Plot twists can come from many places: characters, background info, even the worldbuilding itself.
Let’s see how we can twist a negative aspect of a world into something that’s actually beneficial, then write it together!
During the last stream, a subscriber requested that do the worldbuilding plot twist exercise that YouTuber Joriam Ramos discusses in his video here:
Check out our take on the exercise here, or scroll down for a summary.
To summarize, the exercise is broken down into three parts:
- The dystopia: something that is objectively bad, and how it interacts with people/the world
- The worldbuilding plot twist: a new aspect of that dystopia that the characters learn, and how it’s discovered
- The hidden benefit: what makes the dystopia necessary, also why no one noticed/knew it it before
Example #1 (from Joriam’s video)
- The dystopia: a fantasy world is ruled by gods who send people on horrible quests, usually to their deaths, like farmers sent to go slay dragons
- The worldbuilding plot twist: the main character confronts the gods, demands to know why they torture people, turns out there’s something more powerful than the gods — destiny
- The hidden benefit: the gods used to love humans, but one human messed with destiny so badly it nearly collapsed, and so now the gods must force people to follow their destinies as best they can, sending farmers who should’ve been dragonslayers to die fighting dragons, and after centuries of them doing that, destiny is finally healing
Example #2 (that I made up)
- The dystopia: at age 18, everyone must lose one limb of their choice, having it surgically removed and replaced with a crude prosthetic, they believe they’re doing it to donate tissue/bone marrow for the richer class, to pay for the education/housing/food that they’ve been given
- The worldbuilding plot twist: the main character’s generation is now asked to give up two limbs, so they rebel, until it turns out that the limbs are used to bring wandering souls back to life
- The hidden benefit: decades ago, wandering souls were discovered, the leftover remnants after some people die, and if left alone they possess people and drive them crazy to do horrible things, but if they’re inserted into a limb then they can grow back into a full person and find peace
After going over that, chat came up with a bunch of dystopia ideas for us to do the exercise with, then voted on this one: The world is run by Reddit votes and your personal score affects your social standing.
Here’s what we came up with:
- The dystopia: The world is run entirely online in a virtual reality website called SnooGlobe, where upvotes/downvotes affect your social standing, because the rest of the world is scorched earth
- The worldbuilding plot twist: The main character starts to learn that some of the people on SnooGlobe don’t have real-life counterparts, they’re the uploaded consciousnesses of people who have died — including the main character who finds out they died years ago.
- The hidden benefit: The earth is not scorched, it’s fine, but when people get uploaded after they die, gaining immortality, they can’t participate in IRL society, so they have to exist on SnooGlobe only in order to stay “alive.”
Be sure to check out the video for a quick recap on all the work it took us to get that twist in there!
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you join us on Twitch.
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Images: Pakutaso