While mediocre writers get all stressy-spaghetti over their first two chapters because they want to yoink your attention (or be traditionally published – sorry), real ones know the climax is the key part. Having your climax in mind when you begin writing helps pull the narrative forward, building the correct tension and momentum that makes readers want to keep going.

You can have a slow start and still intrigue readers if you are chugging along toward a fantastic climax. They can feel things are gearing up and they want to know how things are going to escalate – how far the characters will go in service to their goal.

So, what makes that delicious climax? Funnily enough, a great climax is shaped by working around it, end to beginning, rather than working up to it. Let me explain.

What you think is a plot twist climax in your story probably is a U-turn that doesn’t make sense.

Most writers want to think of their climax as a plot twist that completely changes the direction of the book and the readers never could have seen coming. They throw random shit in there for what appears to be no reason.

For example, they might have characters fighting the Big Bad, but then it turns out that the Big Bad is actually the evil twin of one of their friends who is also one of the superheroes. But no one suspected this, no one commented on the weird similarities, nothing. It was just plopped in there with no lead up.

That is not a plot twist. That is taking the narrative thread, snapping it in half, then hurriedly tying on a brand new thread and claiming it’s the original. It’s cheap and insulting to readers, who were trusting you to be honest with them about what this story is.

Unfortunately, modern writers have no clue what a really good plot twist actually is, leading to atrocious writing that exasperates readers.

I’ll let Literary Terms explain:

In literature, film, television, and even video games, a plot twist is an unsuspected occurrence or turn of events in the story that completely changes the direction or outcome of the plot from the direction it was likely to go. It’s a hugely popular and frequently used narrative technique in fiction. Plot twists are designed to disrupt things in a story that the audience thinks they already know or have figured out. The author achieves this “twisting” of the plot by providing a huge shock or surprise, one that is either completely unexpected, or was perhaps foreshadowed through earlier details or events.

The very term “plot twist” tells you that you have two end points of your narrative thread that get snarled up in the middle. The twist doesn’t break your yarn; it simply introduces a major complication.

One of the most beloved examples of a plot twist is Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace;” it’s a classic (and one of my favorite short stories) for a reason. A woman who wants desperately to be a noveau riche courtesan borrows what she believes is an expensive necklace from her rich friend and then loses it. She’s terrified and grinds desperately to replace it, only to find out that the thing was cheap tacky jewelry that she could have afforded on her own salary, without taking on extra work and bankrupting herself.

Plot twists are hard to do, but they pay off spectacularly when they are done well. Which is why everyone keeps doing them badly and then wondering why no one likes their work.

But here’s the thing about “The Necklace” and other stories with plot twists that people often forget: the destination was always in sight, but the journey there wasn’t.

The end should be visible; the middle shouldn’t be.

Your climax is not just a sudden about-face on what you are building up to, because you are building up to the end. It’s a sudden, startling complication that recontextualizes everything you laid down in the first half – but, most essentially, it does not change the destination.

In other words, the “how we get there” is more interesting than “what is going to happen.” If we can’t guess where the book is going to end up, then we feel confused, unsettled, and uncomfortable.

This is a common problem with literary fiction and explains why people criticize the genre for having nothing happen. Things do happen, but they’re not arranged in a way that provides a clear end point, which is on purpose; some writers think this makes their work sophisticated. It does not.

Because we don’t have a destination, we spend inordinate processing power trying to guess. But we can’t guess, because the author themselves may not have even known where they were going to end up. As such, we can’t fully connect all the plot points; they are disjointed scenes floating with no apparent end in sight. We feel like no matter how the book ended, it didn’t quite earn the resolution. We leave dissatisfied and confused.

Greek writers knew about the destination satisfaction millennia ago, but for some reason, we’ve lost sight of their teachings. I blame the fact that most people don’t read even one singular Greek play in high school or college, which is a real damn shame. They’re good stuff.

The Odyssey is the quintessential road trip from hell; one could say it even launched the genre. Sort of like the face of the whole concept. A face that launched a thousand literary ships.

Anyway. We know Odysseus is going to eventually make it home. That’s the contract Homer made with us at the beginning of the story: he will go home. We just don’t know how long it will take (a long time), what he will see on the way there (a lot), or who will be there to greet him (his doggie!).

So while we can estimate the end destination, we don’t know his ETA or the stops he takes along the way. That mystery delights us not because we immediately think “Oh no! This is what is going to make him not go home! He’s going to die!” Rather, it delights us because we go, “Okay, you big liar freak, how are you going to worm your way out of this one?”

Greek tragedies are like this too; in fact, they’re even more explicit. We get a prophecy at the beginning that tells us exactly where we’re ending up. Since the Greeks understood the Checkov’s Gun principle even back then (Checkov’s Spear, I guess?), the prophecy always comes true somehow.

But we’re also given a situation which makes it seem impossible for the prophecy to be fulfilled, or the prophecy is just vague enough that we can’t quite decipher it. Then we have to watch, with mounting horror, as piece after piece clicks into place.

The beauty of the tragedy is that we see what’s going to happen, and we can’t stop it. We just don’t know exactly what will get us to the catastrophe.

This is the principle I use in all my books, but most notably in What Is Cannot Be Unwritten. We know from the very beginning that Mordrek doesn’t want to be a spy anymore; we see him fantasizing about running away and starting over somewhere else. However, we don’t know what will be the final straw for him to get out of his contract with Queen Susuma.

We start to get a creeping sense of “oh no” when he meets the (fridged?) love interest: it’s a doomed romance. The entire book gives us every single reason in existence why they will not work out. However, we don’t know exactly what will be the breaking point or how this relationship is going to end.

That’s why the climax is so shocking and gross. Not because we couldn’t figure out the ending, or that the climax threw away our expectations of the book’s end – but because that particular outcome was unpredictable except with the benefit of hindsight.

Abrupt cheater plot twists often signal low authorial confidence.

Part of the reason that Guy de Maupassant’s writing is so beloved is not just because it is technically proficient or interesting. It’s because he was a confident writer who didn’t feel the need to overexplain, nor did he feel the need to cheat readers by throwing curveballs at them.

A certain species of insecure writer is worried that showing too much of their hand at the beginning of the story will make readers lose interest. As such, they hide everything they possibly can and develop this strangely adverserial relationship with readers, where they don’t want to tell you the important information until the very last moment.

For them, foreshadowing is a power play that they lose each time they give something up. This makes the climax seem abrupt, which is the point to this writer: they want you to be confused because they assume that this makes you want to keep reading.

But that’s not quite the right mindset. If you want the reader to trust you, then you have to trust them in return: trust them to understand, to put the pieces together, to follow you to the end. This requires being honest with them about your end point but not explain the whole itinerary.

Writing with the end goal in sight builds trust with the reader.

When you write a book, you are taking your readers on a literary road trip. They should have a good idea of where you’re going to end up, and they should trust you to get there in a reasonable manner.

We would not get into a car with a driver we didn’t think could get us to our destination safely. None of us want our road trip to end in the ER. Accidents can happen, sure, but if we get that bad icky feeling about the road trip, we don’t want to be proven right.

Likewise, if the driver suddenly said, “You know what? Fuck it, we’re not stopping in Omaha, we’re going to Denver,” then you are being kidnapped, and you should probably call the police.

The magic of the road trip, though, is that we don’t know the exact shape of the journey there. A road trip that doesn’t take some strange detours is simply not worth taking.

For example, I drove 64 hours round trip from Cleveland to Albuquerque, New Mexico. We knew some of our essential stops: namely, San Antonio, Texas, and Carlsbad Caverns National Park. That particular park had been on my bucket list for a long time and was a dream come true.

What we did not know, though, was that on the way back, one of the major highways through Kansas was completely closed through the entire state. Which happened to be the very highway we had intended to take, and which Google Maps had kindly not warned us about until we were all the way through Oklahoma.

I had to drive until 2 am on tiny back roads while swerving to avoid hitting nocturnal (and very creepy) jackrabbits, then sleep for a few hours at a rundown nasty hotel in the middle of nowhere before getting up to haul ass home. If my road trip were novelized, that would have been the climax: highly unexpected, a severe plot complication, but not in disservice to my end goal (Cleveland, the best city in the world).

Now, I had my mom and two dogs in the car with me; that was part of the reason I had to drive so late into the night, because we couldn’t find a pet-friendly hotel in the middle of nowhere Kansas. If my mother did not trust me as a driver, we would have tried to find somewhere, anywhere, to stay. We would have stopped on the side of the road and slept rough. The end goal would have still happened, but the climax wouldn’t have.

Which brings me to another key point about climaxes that you should keep in mind as you write.

Any character might reach the end goal, but not every character would experience the climax.

In my posts about characterization, I have hammered in the point that plots are shaped by characters, not the other way around. A good book has a non-substitutable main character. You can’t plop anyone else into that role and still have the story shake out the same way.

This is no more obvious than in the climax, because it is the character’s decisions that have led them up to that point and their personal traits that get them out of it. Their ingenuity, bravery, stubbornness, or perhaps even cowardice is what makes the climax happen in exactly that way.

I talked in my post about quality assurance checks for character development that you should try switching out your MC for someone else and see if that character would take the story in the same direction. If another character would follow the same exact plot points, then your character does not have enough agency.

Take, for example, my first book, 9 Years Yearning. I tell readers up front that Orrinir and Uileac are going to get together. The book starts on their wedding day. The title says they spent nine years getting to that point. But even though we know they get married, the battlefield confession climax wouldn’t happen to someone else. It happens because Uileac is a cavalryman and Orrinir is an infantryman and they have different battlefield roles.

And it also happens because Erix is a wonderful horse and the bestest goodest girl ever who plays matchmaker for her two favorite people. As such, this specific story, with all those specific plot points, could not have happened to anyone but Uileac.

Again, the book isn’t a “what happens; it’s a “how did this happen.” We work backward from the characters’ climax (literally, haha) and see what led them to that point: the book’s climax.

Start with a beginning and an end, then let the climax form naturally.

So, here’s my suggestion for how to create a great climax, now that I have explained a good mindset for how to make one.

Start with the beginning and the end, then the middle.

This is confusing for many writers, especially pantsers (I’ll talk to you guys in another post), because they think that they have to write in order: beginning, middle, end. Not true.

In fact, I almost never write in order for any project. I didn’t write in order for my college essays, either, and I always got great grades. After gathering all the research I needed, I would write the intro, the conclusion, and then the middle.

Why? Because then I knew what my main argument was and I knew what conclusions I would draw from the research I’d gathered. I’d then write everything out in different sections based on what I remembered, with signposts for where I needed to put in citations, and deal with those later. Once I was done, I’d check that all the sections flowed well together and rearrange them if necessary.

And this is exactly how I tackle books, too. I know where I’m starting and where I’m ending up. I write my long outline with the end point in mind, then figure out what will get me there. Once I’ve figured out the beginning and end, I determine the climax. I then work from the beginning to the climax, and then the climax to the end.

That sounds super confusing when I write it out, so let me put it in a numbered list.

1. Beginning
2. End
3. Climax
4. Beginning -> Climax
5. Climax -> End

This way, I’m asking the same questions as readers will when I’m working: “how do I get to the end goal?” I can signpost immediately what the characters are working toward because I know it already. The climax lands like a bomb in my outline, but then I go back and work up toward it so that it seems like a natural conclusion. And finally, I connect the climax to the end so that there is a natural progression from that high point to the end mark.

As a note, if I’m working with two POVs, I write each POV separately. That way, I can fully embody their voice throughout and not get it confused with the other POV.

If you’re working with my Plot Mountain method, then you have the same benefits because the method naturally encourages you to work this way. You know your start is the mountain base. You know your end is a return to base camp. You know you’re going to the top. But how you get there, and how you return, is the real question.

Most genre fiction works this way, even if we don’t think of it like that. We know that someone will solve the mystery, or get the love interest, or defeat the villain. The very concept of a genre imposes certain limitations on the end result, because otherwise readers are not satisfied.

But people keep reading mysteries and romances and thrillers because they want to know how they get to that point. They want to have the cognitive dissonance of things seeming impossible but then turning out alright. They know the MC will live, but not what happens to ensure survival.

Confident writers do not need to trick readers into sticking with them; in fact, deception and about-faces turn readers off. Then you get into a vicious cycle of annoying readers by throwing weird stuff at them and wondering why they don’t like it.

Trust your reader won’t jump out of the car at the first rest stop. Tell them where you’re going and what they can expect when they arrive. Then, let them be surprised by the winding roads you take to your destination, as that’s the real memorable part.