How 2 incorporate a twist?

Could you be more specific? There are many methods.

give all your characters the same name

costume names cigars

yeah particularly with crime stories, has anybody hgot any idead os dropping clues for the solving of the crime/ particular techniques of relaying crucial information to the reader without being Agatha Christie -like about it.?

not now cato.

The best advice is just to go through the site, nicking the best ideas from the stories that work for you. But it's surely not that difficult? Obviously, you know the twist yourself - in a short story, you're building up to it all the way. I write a lot of these, as I thoroughly enjoy misleading readers. I'd say, set the scene at the beginning with several characters - even if the final "culprit" or "victim" isn't even one of them, it sows confusion and doubt in the reader's mind: after all, in a whodunnit, everyone's a suspect, right? If there are only two people involved, there's a fair chance that a) it's one of them or b) it isn't, so you don't know that character anyway, and couldn't care less if he/she did it! Mention people in passing.. creates confusion again, as only you know why they're there. The reader doesn't! You could write a short prelude, then time-shift back or forwards to the main plot.. I know this sounds terribly like self-advertisement - but the "twist" story I'm most pleased with myself is one called "Just too good to be true." It's easier to write a story than explain how it's written. You could see at what point you solve that one, and maybe let me know? Hope I've been some help.

Start at the end - decide what the final twist will be before you start writing. Then decide what you want the reader to think the story is all about (the wrong impression) before they finally work out the twist. Then scatter red herrings liberally throughout your text that will give the deliberate 'wrong impression' on the first reading - but also have an alternative/ambiguous meaning that becomes apparent on reading the final twist. Mess with the reader's natural tendency to make assumptions.

Disco-Stu is correct. The reader assumes all the time. I read most of Blue Afternoon by William Boyd before it occurred to me that the main char' was a woman. Sometimes I'll come up with a pretty average idea but by either shifting the genders/conext/setting/time or a mixture, the concept can become alot fresher in your own mind. For an excellent example of this check out Tibor Fischer's The Collector Collector.

Aha ! G.K Chesterton wrote a brilliant piece on this, and he was without a doubt, the master of short crime fiction. This is a masterful piece of writing and it really does help crystallise what you want to achieve when writing a mystery. It is quite long, but stick with it... Anyhow, I find in my own case that when I begin to think of the theory of detective stories, I do become what some would call theoretical. That is, I begin at thebeginning, without any pep, snap, zip or other essential of the art of arresting the attention, without in any way disturbing or awakening the mind. The first and fundamental principle is that the aim of a mystery story, as of every other story and every other mystery, is not darkness but light. The story is written for the moment when the reader doesunderstand, not merely for the many preliminary moments when he does not understand. The misunderstanding is only meant as a dark outline of cloud to bring out the brightness of that instant of intelligibility; and most bad detective stories are bad because they fail upon this point. The writers have a strange notion that it is their business to baffle the reader; and that so long as they baffle him it does not matter if they disappoint him. But it is not only necessary to hide a secret, it is also necessary to have a secret; and to have a secret worth hiding. The climax must not be an anti-climax; it must not merely consist of leading the reader a dance and leaving him in a ditch. The climax must not be only the bursting of a bubble but rather the breaking of a dawn; only that the daybreak is accentuated by the dark. Any form of art, however trivial, refers back to some serious truths; and though we are dealing with nothing more momentous than a mob of Watsons, all watching with round eyes like owls, it is still permissible to insist that it Is the people who sat in darkness who have seen a great light; and that the darkness is only valuable in making vivid a great light in the mind. It always struck me as an amusing coincidence that the best of the Sherlock Holmes stories bore, with a totally different application and significance, a title that might have been invented to express this primal illumination; the title of "Silver Blaze" The second great principle is that the soul of detective fiction is not complexity but simplicity. The secret may appear complex, but it must be simple; and in this also it is a symbol of higher mysteries. The writer is there to explain the mystery; but he ought not to be needed to explain the explanation. The explanationshould explain itself; it should be something that can be hissed (by the villain, of course) in a few whispered words or shrieked preferably by the heroine before she swoons under the shock of the belated realization that two and two make four. Now some literary detectives make the solution more complicated than the mystery, and the crime more complicated than the solution. Thirdly, it follows that so far as possible the fact or figure explaining everything should be a familiar fact or figure. The criminal should be in the foreground, not in the capacity of criminal, but in some other capacity which nevertheless gives him a natural right to be in the foreground. I will take as a convenient case the one I have already quoted; the story of Silver Blaze. Sherlock Holmes is as familiar as Shakespeare; so there is no injustice by this time in letting out the secret of one of the first of these famous tales. News is brought to Sherlock Holmes that a valuablerace-horse has been stolen, and the trainer guarding him murdered by the thief. Various people, of course, are plausibly suspected of the theft and murder; and everybody concentrates on the serious police problem of who can have killed the trainer. The simple truth is that the horse killed him. Now I take that as a model because the truth is so very simple. The truth really is so very obvious. At any rate, the point is that the horse is very obvious. The story is named after the horse; it is all about the horse; the horse is in the foreground all the time, but always in another capacity. As a thing of great value he remains for the reader the Favourite; it is only as a criminal that he is a dark horse. It is a story of theft in which the horse plays the part of the jewel until weforget that the jewel can also play the part of the weapon. That is one of the first rules I would suggest, if I had to make rules for this form of composition. Generally speaking, the agent should be a familiar figure in an unfamiliar function. The thing that we realize must be a thing that we recognize; that is it must be something previously known, and it ought to be something prominently displayed. Otherwise there is no surprise in mere novelty. It is useless for a thing to be unexpected if it was not worth expecting. But it should be prominent for one reason and responsible for another. A great part of the craft or trick of writing mystery stories consists in finding a convincing but misleading reason for the prominence of the criminal, over and above his legitimate business of committing the crime. Many mysteries fail merely by leaving him at loose ends in the story, with apparently nothing to do except to commit the crime. He is generally well off, or our just and equal law would probably have him arrested as a vagrant long before he was arrested as a murderer. We reach the stage of suspecting such a character by a very rapid if unconscious process of elimination. Generally we suspect him merely because he has not been suspected. The art of narrative consists in convincing the reader for a time, not only that the character might have come on the premises with no intention to commit a felony, but that the author has put him there with some intention that is not felonious. For the detective story is only a game; and in that game the reader is not really wrestling with the criminal but with the author. What the writer has to remember, in this sort of game, is that the reader will not say, as he sometimes might of a serious or realistic study: "Why the surveyor in green spectacles climb the tree to look into the lady doctor's back garden?" He will insensibly and inevitably say, "Why did the author the surveyor climb a tree, or introduce any surveyor at all?" The reader may admit that the town would in any case need a surveyor, without admitting that the tale would in any case need one. It is necessary to explain his presence in the tale (and the tree) not only by suggesting why the town council put him there, but why the author put him there. Over and above any little crimes he may intend to indulge in, in the inner chamber of the story, he must have already some other justification as a character in a story and not only as a mere miserable material person in real life. The instinct of the reader, playing hide-and-seek with the writer, who is his real enemy, is always to say with suspicion, Yes, I know a surveyor might climb a tree; I am quite aware that there are trees and that there are surveyors, but what are you doing with them? Why did you make this particular surveyor climb this particular tree in this particular tale, you cunning and evil-minded man?" This I should call the fourth principle to be remembered, as in the other cases, people probably will not realize that it is practical, because the principles on which it rests sound theoretical. It rests on the fact that in the classification of the arts, mysterious murders belong to the grand and joyful company of the things called jokes. The story is a fancy; an avowedly fictitious fiction. We may say if we like that it is a very artificial form of art. I should prefer to say that it is professedly a toy, a thing that children 'pretend' wish. From this it follows that the reader, who is a simple child and therefore very wide awake, is conscious not only of the toy but of the invisible playmate who is the maker of the toy, and the author of the trick. The innocent child is very sharp and not a little suspicious. And one of the first rules I repeat, for the maker of a tale that shall be a trick, is to remember that the masked murderer must have an artistic right to be on the scene and not merely a realistic right to be in the world. He must not only come to the house on business, but on the business of the story; it is not only a question of the motive of the visitor but of the motive of the author. The ideal mystery story is one in which he is such a character as the author would have created for his own sake, or for the sake of making the story move in other necessary matters, and then be found to be present there, not for the obvious and sufficient reason, but for a second and a secret one. I will add that for this reason, despite the sneers at 'love-interest' there is a good deal to be said for the tradition of sentiment and slower or more Victorian narration. Some may call it a bore, but it may succeed as a blind. Lastly the principle that the detective story like every literary form starts with an idea, and does not merely start out to find one, applies also to its more material mechanical detail. Where the story turns upon detection, it is still necessary that the writer should begin from the inside, though the detective approaches from the outside. Every good problem of this type originates in a positive notion, which is in itself a simple notion; some fact of daily life that the writer can remember and the reader can forget. But anyhow, a tale has to be founded on a truth; and though opium may be added to it, it must not merely be an opium dream.