A lot of my stories have twist endings. Twist endings are hazardous because the twist itself is typically a small idea that could be expressed in a few sentences, but you need an entire story leading up to it to make the reader care enough that the twist will have impact. It’s easy for the twist to overshadow everything else in the author’s mind, which results in 20,000 words of limp story followed by a one-paragraph zinger/

So you really have to write two stories: the twist, and the story that makes you care about the people involved in the twist. The twist in Memento or The Crying Game can be described in a paragraph, but you need an entire movie with its own plot just to draw the viewer in for the twist.

Then you must make sure these two stories match thematically. The twist in The Crying Game is that after already having gotten misty-eyed over a dead man’s love relationship, the main character suddenly learns the dead man was gay, and has accidentally stumbled into understanding with uncomfortable clarity a point of view that he previously thought was utterly alien to him. The entire movie leading up to that point, the IRA and terrorism and kidnapping, was constructed to mirror that single moment, by leading the anti-terrorist soldier to understand the viewpoint of the IRA terrorists. It’s an extra story that gave us a character we cared about, that can hand that character off to the twist ending story without clashing with it thematically.

Twist endings are much easier to write well in fanfiction, because you don’t need to write an entire second story just to make us care about the characters. I wrote two very short twist-ending stories, “Trust” and “Game of Immortals” (in “The Twilight Zone”, formerly “Pony Tales”), that can be as short as they are because we already know the characters. My latest story, “Happy Ending”, is an even better example of this, because its structure is based on a famous 1948 short story by Henry Kuttner, also called “Happy Ending”. The 1948 story is clever, but you have to wade through perhaps 15,000 words of an unremarkable space-conquest story just to get to the clever twist ending. (That was a depressingly common problem with science fiction stories in the 1940s and 1950s, exemplified by the many short stories Isaac Asimov wrote that were merely set-ups for a bad pun.) I think my story works much better, partly because it has an extra twist, but mainly because I didn’t have to spend 10,000 words  developing a new character.

(Although now that I think about it, I completely rewrote Blueblood, so perhaps I did develop a new character. Many science fiction authors still say the best science fiction story ever written is Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall”, which takes 14,000 words to build its characters up just enough to throw them away for an utterly-implausible twist ending less entertaining than the single sentence uttered by John Campbell that was the prompt for the story. Really, 1940s science fiction has a lot to answer for.)

“Happy Ending” is Safe For Ghost and Other Sensitive Souls. It’s tagged “tragedy” and “dark”, but it should be tagged “impish”. My goal is for you to say “Bad Horse, you bastard,” not “Bad Horse, you monster.” Also, it has a happy ending. Heh. Much thanks to Cypher, who explained to me why the original version of the story was lousy, and pointed out three rough spots in the second version.

“Happy Ending” has been in the EQD queue for three months now. I clicked “submit” just now before hearing back from EQD because my last three EQD stories (Moving On, Long Distance, Alicorn Cider) weren’t featured. “Alicorn Cider” got about 3,000 views and 230 likes in its first three days, which I think was more than any stories that were featured at that time, and it didn’t even crack the top half of the “Popular Stories” sidebar. So I think knighty changed the featured box algorithm to measure fraction of viewers that like, or favorite, a story (though number of comments also appears to be relevant now). EQD readers are only about half as likely as fimfiction readers to like or favorite, probably because many of them don’t have fimfiction accounts. So, whereas a year ago releasing a story on EQD and fimfiction at the same time made being featured a sure thing, now it might prevent you from being featured. It certainly doesn’t seem to help.