headed.

I don't think that you always need this to make the genre work, I'm sure there are plenty of perfectly excellent examples that don't have it, but by this point it's unconsciously become part of my Keeley plot formula.

Examples from my other Keeley books, with specific plot spoilers:

( Spoilers for the books published to date )

In general I think the main Third Act Twist variations I've been working with so far are: some aspect of the crime isn't what you thought it was, someone who was supposed to be a trustworthy ally isn't, or an antagonist who up to this point appeared to be the Big Bad switching sides and helping them against the real Big Bad.

For all I know there's an actual plotting-beat term for this, but Third Act Twist works fine for me; it describes what it does, and I know what I'm talking about.

Having figured this out is going to be immensely helpful for plotting this kind of book going forward, because I think when I get stuck on the big-picture plotting level, the solution is often just figuring out the second layer to the mystery and weaving it into the first.

It's also kind of interesting because this sort of sudden reversal of expectations/realization that Everything Was A Lie is exactly what you don't want in romance.

FFFX reveals!

I failed catastrophically to rec my amazing gifts during the anonymous period, so I will just roll that into my new-fic-announcement post.

First, my amazing gifts:

Circle Like a Snake by scioscribe (Falcon & Winter Soldier, gen, 14K wds)
Zemo shows up on Sam and Bucky's doorstep with a mission: help him rescue Sokovian refugee children from a HYDRA lab.
He also has a new, Raft-provided accessory: a tracker bracelet that's putting a slow drip of poison into his veins.

Poisoned with 24 hours to live, my beloved! ♥ And it delivers beautifully on everything that is suggested by that premise.

Hold On by sheron (Falcon & Winter Soldier, gen, 7K wds)
A secret video from the Raft underwater prison reveals to Sam and Bucky the experiments that were conducted on the human prisoners there. They race to the rescue.

Thoroughly satisfying wingfic with wonderfully visceral and body-horrory wing descriptions and loads of h/c. ♥

I will be imagining all the sequels to both of these.


And here is what I wrote:

Escape Hatch (Falcon & Winter Soldier, gen, 10K wds)
"You need to listen to me," Zemo said. "I've been sent to kill you, Sam. There is a bomb in my back. I think we can safely say—" He smiled briefly, humorlessly, at their horrified expressions. "—That the mission did not go as planned."

Just your basic (mostly) fake betrayal with an implanted bomb. As you do.

Beads on a String (Falcon & Winter Soldier, gen, 14K wds)
When Wakanda pulls Zemo out of the Raft and sends him on a mission, Ayo is tasked with being his handler. But there is more to it than either of them knows.

I nabbed this one as a pinch hit, because the "Ayo working with Zemo" prompt was so compelling and I really enjoyed working both character arcs around that. Ayo's POV is really fun to write, plus bonus Wakandan worldbuilding.