Does your story need a reversal?
Sports fans know all about the pain and pleasure of reversals: they are what keep you watching through inning after quiet inning of a slow baseball game, whether you are hoping for a miraculous revival or dreading a foul-up. What turned out to be an improbably successful season for the San Francisco Giants did not start auspiciously. After sailing into a 5–0 lead behind the wind of Kevin Gausman’s fantastic pitching in their opening game, the Giants blew the lead in the eighth inning and ultimately lost the game in the tenth with a walk-off walk. (For people who aren’t baseball literate, no, that’s not supposed to be a thing.)
And yet the reversal was exciting. I yelled at a particularly heart-breaking flub by the experienced, skilled Brandon Belt, causing the cats to scatter and my daughter to poke her head out of her room to find out what had happened. (Finding out it was “only baseball,” she went right back in.)
A sudden reversal can clarify, like nothing else, what you had really been wishing for all along but had refused to recognize or been afraid to admit. The ending of Austen’s Emma is a classic example: Emma only realizes she loves Knightley when it appears she has lost him to Harriet.
When a reversal happens at the beginning of the story, you are telling readers that this is not the story they thought it would be. Readers get to feel the suspense that the characters are feeling, the sense that the story could unfold in ways that are impossible to understand from their current vantage point.
I saw this storytelling technique used masterfully this week in the video game Firewatch, which I watched my son play for over an hour, enthralled to see an interactive story unfold in front of me. The game opens in choose-your-own-adventure style, with the player invited to select responses to situations. At the beginning it’s the story of a relationship—a meeting in a bar, falling in love, choices about dogs and kids and jobs. And then the story takes a completely unexpected twist, which I’m not going to reveal because I hope you’ll try out the game yourself. (I’m an inept gamer who does things like leap off a mountain after laboriously climbing it because I haven’t gotten the hang of the controls, and even I can manage and enjoy Firewatch.)
The reversal in the story takes you into the main part of the game and continues to resonate—an emotional and psychological mystery underpinning the more immediate mystery the protagonist / player finds himself in.
When a reversal comes, as in Emma, at the end of a story, it can gather up all of the deep, intuitive strands that have been floating along underneath the plot all along, weaving them firmly into the ending in a way that feels both inevitable and satisfying.
Does your story need a reversal? Even exploring which aspects of your plot or character arcs could be reversed, and in what direction, could unbury new potential and hidden meanings in your story. Play around with the idea and see what you discover.
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