Four observations in response to Nathan Baugh on story twists

Jun 3, 2025  |  6 min
 |  Payoff Story structure Story Craft

Summary: To write good twists, bury details in a ‘sandwich,’ deliver the payoff just in time, surprise your audience with the method or degree of your payoff, and don’t ‘explain the joke.’

I’m a big fan of Nathan Baugh. He’s a writer and entrepreneur with an interest in storytelling similar to mine. He posts occasionally on X, has a Substack newsletter, co-hosts a podcast with Nat Eliason, and runs an online course for nonfiction storytelling.

He’s worth a follow if you’re into storytelling.

Recently, he wrote a newsletter post about twists. It got me excited. What follows are four observations in conversation with what he says there.

Hopefully this will be useful for crafting your own story twists.

The sequence trick

In his post, Nathan talks about anchoring bias and misdirection.

“Readers give more weight to the first thing they’re shown. Whatever comes first, sticks in their brains.

“You can use this to your advantage to create what I call a Diversion Plot. It’s a misdirection built on human bias.

“Essentially, Plant Idea 1 in your story first (the Diversion), then quietly introduce Idea 2 – the real twist – later. That way, your Reader expects the first but isn’t upset when you twist your story toward the second.”

This resonated with an idea I’d picked up from the Writing Excuses podcast. I believe it’s Mary Robinette and Brandon Sanderson who talk about burying important setup details in a “sandwich.” (Kowal et al.)

Imagine you’re writing a mystery story, for example, and a crucial clue to your twist ending is a spilled glass of wine. So, you have your intrepid detective enter the room and glance around. She immediately notices three details:

  1. a turned over chair
  2. a spilled glass of wine
  3. a red hair bow

Do you see it? The key to this trick is that you placed the crucial clue in the middle of the “sandwich.” This gives it less prominence in readers’ minds than the other details. It’s buried. You’re still playing fair — it’s there for anyone to see — but in a way, it’s hidden.

Then, you can bring forth the spilled glass at the appropriate moment. “Ah!” says your audience. “I remember that. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.”

But of course they didn’t. You worked hard to conceal it.

Just in time delivery

Next, Nathan talks about respecting his “most attentive” readers.

“Can my most attentive reader logically piece together the twist beforehand? If so, then I feel like I’m in a good spot. If not, I’ve likely hidden the clues too deep.”

On the Writing Excuses podcast, author Kevin J. Anderson says that he appreciated twists that made readers realize what was happening just a moment before the reveal. (Kowal et al.) That resonated with me. I’ve since noticed myself making that “just in time” connection sometimes when I read good stories (and really enjoying it when authors pull it off).

Anderson says that it works because it helps readers feel smart. I think that’s part of it. But I wonder if there’s more to it than simple pride. I suspect it works because it allows us to experience multiple types of enjoyment from the same payoff.

For example, we get the fun of the surprise and a jolt of pride or achievement, yes; but we also get just a touch of delicious anticipation immediately before the reveal. In the psychological literature, there’s the notion of “savoring” — the idea that the mere anticipation of some expected good is, in itself, a type of pleasure. (Kiyohito)

So maybe a well-written twist delivers multiple types of pleasure that increase the impact of the payoff:

  • A feeling of insight at making the connection
  • A feeling of pride in the achievement of discovering things ahead of time
  • The pleasure of anticipation — wanting to know if suspicions are correct
  • The pleasure of confirmation once the reveal is made

Method and degree

“My goal with a twist isn’t to trick the Reader. Rather, I want to play fair but still surprise them.” (Emphasis mine.)

In terms of “playing fair but still surprising” I think one other way to think about this is that a good ending plays into a “realm of appropriate payoff.” We want the payoff to be in the right general area. It needs to match the setup we’ve given.

But if the type of payoff is set, how do we surprise our audience? We can subvert exectations with the method by which the payoff is achieved and the degree to which it’s achieved.

Method

  • For example, as readers we know a murder mystery will be solved. We suspect the heiress. But then an offhanded comment about the Bulgarian mineral trade reveals that it was actually the butler all along. This matched our expectation (the mystery will be solved) but happened in a different way than expected (conversations about Eastern European economics).

Degree

  • We know Luke Skywalker will join the Rebels and fight the Empire. But we don’t realize that he will personally embrace the ways of the Jedi, face down the Emperor, win over Darth Vader, and usher in a new golden age. These are all inline with the kind of thing we can expect from the story, but they are (arguably) greater than expectation in degree.

  • Brandon Sanderson gives the example of gifting a matchbox car to a child. (Sanderson, 3:30-3:50) He talks about hinting ahead of time about the car so that the child expects the car. But then he also secretly plays into the child’s love for Mario by buying a Mario-branded matchbox car. It fits expectations but it’s greater in degree. It does more.

So maybe an ideal payoff would fit both of these paradigms. It would be set up such that readers could guess it just before the reveal. But then the reveal would not merely fulfill that expectation but go beyond it, surprising readers by how it was achieved and by delivering even more than they expected.

Don’t explain the joke

Lastly, Nathan makes an observation I really like about resisting the urge to “explain the joke.”

“Resist the urge to explain the twist after the fact. There’s no easier way to ruin a Reader’s experience than by explaining the story to them.”

This was new to me. I’ve not heard anyone else articulate it quite this way, but it immediately struck me as correct. In a good resolution, we want to see the effects of the payoff, but we don’t want to have the mechanics of it explained to us.

I hope this has been useful to you. If you like this format of responding in conversation with what others have written, let me know (hello@natelistrom.com).

Further reading

Here’s some more on this topic (if you’re a glutton for punishment):

Onward!

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