you are in a maze of twisty plots, all alike

[coraa]

If you're a writer (or a producer or director or a musician, and maybe also if you're a visual artist of some stripe, though I'm less knowledgeable about the tropes there) and you're a one-trick pony, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Writing the same thing with variations isn't a problem if your audience likes the one thing you do, if you enjoy your niche, and if you make it fresh enough to not bore people. Some of my favorite writers I like because they do more or less the same thing but in different ways, and I think I'd be disappointed if they got too different.

However.

If your one trick involves a plot twist, you need to realize that by the, oh, third time, or fourth at the outside, everyone is going to know the twist is there and be looking for it. The story damn well better work even if the twist is not a surprise. And if seeing the twist in advance prevents them from connecting with the material (because they see the joke coming, because they're detaching so they won't be hurt too much when you bring down the hammer on their foot, because they're too distracted looking for the twist to connect with your events and characters, because they're not seeing your characters as characters but as types), you might have a problem.

Comments

[donaithnen.livejournal.com]

Is this post brought about by any author in particular? (I ask because i'm always amused by authors doing silly things =)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Joss Whedon. (I'd thought it for a long time about M. Night Shyamalan, but it's Whedon who has me thinking it now.) I'm not sure whether I should get more specific, for fear of being inadvertently spoileriffic. Well, actually, I'll go ahead and say it's Dr. Horrible, and put the rest of the spoilers behind a highlight-to-read greyout, which, if you're reading comments via e-mail and don't get html encoding, don't look at the next line:

Spoiler! Select by mouse to read:

We started to watch it, and I actually said, "It's a Whedon production, which means that I will be encouraged to laugh and smile and get emotionally invested and sympathize with the characters and then they will be crushed into painful tiny pieces and I will feel dreadful." Doubly so as soon as a love interest showed up, because Joss is particularly fond of taking happy relationships or even potentially-happy ones and grinding them to dust. So when I watched, I didn't really connect with the characters; I held myself at a distance. (I did enjoy Dr. Horrible's initial blog, because it was funny, but I couldn't invest myself in any of the rest.) And sure enough, by the end they had all been crushed into little tiny pieces, metaphorically and literally. Not only did I go 'eh, predictable,' it prevented me from connecting with the characters, because I knew that if I did so, I'd likely feel awful.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

*waves to M. Night Sh-whatsit*

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Ha. Yes, precisely. Where the game of figure-out-the-plot-twist totally eclipses everything else...

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, when people guess from the PREVIEWS(It's a ghost. He's the villain. They live in modern times. I have seen one of those, and only because I'm a comicbook geek at heart.) there's no point in watching.

[neonelephant.livejournal.com]

As such an author, though, you can also try to avoid the audience guessing the plot twist by failing to foreshadow it in any way whatsoever; I find this to be unsatisfying as well.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah. But it's not so much that twists should never be predictable -- even the best-written twists will be guessed by some people (and so opaque as to appear to be out of the blue to others). It's being too repetitive, so that the presence or absence of hints is irrelevant, and the existence of the twist is obvious because you are the writer.

[clairebaxter.livejournal.com]

Anne McCaffrey.