Hi, I need help on a twist idea for a short story, which I am working on. Here are two twist ideas I came up with. 1. The medical bio engineering company are actually kidnapping people, mutanting them into humanoid animals, and using them as medical specimens for their marketing system. They removed their organs and sold them to people, who need them. And they take their genes to add into their other products. Their victims are nothing, but medical slaves to them. And the public doesn't know about it. 2. The medical bio engineering company created humanoid animals for their marketing system. They remove their organs and sold them to the people, who needs transplants. And they took their gene samples to add into their products. The public doesn't know about the animals and the company's secret. So which one do you think will surprise the reader and make him or her read more in the story?
I honestly think that both have been done before, and thus have lost their originality - the foundation for the twist. I chose the second one because you can at the very least add the animal/human hybrid idea into it at least...the idea that humans are now functioning off animal's organs (though I don't know if that's feasible scientifically...). That has a significant "gross" factor, and you can play in some interesting social commentary with it. But honestly, neither one seems much like a twist to me. I'd offer some other ideas, but twists are not in any instance my forte, so mine would be horrible. I would suggest, though, that your twist be something not even the reader can discover or think up... In other words, don't make this a story where the characters are oblivious but the reader has (on their own, even) figured out the entire plot halfway through the piece. So if you decide to go with one of these story ideas, at the very least make it completely opaque right up until the end, and that will give the twist a little more in the way of credibility. Cheers, Rachel
How is the first already been done? I checked wiki and found nothing that is similar with the first idea.
Well, Michael Crichton's Next is about, partially, a monkey who has human parts...The Dune series (the prequels, mostly) has a huge part about using other people to rebuild dead ones, or replace organs, etc...and I'm drawing a blank for others, but I'm sure it's been done before. I'm sorry I can't give you more examples, but, yes, I've seen them both. Perhaps not in that exact manner, but the idea was the same.
I have to agree, both of them remind me of Resident Evil and Resident Evil: Apocalypse. You need to put an individual spin on the idea.
Sorry these aren't so much twists as interesting plot potentials. Personally I'd go with number two. Kidnapping people has been done to death, and purely from a legal point of view the medical company wouldn't want to have to worry about police knocking on their door about kidnapped people. Avoiding the governments medical control branch would be difficult enough.
I agree with Domoviye, these are plots, not twists. A twist is a change in direction of a plotline, usually at the climax, that takes the reader by surprise. I remember a differenn conclusion to the TV series The Fugitive than the one shown in syndication and referred to in the online reviews (my sanity is a different matter, though). In the version I remember, when they finally catch up to the One-Armed Man ad he makes his dying statement, he was not the murderer of Kimball's wife. He was a common burglar who stumbled upon the murder, and saw the real killer. The actual killer was Kimball's brother (or sister's husband, I'm not absolutely clear on that point), who had been having an affair with Kimball's wife, and killed her during an argument when she tried to break it off. That was a twist, whether I actually saw it (as I believe), or whether I just imagined it. Back to your question, though, either plot would be workable. It doesn't really matter. What matters is how you tell it!
Watchers by Dean Koonts(not sure that how you spell his name) has a storyline similar to both... but i agree with domoviye... these are plot lines.
