Found a killer plot twist tip from an old Playwriting book from the 60s

I was digging through a used bookstore in Portland last weekend and grabbed this beat-up copy of 'The Art of the Twist' from 1964. The author talks about planting 'false memories' in the reader's head by describing a scene twice with slight changes. It got me thinking about how I could use that in a horror story I've been stuck on for 3 months. Basically you describe a door as red early on, then later as blue, and the reader's brain tries to reconcile it. Has anyone else tried messing with timeline inconsistencies on purpose like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

noaht1515d ago

Honestly that false memory trick is gold but you gotta be careful with it. I tried something similar in a short story where a character keeps remembering their mom's kitchen table as oak but later it's clearly pine and the reader starts questioning if the kid even lived there. Thing is if you overdo it people just get confused and bail. I pushed it too far once with three timeline shifts in one chapter and beta readers were like "wait who's the dad again?" The red door blue door thing is subtle enough though that might work perfect for horror. What genre are you mostly writing?

wells.olivia15d ago

Totally @noaht15, the door thing works best when it's subtle, like how in real life you'll swear your friend's car was blue but they've always had a silver one. Our brains are always quietly editing memories to make sense of things, so messing with that feels creepily natural.

wendysanchez15d ago

Huh, that's a really good point about subtlety. How do you decide when a detail is just confusing enough to make the reader uneasy versus just sloppy writing?