
Give one of your characters a secret. This is so simple it’s almost unbelievable.
#Cplot back plotter crack
Is your MC’s hair suddenly a different color? Is there a stain on the bathroom carpet? Is something dear to your character missing? Is there a long, silvery crack in the window that wasn’t there before? Has the sun disappeared?

Have your character wake up … but something is different. But it really does add an engaging humor element to a sci-fi story, if you’re willing to take the risk! Tip: try twisting the cliché in some other direction! Swap your characters’ personalities. I know, this trope is becoming a cliché.

Your protagonist quits their mission. Why did s/he quit? Will s/he come back to the mission? For extra punch: make it even worse than the worst. Whenever possible, apply Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” So basically, imagine the worse possible thing that could happen to your characters, and go from there. Take away the object crucial to their success. Did they lose the map? Or did the magical way-finding whatsit get stolen? Are your characters starting to blame each other for the loss?Ī character disappears in the night. Or in the day. The parents are working for the antagonist. This works well if your protagonist is particularly close to their parents. Oooh, here’s another one: is the POV character the traitor?! Extra-bonus points if he was only betraying them to protect them. Reveal (or hint at) a traitor. Who’s been secretly giving information to the bad guy? The best friend? The lover? The parent? Bonus points if the POV character is close to the traitor. Does s/he do it to protect themselves, or others? What is their secret identity? How far will s/he go to maintain it? Your protagonist has to assume a secret identity. What do your main characters do? How does the natural disaster affect the mission? Your protagonist develops a fatal illness. Will s/he live? Will s/he die?Ī hurricane sweeps the nation. Perhaps s/he’s closest companion falls from a great height – off a roof or a cliff, maybe – and they don’t know whether he survived or not.

Maybe s/he falls fatally ill and they don’t know what caused it, and maybe they learn in the worst way that the disease is contagious. Tip: the more time the reader has to bond with the character, the sadder the death will be!Īlmost kill someone off. Give one of your characters a near-death experience. Kill someone off. This is about as drastic as it gets! But it certainly is effective especially for fantasy, dystopian, sci-fi, or adventure writers. It gives you so much more material for the rest of the story! I wrote a fantasy novel from the POV of dragons last year, and the only reason I kept going with the story was because I had an unlikely character inadvertently start a war. Start a war or revolution. I like this one because it could work for just about any genre: dystopian, historical, fantasy, science fiction, adventure … the list goes on. Which is why I’ve sorted them from most to least drastic, so you can find just the right “twist” for your story. Not everything in this post is necessarily a “plot twist” – some of them can just be referenced during your “Well, now what?” moments. The following function and plots hopefully illustrate the problem.Plot twists, done well, are a superb addition to the suspense in your story. ?Īny hints or explanations are much appreciated! This works, but needs some advanced R knowledge for a user of such a function.Ī way to change the default setting for the shape and colour arguments outside of aes() in geom_point?Ī way to override the specification of the shape and colour arguments, if an aesthetic is used?Īnother way to reach the goal stated above, without using. One workaround would be to remove the shape and colour arguments, and allow them to be specified using. colfac arguments are provided, the aesthetics get overridden by the specification of shape and colour, respectively.

colfac, etc.), but also allow to set e.g. That function should allow to map columns of X to various aesthetics inside aes() (via arguments. I'd like to have a function that processes some input X and produces a gglot graph using geom_point. colfac = NULL, shape = 21, colour = "black",Ĭenter = TRUE, scale = FALSE, x = 1, y = 2, plot = TRUE) ".format(val) for val in xticks])
