on Fiction University:

Stories with a great twist are stories readers remember, but make sure your story is more a single punchline.

I ran into a problem when writing my adult urban fantasy novel, Blood Ties. There’s a twist, and one of the things that kept changing in the original outline was where that twist was revealed. Did I reveal it early on so the reader got to the “cool part” of the idea first? Did I use it as my midpoint reversal? Or was it an end-of-book shocker?

Then it hit me.

I wasn’t writing a story that had a twist, I was setting up a 400-page joke with the twist as the punchline. The novel was all about the reveal, not the story. Which was a major problem.

A twist can’t be the whole book. The story has to hold up even if readers know the twist.

When writing a great twist novel, you want to have suspense and wonder and hook the reader, yet also leave behind those wonderful little clues that readers who know the twist will see and take delight in–and provide re-read value for those who decide to go back and see what they missed. The novel has to hold together and be an entertaining read that’s made better when the truth is finally revealed.

If you’re working on a twist novel, you might want to ask yourself: