HOW TO WRITE TWISTY TALES

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HOW TO WRITE TWISTY TALES

No form of writing appeals to me more than short tales with a twist. I love to read them, and I love to write them. Poe was perhaps the first to define them in themselves, and writers such as Roald Dahl raised them to an art form.
Essential to such tales is the importance of a sense of humour. Indeed, I don’t think you can work out the important slants on life that make the twist without one. If, after you’ve written one, you don’t go ‘he he’ to yourself, then it maybe fails.

Which brings me to the second point.

That laugh will be pure sadism. And I suspect there must be a touch of this in the mind-set of the twisty tale writer.
Another essential ingredient of the twisty tale is that you must give hints of the twist somewhere in the storyline. Hence, when re-read, it becomes obvious. This is not always achievable, but the best tales have this ingredient.

This makes you, of course, a conman.

Which is what the twisty tale is all about – fooling the person into a wrong assumption, and then hitting them with the one you want. And to be successful in this is to give a buzz as good as any conman in other fields.
And this is best achieved by placing, in the story, a kind of ‘comfort zone’. Make the reader think they know what’s going on, and also make them comfortable within the narrative. Achieve this, and the twist at the end becomes a twist indeed.

© Anthony North, March 2008

SMOKE AND MIRRORS

The mirror stands for all to see,
but do you look and say ‘that’s me?’
Do you stare, vainly, as if a joke,
not noticing that, around you is smoke?
What is this ghostly, abstract form,
that looks so different from the norm?
It approaches as if from an ethereal lair,
forming this, forming that, for you to stare,
at the nightmares, made real around your life,
your treatment of all, from strangers to wife;
It chokes as it grasps out to you to touch,
you learn to fear it, Oh! so much;
This is the illusion of all our pride,
to the mirror we seem to always confide,
our innermost hopes and fears, too,
for the mirror is fate,
and the smoke?
That’s you!

(c) Anthony North, March 2008

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