Last week, I was reading an old interview with Philip K Dick. In it, he mentioned that a lot of the choices that shaped the plot of The Man in the High Castle came from his use of the I Ching.
It got me thinking about plot twists and where they come from. My preference is for the work to be as organic as possible. Often, some of the more interesting turns in my stories occur to me as I'm writing and surprise me. I can trace back where they came from, but they are far from deliberate. Since many of my stories come from intuitive (not systematic) collisions of apparently unrelated ideas, sometimes the odd story developments emerge from the natural consequences of those combinations.
Because the muse doesn't always show up, I have techniques that lead to twists. Sometimes, these fit right in. Sometimes, they necessitate a lot of rewriting to smooth them out enough so that they feel organic. And sometimes they lead me into lots of pages that never make it into the final manuscript. My first "go to" approach is to list 10 to 20 options. Often I write these out in full sentences so that I know I'm being absolutely clear about each. It's very rare that one of these doesn't feel both right for the story and unpredictable.
Another thing I do is imagine how some of my favorite authors would move the story forward. Oddly enough, even though these are really coming out of my brain, no two authors ever make the same choices. More often than not, I'm stuck with more than one option that intrigues me — not a bad situation to find myself in.
On occasion, I've also written the scene over again from a different character's point of view. This is less successful, but always worthwhile in terms of insights. In fact, it's worth mentioning that many of my favorite story terms seem to been whispered into my ear by one of the characters. Or they've resulted from the reaction of another character in the scene that was stronger than I expected. One more character piece that has worked is including a wildcard character (often a trickster) in the story and introducing them into the problematic scene.
Context can play an invaluable role as well. Getting out of the character's head and exploring the larger meaning of the scene, in terms of the story world, often causes me to include forces (such as cultural) that make a modest decision epic. More rarely, I focus more tightly on the character's interests, even breaking down each beat and working to experience deeper emotions that come into play.
The easiest way to flip expectations in ways that engage rather than lose readers is to refer to models. I’ll often look to similar stories or history to explore possibilities. These come with their own authenticity, which helps me to be convinced as I use what I’ve learned to work on my own story. The one caution here is that the excuse “this really happened” may work its charms on the author, but may mean nothing to a reader. The improbable doesn’t work in fiction. And that goes double if it benefits the protagonist.
One more thing. Every plot twist needs to be challenged in revision. This can be a pain if you’ve fallen in love with it and other elements of the story depend on it, but a bad plot twist can shatter the story logic and drive readers away. Luckily, it’s almost always the case that any concerns that arise can be fixed by making changes to scenes that come before the twist. In my experience, these are not just simple fixes, but opportunities to make large chunks of the story more interesting.
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August course
A Task Approach to Efficient Writing
August 16-September 5
One key to writing productively and doing a thorough job is understanding the tasks of writing. If you only see big activities, like exploration, drafting, revision, and polishing, it’s hard to plan the day’s work. Each requires many different skills, approaches and time commitments. That’s one reason finding “revision” on your to-do list can be so overwhelming. Where to start?
By breaking the work down to specific steps (like analyzing story logic, tightening prose, and sweetening the humor), you can assign yourself tasks to make each writing session rewarding.
This course will help you divide huge writing jobs into bite-sized pieces, with guidelines on how you can order them to match the way you write.
Through exercises, checklists, and approaches to integrate task-based planning into your writing, you’ll be able to create your own map to finishing a manuscript. With over 50 different tasks listed, ordered, and defined, you’ll never sit down with a vague idea of what the day’s work is.
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