what a twist!

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I recently revisited M. Night Shyamalan’s body of work. Shyamalan’s known for his use of plot twists, especially those revealed deep in the third act. But not all of his twists have been received equally well. The Sixth Sense is highly regarded, while his later films (such as The Village) were panned.

As a writer of suspenseful fiction, I’m always interested in the craft of heightening an audience’s reaction. But I don’t go in for very many plot twists in my work. There’s a great premium put on plot twists in narratives of all sorts, especially in our era of spoiler sensitivity. But in a good work of art, the plot twist should be one of the least important facets.

Let’s take The Sixth Sense as an example. (This should go without saying, but I will be SPOILING the big twist at the end of any works I discuss)

The only reason the big twist at the end works is because the whole story leading up to the twist works. We follow this adorable kid who can see dead people and the therapist who’s trying valiantly to reach him. After a series of highs and lows, the therapist and the kid realize that the “cure” isn’t to stop the kid from seeing ghosts – it’s to acclimate him to the trauma of these visions so that he can help the ghosts move on. The kid grows as a person because of this newfound strength and purpose.

It’s because of this new purpose that the twist at the end – that his therapist was actually dead all along – works. The therapist helps the kid master his gift; the kid helps the therapist move on from the mortal coil.

Without that thematic unity, and without the solid performances of Haley Joel Osment and Bruce Willis, the twist at the end is just a meaningless narrative flourish. The story could have worked without the twist – it would have been a B-minus thriller elevated by good performances – but the twist wouldn’t work without as good of a story.

There’s an episode of The Twilight Zone (the 1985 revival) called “Button, Button” in which a lower-working class married couple receives a visit from a mysterious stranger. He gives them a small box and makes them an offer: if they press the button on the box, someone they don’t know will die and they’ll receive a vast sum of money.

The couple debates the ethical implications of killing a random stranger for money. Maybe it’ll be someone with cancer! Maybe it’ll be a child! What if they do something really good with the money? And so on and so forth. (They investigate the box and find that there’s no mechanism inside that the button triggers)

The husband throws the box away to end the debate, but the wife can’t stop thinking about it and eventually pushes the button. The stranger shows up and pays them their money. He’s about to leave when the wife pleads to know who they killed. The stranger’s answer implies that the button always kills the previous person who pushed it.

Now:

This episode was based on a Richard Matheson short story of the same name. The story is identical in every respect except the ending. In the Matheson short story, the woman’s husband dies. When the stranger shows up with the payday, he makes some arch comment along the lines of “never really knowing” the person you marry.

Matheson hated the Twilight Zone version and I’ve never understood why. It’s a substantially better ending! 

Matheson’s version hinges on a coy little semantic twist of what it means to “know” someone. But the TV version makes the twist matter! The entire episode revolves around an ordinary couple talking themselves into something monstrous through a mix of rationalization and curiosity. But whether the wife survives long enough to enjoy the payoff depends on whether the next person to get the box – a total stranger – is more ethical than she was.

(Note: the ferry scene in the climax of THE DARK KNIGHT works for a similar reason)

A plot twist can be a tool to heighten emotion, but only if there’s already emotional investment present. “The sidekick was working for the bad guys all along!” only works if you like the sidekick. Without that, a plot twist is just a trick.

vigilantes and fiction

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If I have a guilty pleasure, it’s the vigilante thriller.

“Guilty pleasure” is itself a guilty term in an era of blockbuster superhero movies, binge TV, and poptimism. We’re supposed to own up to the things we like without shame. And I can’t feel too guilty about my tastes if I’m blogging about them, I suppose.

But we’re also supposed to recognize the limitations in our favorites. Nothing in this transient world comes without its flaws. And vigilante thrillers have, perhaps, more flaws than most subgenres.

The idea of a hero defying law and social convention in a lone quest for justice speaks to me. But I can’t pretend that “defying law and social convention” isn’t a handy excuse for “being an asshole.” And, if I’m being fearless and searching in my moral inventory, that’s what vigilantism is: a socially acceptable excuse for violence.

It’s a way to daydream about fistfights, car chases, and gun battles without the consequences of being a menace. Sure, I’m a murderer and an asshole, but it’s for the right reasons. I don’t want to be violent, really, but I had no other choice.

Plus, far too often, vigilante thrillers are just an excuse for the author to lament about a “weak” or “soft” society. In a civilized social order, we outsource violence and the pursuit of violent offenders to an official body. Therefore, if there are offenders who haven’t been brought to justice, it means that these officials have failed. Or, depending on your politics, the officials are being held back by too much red tape, too little firepower, or too high a regard for civil liberties.

So given these flaws, why do vigilante thrillers still speak to me? Sure, past a certain point I just like what I like, regardless of how problematic it is. I can’t completely redraft my aesthetics to match my politics, especially if my politics change. My views aren’t what they were 10 years ago, yet I’m trying to write novels that will (hopefully) still be readable 10 years from now.

Ultimately, I think the real draw is the fantasy of a life without compromise. So much of the “real world” (meaning, the world of paychecks and health insurance) requires sacrifice. We may make bold declarations of principle – to our friends, over drinks, in impassioned Facebook posts – but the material limitations of the world prevent us from living those principles to the fullest.

To a certain extent, that’s healthy. We’re not built to be unswerving ideologues; we’re built to get along with the people around us.

But it’s fun to imagine a life where we don’t have to temper our pursuit of justice – where we have not only the skills and resources to redress the wrongs of the world, but also the will to see it through. And we tell ourselves that we could survive if this path isolated us from friends, family, colleagues, and the social order. But secretly, we also like to imagine that people would respect us if we followed this dedicated path. Maybe they’d even give us a little help along the way.

They say you should write the types of books you want to read but can’t find. That’s what CLEARCUT and the Adrian Cervantes series have been a stab at: all the things I think are good and empowering about vigilante thrillers, with as few as possible of the flaws. It remains to be seen how well I’ve done, but I’m willing to keep trying.

inspirations for CLEARCUT

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What sort of thrillers speak to me?

person-of-interestTwo of my favorite TV series of the past 10 years – shows that I keep coming back to – are Burn Notice and Person of Interest. As formula shows, they work: a retired spy with exceptional skills helps innocent people solve problems that the cops can’t help with. They have a variety of contacts and allies – some intimate, some reluctant – who help them on their way. They’ve done bad things in their past, but their freelance vigilantism gives them a chance at redemption.

In fiction, Barry Eisler’s books (particularly the John Rain and Ben Traven series) and the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child have also been staples. Without the constraints of broadcast TV, Rain and Reacher can travel farther, hit harder, and play harder still. Eisler and Child’s protagonists are lone, grim sentinels, but they get occasional help from a friend.

Writers write for a number of reasons, but one of the chief reasons, whether we admit it or not, is to imitate our favorites. (Another reason is to surpass them) So fans of Burn Notice or Jack Reacher may see some similarities in Adrian Cervantes.

The back cover copy for CLEARCUT sets the stage:

Adrian Cervantes’s Ranger squad was betrayed and ambushed in Iraq, sent to deliver an embezzled payoff to a man who didn’t exist. The lone survivor, Cervantes went AWOL, returning to the States to distribute his purloined cash to the families of his squad.

But it’s not as simple as leaving a check in the mailbox. Every family he visits has their own troubles. Law enforcement hunts him at every turn. And Cervantes’s need to see justice done earns him plenty of enemies.

The one thing that makes the Cervantes series different enough for me to feel it’s worth doing, though, is the reason the hero sets out.

Many thrillers, whatever their other merits, have our hero stumble onto a problem completely by accident. He sticks around to solve the problem out of some innate, unflagging sense of justice. For some readers, that’s sufficient. We don’t need to ask why our grim sentinel sticks his neck out for a helpless bystander – we just want to see him dish out justice, one roundhouse kick at a time.

That’s never quite been enough for me, though.

Adrian Cervantes isn’t solving people’s problems just for the exercise. Each victim is the family of a member of his squad. He owes it to the men he couldn’t save to leave their families better than he found them. And, by the coincidence that powers all fiction, each family has problems that money alone won’t solve.

My hope is that the personal connection makes these thrillers more engaging, impactful, and richer in variety than they would be otherwise. Though CLEARCUT is only the first in the series so far, I already have big plans in store for the successive novels. Wherever Cervantes ends up, he’ll be fighting not just for his own idiosyncratic moral compass, but to make good on a promise. I’m excited to see where that takes him.

Reminder that Clearcut is available for pre-order for the Amazon Kindle, and soon to be on sale in paperback as well! Pre-orders are at a 50% discount from the launch day price – reserve yours today!

no amount of assertion made an ounce of art

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How many drafts do you write before the book is finished?

I’ve never had a satisfactory answer to this question. My answer has also changed quite a bit between when I started writing and now. It’ll probably change in the future, too.

The first draft, the raw draft of dumping words on the page, goes into Scrivener. Though I still fuss with sentences, I keep Scrivener in Full Screen mode and do as little jumping away from the text as possible. If I give a character a name at the start of the chapter and forget what it is by the end of the chapter, I won’t scroll up to look for it. Their name becomes TK WHAT DID I NAME THIS PERSON until my first editing pass.

I think most people know this, but: TK is a journalism convention, marking a place in the text for future edits. It’s an easy way to note things to come back to. I use it primarily for details, though I also use it as a stylistic reminder. Sometimes I’ll finish a paragraph and realize I conveyed none of the feeling I intended to, or that I wrote a hundred words of cliches rather than something simple and true. There’s nothing wrong with ending a fresh paragraph with TK THIS SUCKS REVISE LATER. Better to do that and prove that you knew it wasn’t working at the time than to come back to it and wonder what you were thinking six months ago.

When I reach the end, I’ll go back and fill in all of the TKs. I suppose this is technically the second draft, but there are rarely substantial changes in content over the first draft. Still, this is the earliest draft I could show to another human being and expect them to follow.

After letting it sit for three to six months, I take this draft back out. If I was paying attention as I was writing it, I will usually have a rough sense of what needs to be fixed – what scenes need to be completely rewritten, what chapters need to be rearranged, what could be tightened up. If I don’t know what’s wrong already – and there’s always something wrong – I try writing a synopsis of the story from memory. If I forget what happens between certain key scenes, or if I remember something happening different than it did, or if I sum up something in a sentence that took two chapters to recount, that tells me where I need to work.

At this point, I have a draft I’m comfortable sharing with trusted readers. I reach out to see who’s available, solicit their feedback, and compile their notes. Generally, if I get the same note from multiple people, or if I get pointed feedback on something that’s key to the story, I focus my attention there.

With these edits in place, I work with a professional editor for another pass. This is where narrative inconsistencies, stylistic hiccups, and grammar issues get ironed out. These are also, frankly, a pain, because I have to export a file from Scrivener into Word, review feedback in Word, and then put all those changes back into Scrivener. But my day job’s taught me the importance of making copy changes to the source file, not just the final export.

Once these edits are done, I export from Scrivener to a Kindle-readable format. Then I load the book onto my Kindle and read the whole thing again. Each different view of the text – on the screen vs. on the printed page vs. on the Kindle – uncovers new things. It’s a matter of how the text gets juxtaposed. You’ll never know how many times you use the same odd word choice in the same paragraph unless you format that paragraph a couple of different ways. Any changes I find here, I make in Scrivener. Again.

What emerges from that could be called the “final” draft. But even then, probably up until the day of release, I’ll be finding little bits and pieces to tweak. At some point, every writer needs to wash their hands of a draft and submit it to the world’s attention. But another thing I picked up from my day job is to label drafts by their date, not by their order. Call nothing final until you die.

And there may be one or two more revisions within that cycle. This is the great challenge of producing viable art. You have to take something that inspired you, grind it over and over until you’re sick of looking at it, then give it one final polish.

“No amount of assertion made an ounce of art,” wrote Saul Bellow. Art emerges from labor: refinement, revision, scrapping first drafts and stripping away excess. If there’s not a revision period, it’s not art, it’s play (also valuable, but hardly marketable). Revision is the most important part of my writing – and, for me, the hardest.