Make Turns Change the Field

Practice. After each major turn in your draft, write one sentence in this form: before this, ___ could happen; after this, ___ can no longer happen, and ___ now can. If you cannot complete it, you have an event, and the scene’s work is not yet done. Then check that the next scene behaves as if the sentence were true. Often the turn itself is already strong enough, and the fix is a following scene that finally notices it. Twenty minutes covers a chapter.

In Oedipus the King, in Francis Storr’s translation, a messenger arrives from Corinth with good news. Polybus, whom Oedipus believes to be his father, has died of old age, so the oracle that said Oedipus would kill his father cannot be fulfilled, and Oedipus calls the oracles “dust, ashes, nothing.” One fear remains, his mother. The messenger, eager to help, asks what troubles him and then tells him his fears are baseless. “How baseless,” Oedipus answers, “if I am their very son?” Polybus, the messenger says, was no kin to him by blood. A few lines on, Oedipus is asking whether he was a foundling.

Aristotle uses this event in the Poetics as his example of reversal, since the messenger comes to cheer Oedipus and, by revealing who Oedipus is, produces the opposite effect. A fact changed, because Polybus was not the father, but the larger change is to what can still happen. Before the messenger, the play is about whether Oedipus has done what the oracle foretold. After him that can no longer be the question; the question is who Oedipus is, and the play can end only in an answer.

Some turns surprise and change nothing. The twist arrives, the reader gasps or shrugs, and the next scene proceeds as if it had not, and a reveal that leaves every option where it was is information, a different kind of thing. Readers seem to follow a story by forecasting what can still happen, so a changed goal, fact, relationship, or balance of power is a turn only to the degree that it changes what characters, or readers, can expect next. Other turns are gradual, and some works have no single hinge. In a story built by accumulation a change can be complete before anyone names it, and a scene that announced a turning point might falsify it.