Literary agent Allegra Martschenko (BookEnds Literary) finds herself giving one specific note often.
It’s not about voice, or hook, or comp titles. It’s a single storytelling choice most writers make that undermines their storytelling, takes away that “I have to keep turning pages” feeling–and turns into a huge missed opportunity.
It’s the difference between an obstacle and a plot twist.
“It’s very difficult to explain with just my words,” Martschenko says. So instead of a definition, she paints a scene for us. Jack and Jill go up the hill. What happens next will show you the difference.
The Hill (A Scenario)
Picture two characters, Jack and Jill. They want to reach the top of a hill for a date. They start walking–but, halfway up, it starts to storm, and the path turns to mud.
That storm is the pivot point. What happens next determines whether you’ve written an obstacle or a twist.
The obstacle version: Jack and Jill push through the mud, reach the top, and have their date. The story you promised the reader happens more or less exactly as expected. Nothing about their trajectory changes.
The twist version: the storm gets too dangerous to walk through, so they take shelter in a cave instead. They huddle for warmth. Something shifts between them. By morning, they have to decide: keep climbing, or go somewhere else entirely? Or: Jack slips, Jill dives to catch her, and now Jill is hurt and can’t walk. The two of them have to talk their way into a new plan.
Same storm. Completely different story. In the twist version, the reader can no longer predict what happens next–and that unpredictability is what keeps them turning pages.
Obstacles Aren’t a Problem–They’re Just Not the Same Tool
To be clear, obstacles have a job. Sometimes you need Jack and Jill to push through the mud because the whole point of the scene is proving they can persevere. It’s character building. And if you need that more than storytelling at that particular moment, that is the correct choice.
The issue isn’t that obstacles exist in your manuscript. The issue is when every major event in your book is an obstacle, and none of them are twists–when your characters encounter friction, push through it, and land exactly where the reader expected them to land all along. That’s the pattern agents notice in a query manager fast, even if they can’t always articulate why a manuscript feels flat.
How to Turn an Obstacle Into a Twist
The move, according to Martschenko, is to treat your pivot points as splitting points instead of speed bumps. Ask what happens if your characters get knocked off their original path instead of powering through it.
That can look like:
- A detour that changes the relationship (the cave)
- An injury that forces a new plan (Jill can’t walk)
- A full subversion of the goal itself–say, Jill betrays Jack at the top of the hill instead of sharing the date they planned
That last option can even become a midpoint pivot for the whole book–the rest of the story reorganized around a goal nobody saw coming.
The Twist Still Needs a Reason to Exist
None of this means every scene needs you to pull the rug out from your characters. Do that too much, and you’ll exhaust your reader. Martschenko is clear that a twist works because it’s right for this story–not because twists are inherently better than obstacles, or because a book “needs” a certain number of surprises to keep an agent reading.
A useful gut check: does the twist serve your character’s motivations, your theme, or your world? If you already established that Jill is a manipulator, her betrayal on the hilltop tracks. If your book is about the journey mattering more than the destination, then subverting the destination is the whole point and form matches content beautifully. If your characters live somewhere with a real rainy season, the storm was inevitable from page one–and how they respond to it is where the story actually lives.
Twists can happen anywhere in a manuscript. What matters is that they’re earned, not just inserted for shock value.
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