What I Learned about Plot Twists from Middle-schoolers

Some plot twists are conventional.

I taught Language Arts to students in seventh and eighth grades for eight years. We wrote a lot of stories together. We wrote myths and monster stories, science fiction and coming-of-age stories. 

In particular, I taught eighth graders how to write monster stories. 

Eighth grade, in our school’s curriculum, was all about America. So in LA, we read American short stories, including “Cannibalism in the Cars,” by Mark Twain, “The Tell-tale Heart,” by Edgar Allen Poe, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Blood-burning Moon,” by Jean Toomer, and “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson. 

Americans have always liked scary stories. Monsters can be found in the shadowy corners of nature, society, technology, and our own minds. 

I gave my students as much liberty to express themselves as possible, but I did have rules. I provided a template to keep them on track so that they finished their stories (which we edited), and I enforced prohibitions, such as on the use of existing monsters (no trademarked movie monsters allowed) and on the use of weapons (no guns to solve problems). 

So I gave them a template, and we worked our way through it step by step. We started by identifying a confined space. Then we chose our monster. And then we chose our hero.

One of the most surprising things I found after teaching the monster story for eight years was that kids think of plot twists right away. 

What if the hero is the monster? What if the monster is in her head? What if the monster is a nice monster? What if it’s all a dream? 

The students come up with these instantly, like on Day One. It’s not like they think for days before they stumble on a plot twist. These twists seem to feel, sincerely to the students, like some kind of leap of imagination no one must have thought of before. Plot twists come to them like a personal revelation, a gift, a sudden insight. 

And yet . . . every year, like clockwork, the students instinctively come up with the very same so-called twists.

It happens so predictably that it’s as if the twists themselves are conventional story structures, and what we consider a conventional story structure is the exception. 

In the early years, I was surprised by how fast the students offered up plot twists. I thought these were super-creative kids. When it kept happening, I thought they were getting these twists from shows, movies, comic books, and YA novels. 

But the twists were the same every year. The plot twists weren’t as varied as they would have been if the students had been inspired by the thousands of stories in popular media.

So when it happened every year, I had to come up with prohibitions that headed off these predictable plot twists.

“The monster is real,” I insisted. It is not in the hero’s head. It is not a figment of the imagination. It is not the projected dream of the hero. It is not the hero transformed at night. The monster is its own being within the story. The monster is real.

“The monster is a monster,” I insisted. It is not nice. It is not friendly. It does not spare anyone. It does not stop coming for the hero. The monster is a killing machine. Death is a fact of life, and we are writing a monster story. The monster is a real monster.

I had to give a speech like that every year to head off the inevitable requests. 

Can I make the hero be the monster? Can the monster live in the dreamworld? Can the hero and monster be friends? What if the monster didn’t hurt anyone? 

And so on.

The persistence of these plot twists got me thinking harder about why the students thought of them so quickly. They’re supposed to be twists, after all, yet students came up with them like they were obvious.

Why were students drawn to these particular plot twists? 

What did the plot twists offer that tempted the students? 

Were the students instinctively resisting something about the story that drove them to devise plot twists? 

And then it hit me.

Conflict.

They were resisting conflict.

A plot twist offered a way to defuse conflict.

With the right plot twist, the student could resolve conflict before the story even began.

Students had felt trapped by something, and a plot twist offered a way out.

It wasn’t that they felt trapped by conventional storytelling. They felt trapped by conflict itself.

More precisely, they felt trapped by the uncertainty of conflict. They didn’t yet know how to resolve the conflict between the hero and the monster (we’d just started, after all), and a plot twist offered a path toward certainty.

If the hero and the monster were the same, that revelation ended the conflict.

If the monster were a figment of the hero’s imagination, that revelation ended the conflict.

If the monsters were nice and didn’t hurt anyone, then there was barely any conflict to resolve.

Students were thinking about their stories like they were problems to solve as fast as possible. They wanted answers, not uncertainty. 

They wanted peace, not conflict. They wanted values to plug into the unknowns, and they wanted to solve the ending before they’d written the first sentence.

It reminded me of advice that is often given to mature fiction writers. 

Writers have a tendency to protect their heroes and keep them from trouble. Writers are empathetic folks, and we tend to defuse drama before anyone gets hurt. Writers are tolerant people. They may avoid conflict in real life and, in fiction, sometimes fail to push their heroes into difficult, troubling, harrowing, dramatic situations. 

So the advice to nice writers is a reminder to be mean. Be mean to your heroes. Get them in trouble. Put them in situations of conflict. 

And let them struggle to figure a way out.

Students feel those same desires to protect their characters, to avoid conflict, and to be nice. They express that desire by offering a plot twist that heads off conflict from the start.

At the beginning of writing a monster story, students don’t know how to resolve the conflict. How does the hero fight and kill the monster? It’s scary to think about. So let’s not think about it. A plot twist offers an easy denial of the uncertainty of resolving that conflict. 

It’s all a dream. It’s all in your head. Everyone is nice. We’re all friends here.

Whew. Glad that’s over.

So that’s one thing a plot twist offers: a quick fix to restore the peace.

Another thing a plot twist offers is an escape from the work of imagination.

This isn’t true, of course, but it’s the feeling that students have when they come up with a plot twist: the feeling is one of relief. They are relieved to be spared from the work of imagination. It feels like they don’t have to work hard anymore once they’ve decided the hero is also the monster, the monster is a hallucination, or the monster is friendly. 

When we start out imagining the elements of our story (confined space, monster, and hero), the students know (because I tell them) that the story ends when the hero kills the monster in order to escape the confined space, but they do not yet know how this will be accomplished. 

The pages are blank. The Google Doc is empty. We have not yet begun. The showdown hasn’t happened. The resolution is a mystery.

This can be difficult to bear.

Writing the story means they have to figure this out. They have to figure out a way for the hero to kill the monster and to escape. It’s uncomfortable to write your way into trouble, to give yourself a problem you don’t yet know how to solve, and to move forward into the unknown.

The students are the heroes, and they don’t know what to do. They’re trapped in the confined space of this class assignment. And there is a monster.

The monster is me! 

No, the monster is not me.

The monster is the unwritten story. 

How do they defeat it? How do they write their way out of trouble? 

Once they let go of plot twists (of the kind I’ve mentioned) and embrace the uncertainty of the conflict in their stories, the students dig into the scenes of their monster stories and quickly discover there is plenty to write about precisely because of the uncertainty of the conflict. 

We move forward scene by scene. We don’t try to solve it all in one day. We spend weeks moving forward beat by beat to the second act (enter the confined space) and to the midpoint scene (meet the monster) and to the death moment (the monster kills the hero’s buddy). 

Students discover that the uncertainty fades with the writing of each scene. There is less uncertainty the more they write into the story. That’s what starts to feel good. It feels good to resolve the uncertainty by writing one dramatic scene after another. It feels good to exercise the imagination by working through one dramatic scene after another.

They start to feel protective of their story, proud of it even, having invested the work of their imagination into the story, and they can’t wait to tell me how they came up with a cool way the hero can kill the monster and escape.

They own their story now precisely because they accepted the uncertainty of the conflict, imagined the world of their story, and dramatized the resolution all on their own.

What I was most impressed by every single year was that no student wrote the same story. Each student wrote a unique monster story. They chose different confined spaces, different monsters, different heroes. They did their own thing and wrote in their own way, no matter my template and guidelines. 

And their stories, worked out on the page, were so much better than they would have been had the monster been just a bad dream; and the conflict, all in their head.

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