The Ultimate Plot Twist: Choosing the Non-existent Option

Stories and the characters at their center tend to keep a reader’s interest in direct proportion to the enormity of the obstacles we put in front of them. The higher the stakes and the more impossible the choices, the faster the reader will keep turning the pages to find out what happens. Will she, or won’t she? Will she pick door #1 or door #2? And what will become of her because of that choice?

(5 Moral Dilemmas That Make Characters and Stories Better.)

Once you’ve gotten your reader invested in that quandary, I’ve found that the most satisfying resolution—and best plot twist of all— is door #3, an option that neither the reader nor the protagonist sees coming and yet somehow feels inevitable.

I stumbled upon this idea while writing my first novel, Fill the Sky. Enrolled in a class called “Novel in Progress,” we workshopped chapters of our nascent books as they were written. Fill the Sky is about three long-time friends who travel to Ecuador to see if the shamans there can save one of them from terminal cancer. Beyond those literal life-and-death stakes, the heart of the novel focuses on emotional dilemmas, the biggest of which is faced by cancer-riddled Ellie.

Throughout the novel, Ellie struggles with the guilt of a brief but intense period of infidelity in her marriage. She is terrified by the idea that her husband might find out about it after she dies, leaving him alone with a betrayal she won’t be there to explain. But she’s equally worried that telling him would only poison the time they have left together. Why add more suffering now?

I knew I was onto something when my workshop mates moved quickly from offering the typical critiques about prose, pacing, or any number of other craft elements and began to vehemently disagree about which choice Ellie should make—a sure sign of a compelling narrative dilemma. Problem was, with half the group certain option #1 was the way to go, and half the group just as certain about option #2, how could I possibly create a resolution that was satisfying for all of them and didn’t seem blatantly obvious? The key, I came to realize, was to create an alternative option, option #3.

Here’s how it went (spoiler alert). Near the end of the book, Ellie has a deeply emotional experience during a healing ritual where the answer comes to her clearly. She realizes that her husband already knows, and that he’s been as afraid to ask her about it as she’s been to tell him. The question is no longer whether she should tell him about the affair, but how she can help him see that she went back to him not out of obligation or because her cancer returned, but because he is truly the love of her life.

The key to making “door #3” a believable and compelling choice, is to quietly build the foundation for it in the background. I think of story development as a cross between map-making and performing a magic trick. Setting up option #1 and #2 is akin to the magician putting two shiny objects on a table and convincing the audience that they are the only two things worth looking at in the room, all while busily wielding the surprise off to the side. Similarly, while the reader is actively mulling over the two stark choices on offer, we need to quietly fill the story with moments, details, dialogue, and character interplay that point in an entirely different direction. When we reveal option #3, the ideal response of the reader is, “I don’t know why I didn’t think of that,” coupled with, “of course!”

In my third novel, The Hidden Life of Aster Kelly, I used the “door #3” process to develop a plot twist that comes early in the book. Aster Kelly, an aspiring designer in 1940s Hollywood becomes pregnant with the child of a man who she is sure, if she tells him, will propose and make her “an honest woman,” but it’s a future she doesn’t want. Knowing that life as a single mother who supports herself is a near-impossibility at that time, and having no desire to end the pregnancy, she is caught in a no-win dilemma: return to her parent’s home to raise her child under scandal and reproach or marry a man she doesn’t love.

The map-building in the background, however, has Aster forming a wonderful friendship with her design mentor, Fernando, who has fallen in love with Christopher Page, Hollywood’s next big star. When Aster learns that a studio executive suspects Christopher of being homosexual, a career-ending revelation in the ‘40s, she suggests that she and Christopher “elope,” solving major problems for all three of them while allowing them all to continue a life of their choosing (albeit in secret). The unintended consequences of that decision put the rest of the novel in motion, but it is a plot twist that is both surprising and makes perfect sense. The elopement was the “rabbit in the hat” that was there for the taking, it just wasn’t an option presented to the reader as something under consideration. In fact, it doesn’t even occur to Aster until a heated moment that forces the issue. But all the elements are already in place to make it work.

Given that “door #3” is most effective if it’s not a typical or obvious choice, it can take some work to invent. I didn’t know how Ellie would resolve her dilemma when I began writing Fill the Sky, nor had I fully envisioned the turn Aster Kelly’s story would take. But I now try to put as many third door choices as I can into my novels by utilizing a simple technique I call “what if?”

Working off the page, I try to imagine all the many directions a story could take that do not involve door #1 or door #2, the more bizarre the better. This starts as a simple list of bullet points (“what if this?” “what if that?”), and then I see how far I can get with each idea by asking myself the next level of questions: “and then what?,” “and then what after that?” to see how far (and in how compelling a direction) I can get the story to go for each one. Most of them don’t make it very far and get crossed out and forgotten. But inevitably I hit upon one that offers up more and more interesting branches on the story tree, and I know I’ve found a third door that can work.

My latest novel, This Much is True, presented me with the biggest challenge of this kind to date. The novel follows Veronica Harmon, a woman in her 50s who is forced to confront a trauma from her high school days when she realizes that the man who was at its center is the father of her daughter’s fiancé. Over the course of a weekend designed for the two families to “get to know each other,” Veronica must decide if she will swallow this secret, which she has never told a soul, and live with the lie for the rest of her life, or if she will finally speak up and inevitably destroy her daughter’s future.

This dilemma so vexed me that it took me 10 years (during which I wrote two entirely different books) to come up with a solution. I wanted to write this book in part because of the limited options typically available to survivors of sexual assault: keep quiet and deal with crushing emotional turmoil in private or seek accountability and deal with crushing emotional turmoil in public. I desperately wanted a different and more satisfying option for Veronica. Only when I found door #3 was I ready to finally complete her story. What is Veronica’s door #3? That spoiler I’m not yet ready to share, but I don’t think you’ll see it coming.

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