This is telling commentary not just on my vigilance about current events, but also about the “normal” media outlets’ obsession with housewives, Lady Gaga, and like shallow bullshit — and the absolute disregard they have for literary contributions and those who make them. Realizing I missed these two losses has forced me to start checking the NYT obituary page every day. But that’s a rant for another time.

One of the writers is someone I’ve written about in this blog — Robert B. Parker. I think the respect and esteem I have for his writing is well documented in my post about him. The other “tell” that a writer has left his mark: when the writer dies, the reader feels the personal, emotional loss of the characters he or she created. I feel that loss. The world is a poorer place for Spenser being silenced, and for his walks in Boston all being lamentably now locked in the past.

The other was John Mortimer, creator of Rumpole. For the uninitiated, Rumpole is a rumpled (pun intended), cigar-ash-wearing, Chateau Thames Embankment-drinking, aging, and absolutely anachronistic barrister who ekes out a living on his overdraft and the meager earnings he gets from defending every imaginable English lowlife. His days are tormented by Sam Ballard QC, his head of chambers, and his nights by She Who Must Be Obeyed, his wife Hilda. He is erudite, yet possessed of great common sense. He resists all efforts on the part of She Who Must to instill ambition in him with a willful inertia that is awesome to behold. And in his own way, he solves his mystery, wins his case, and gets his way. If you haven’t met Rumpole, by all means seek him out — and if humanly possible, listen to Leo McKern’s reading of him in audio format. McKern played him in the BBC series based on the books, and reads him to perfection. On my long-ago trip to London, the tube station near my hotel obligingly let out within a block or two of the Gloucester Road, where Rumpole returned every night to She Who Must in their mansion flat. I walked the Gloucester Road, and there were indeed some buildings there that looked like what I imagine a “mansion flat” apartment building to look like. I hope when next I see them, I can still conjure Rumpole trudging up the stairs, latchkey in hand, singlehandedly bearing the crushing weight of his role as protector of the rights of the accused.

So you’ll often see me pointing you in the direction of genre fiction for quick, clear examples of aspects of writing well done. (That sentence, my lovelies, was foretelling.)

I’m a fan of mysteries. In between rereading Galsworthy’s “The Forsyte Saga,” and reading Ivan Doig’s “The Eleventh Man,” Alan Greenspan’s “The Age of Turbulence,” Eric Alterman’s “Why We’re Liberal,” Leo Babauta’s “The Power of Less” and Barbara Hambly’s “The Emancipator’s Wife,” I’ve also been flat devouring Robert B. Parker’s “Spenser” mysteries.

Spenser’s sidekick is a character named Hawk. Parker does a great job of illuminating Hawk’s character, and the measure of Parker’s skill here is that Hawk does nothing to make that simple, because Hawk is… minimalist, shall we say? He shows up when needed. He says little (but that little is “cherce” as my other favorite Spencer, Spencer Tracy, would say). He has few rules but those are rigid. He does what is needed, as efficiently and with as little muck as possible. He bows out.

One tactic Parker uses to tell us a lot about Hawk despite his minimalism is Parker makes it clear that Spenser and Susan (Spenser’s girlfriend) know Hawk very well. So we learn about Hawk both because of their reactions to him and discussions and assumptions about him, but also because it’s clear that they do know him so well: if they say something or assume something about him, the reader knows he or she can believe it. Even this last serves a second purpose: the fact that Spenser and Susan are so sure of their assumptions about Hawk tells the reader that Hawk will be true to what they know about him. He’s a mystery, but oddly, also a known entity.

A second tactic Parker uses is to take advantage of what the reader knows about Spenser. Spenser is a first-person narrator: we know him pretty well. So Parker illuminates Hawk by having Spenser point out how Hawk is similar to himself, and how he’s different. We know Spenser, so by contrast or comparison, we know Hawk.

There’s the usual suspect — how others react to him. (In a book featuring a different lead character but also taking place in the Boston area, one character makes an oblique reference to a Boston-area private eye and that “terrifying black man” he hangs around with. Hawk — who else?)

Hawk isn’t necessarily the most likable guy, but he is someone you’d want on your side. He seems to have few friends (well, I’ve counted two) but I suspect that’s because you have to take him on his own terms, and Spenser and Susan do that. Again, Parker uses contrast with Spenser’s and Susan’s acceptance of Hawk to illuminate this aspect of Hawk’s character. Every once in awhile some woman comes along who tries to have a serious relationship with Hawk but finds the rigidity of his own terms too difficult to navigate. So she ends up bailing, and we end up having what we know about Hawk and Susan and Spenser and their various interactions reinforced by comparison.

Oh — and savor the dialogue between Hawk and Spenser. It’s priceless.

In January 2008 I got a new job — incredibly challenging. Six weeks later, my mother — who had always been healthy, strong and vibrant and who was 10 years younger than my father — was diagnosed with terminal, metastasized lung cancer. In the middle of this, I started questioning whether or not I wanted to stay in my then-relationship. (I guess the “then” gives away what my decision ultimately was.) My entire life was in upheaval and everything that was not necessary to move forward got put on hold — including the writing.

By March, I’d pretty much decided to leave the relationship but was putting off the actual exit until we could see what effect Mom’s chemo would have on her prognosis. In June, she had her last chemo and was doing so well we were all convinced it had worked wonders. False hope: it shrank the lung tumor but every other tumor grew in the meantime. However, during the time we thought it had worked well enough to make an actual difference in her timeline, two things happened: I told my ex I was leaving, and, that same week, I met face to face someone I had happened to meet online the week before — and knew as soon as I laid eyes on him that I was supposed to be with him forever.

She deteriorated quickly. She died on August 31. Four days before, on her last lucid night, she met the man I married four months to the day later (last Saturday, in fact), and he was with me when she died. I have not begun to assimilate her loss nor the joy my new husband brings me, but I am trying to look both of these huge changes in my life squarely in the eye and take whatever they have to offer.

I expect my next few posts may deal with how profound experience changes one’s writing. The loss of my mother was my first experience with the death of someone I was close to, and meeting and marrying Jon is easily the most profound and life-changing love experience I’ve ever known. I’m still a writer. But I am no longer the same person who last wrote here all those many months ago.

Two events have occurred: I’ve taken a new job (minor), and my mother has become very, very ill (major). I won’t be around for a bit until the dust settles here. I’ll post when I can, but at the moment, I have to spend my time and thought elsewhere.

(For the purposes of this post, the one book I’ve finished so far was called “Might as Well Be Dead.”)

Nero does some of his own portraying; that is, Archie reports conversations and actions of Nero’s that he himself witnesses. But a lot of the characterization of Wolfe comes from Goodwin himself. Examples:

1) In this book, at one point a cardinal house rule is violated (Nero has a lot of house rules). Goodwin characterizes him by predicting three possible reactions on Nero’s part — and since Goodwin knows him very well, one presumes they’re all reactions that are steeped in likelihood. Now, Nero reacts a fourth way, and it makes sense — but Stout’s purpose of elucidating Wolfe’s character via the predictions is accomplished. Goodwin does this sort of speculation on Wolfe’s motives several times in this book, and each of the speculations reveals something about Wolfe’s character.

2) Goodwin points out when Wolfe is playing a role versus being himself. In one scene in the book (actually the same scene as the one in the above example), Wolfe buys time to think and creates anticipation in his listeners by filling pots in his orchid room. Goodwin points out that the action is totally fake: a key step in the filling has been omitted. Now, there are two dynamics at work here. The first is that he’s characterizing Wolfe by outlining both the lie and the truth in his behavior. The second deserves it’s own paragraph, thus:

3) He’s portraying himself, Goodwin, as knowing Wolfe’s habits well enough to be able to spot fakery — and if he knows him that well (the reader says to himself), well, he must know what he’s talking about and the reader should believe him. In other words, Goodwin is establishing himself as an authority on Wolfe. He does this throughout, in many ways — for example, even when Wolfe says something brilliant or surprising, Goodwin seems to expect it — he knows Wolfe well enough not to be surprised by him.

4) Goodwin makes frequent references to Wolfe’s appearance, habits, likes, dislikes, and thought processes.

5) Goodwin has set his own life up, in many ways, as an accommodation of Wolfe’s mandates and limitations — this tells the reader that Wolfe’s is a powerful personality and, also, that there must be some strong payoff for Goodwin to do this. It also keeps the reader’s eye squarely on the ball: the temptation is to think of the narrator of any work as being the main character. Well, if you want to think Archie Goodwin is the main character, fine, but Stout won’t let you lose sight of the fact that Goodwin thinks Wolfe is the main character.

6) Goodwin talks about Wolfe’s probable reactions to hypothetical situations — say, the idea of having a woman in his life. Now, Wolfe does not actually have a woman in his life — but Goodwin knows how he’d feel about it.

And so on. Now, a main method of characterizing a fictional persona is via the reactions of others to the character. Stout is a good example because it is an extreme example — the main character is seen exclusively through the eyes of the narrator, who either comments on him or reports things that occur involving him, over numerous books. Stout died more than 30 years ago and his books are still in print. He must have gotten it right.

1) Typos. What’s misspelled, or spelled correctly but misused — like “roll” for “role,” or “there” or “they’re” when you actually meant “their.”

2 ) Grammatical errors. And by God, police yourself out of things I see in published works all the time, like subject-pronoun agreement (the worst is using “their” when the correct word would be “his” or “her” — if you can’t get around that with a singular subject, make the whole damned sentence plural!) The other especially annoying one is — and yes, book editors miss this one a lot — using “of” when it should be “have” as in “would of” when it should be “would have.” YIKES!

3) Wrong word errors. Now, first of all, make sure you know what every word you write actually means. If you stop and think about it, you’ll be amazed at how many words it’s easy to use fairly correctly but if someone actually pins you down about the meaning, you have a hard time articulating it. (Ok, define irony. Define fortuitous. Define pragmatic. Define paradigm. Define catholic. Define hopefully — not the colloquial, misused meaning, but what it actually means. Define presently — and which definition is the preferred usage, as opposed to the one people use a lot mistakenly?) And never use “over” when you mean “more than,” “less” when you mean “fewer,” “since” when you mean “because” or “as,” “centered around” when it should be “centered on.” Amateur mistakes, all.

4) Vagueness. Two particulars, here — first, non-specific language (like using the word “thing” all the time, or describing something as “nice” in your exposition. Characters talking to each other — well, that’s different, because people say “thing” and “nice” all the time. But in the expos –no.) And the second is weakening qualifiers (kind of, rather, quite, very). Those are used quite often, very annoyingly, and I’m rather irritated and kind of tired of seeing sloppy editing that leaves those phrases behind.

5) Stylistic mistakes — by these I mean things like “there is” or “there are” constructions, which weaken writing, or using passive voice when active is better.

6) Point of view errors — if you start a paragraph in one character’s head, you better almost always end up there, and you better not have him know things he can’t possibly know — like what someone else is thinking if the someone else hasn’t voiced it, or what someone else’s motive is for doing things when the motive hasn’t been voiced either. Here’s a point of view error with commentary: “I watched him [we've established we're in my head]. He stood there [so far, so good, I can observe and know that without being told] silently. Suddenly he turned, afraid [trouble! How can I know that, based on what I've already revealed?]. He thought I was going to kill him [uh, i'm a mind-reader now?]. I admit, the thought was crossing my mind [now I'm back in my own head, but the reader is getting seasick]. He was trying desperately to figure out how to distract me and make me move from between him and the door [but since I'm reading his mind again, I know better, don't I?] . Avoiding point-of-view errors is why you often see “he seemed to be considering” or “she appeared to blah blah blah” or “he sounded” or “she looked,” because if you’re writing in anything other than third-person omniscient (and even then, a good bit of the time), you can’t know what someone else is thinking or feeling, you can only know what they’re displaying for the world to observe, and your own reactions to it.

7) Consistency errors. Susie has a red hat on page 7 but on page 30 it’s suddenly indigo. Or Susie’s name is spelled Susie on page 1 but Suzie on page 25. Or Mark and Susie’s first date is in springtime and they become inseparable immediately, but date 3 (which presumably takes place the same week) is spent out looking at the leaves changing color. Or your character is pregnant for 58 weeks, once you’ve added up all the time that’s gone by. And it doesn’t have to be internal inconsistency either — it can be inconsistent with your audience’s understanding of how the world works. For example, if your character is a 12-year-old and it’s October, the kid better be in school. If you have him out doing other stuff all the time and it’s not a weekend or after school or otherwise explained, you’ve screwed up in the eyes of your reader. Other inconsistencies arise out of errors of fact or anachronism — putting the First World War in the 1920s, or having a character using a microwave oven in 1949.

8 ) Character-development errors. If by the end of your work, your character’s actions don’t seem inevitable based on what your reader has learned about your character, you’ve dropped the ball. People don’t act out of a vacuum — they have pasts that shape their presents and actions. Your characters are motivated by the goals they’re trying to achieve that form the center of the story, but how they approach them and why those goals are important to them arise out of their pasts, histories, and natures.

9) Time-on-stage errors — did you leave subplots undeveloped throughout and suddenly pop them in to resolve them at the end? Did your main story line take a back seat to what should have been a subplot? Do you have characters who are important to the story but who aren’t seen enough? Or unimportant characters who spend too much time out there?

10) Too much exposition, not enough dialogue. Pick up books like the one you’re writing and thumb through them. Look at the ratio of dialogue to expos. Think about your own work in comparison.

12) Unanswered questions — all your little mysteries either have to be resolved, or closed in such a way that the reader understands a sequel is forthcoming.

13) Writing that assumes the reader knows more than you’ve told him. This is especially troublesome in nonfiction writing — you’re putzing along writing about how to knit, and you suddenly say, “having determined that you need a 9-gauge needle” and your reader thinks, “wait a minute, how did I determine that?” You haven’t put all the knowledge the audience needs down on paper — and this is easy to miss, because you already have the knowledge, so you aren’t going to experience the hole in the writing the same way your less-knowledgeable audience will.

14) Big picture errors. You wanted to make a certain thematic point but too many elements of your story lean in a different direction. Or the entire work is funny and lighthearted and then on page 297, it suddenly goes black. Or your characters fail to react appropriately to something serious when the reaction is called for. Or you spend 200 pages building up to something and then, when you finally reveal it, you do so in a way that doesn’t merit the 200-page build-up. (Like, you spend 200 pages FINALLY getting your heroine to MEET the guy she’s been fantasizing about all this time, and then, on page 201, without even talking about how the meeting went, you say “and then they got married. The end.”) Now, I’m not saying that variations of this kind of thing can’t work, but you better know what you’re doing. And if it doesn’t work, you’d better be ruthless about undoing it.

Well, that’s a start. I’m sure I’ll think of other things to edit for, and we’ll get to them all in time.

In the meantime, have happy and productive holidays — the kind writers’ dreams are made of!

The common definition is that the story arc is the trajectory of the plot. It starts out “low to the ground” at the beginning and rises with every tension-building event until you hit the climax or high point, and then drops back down like unto falling off a cliff. So you get a sort of uneven drawing of a mountain. I say uneven, because the coming down from the climax doesn’t (or shouldn’t) take as long or encompass nearly as many events as it took to get to the peak in the first place. So the initial climb is gradual, but the trip down the far side is precipitous.

That being said, here’s the complicator — stories have more than one arc, because any subplot that results in a resolution has an arc. Characters also have arcs.

Let’s consider a couple of examples. Works that provoke fear are good examples because effective works of horror fiction scare the bejesus out of you, and you vividly feel each ratcheting up of the tension. You know when you’re climbing that arc, emotionally, and you know when you’ve crossed to the other side — because you can suddenly breathe again.

Let’s look at the stereotypical horror story — lonely traveler stranded, goes to eerie house (whose eeriness is obvious to everyone except the hapless hero), (tension rising) gets taken in, hints dropped left and right about the host’s true intentions, (more tension rising) and then comes that long long walk up that dark steep staircase symbolizing the helpless captive’s being removed farther and farther from any hope of escape. By now, even our hapless idiot has begun to cotton onto the fact that something isn’t quite right, and that ratchets our tension up farther. Then come the near misses (more tension) and the inevitable confrontation between hapless hero and evil creature. Now, your imaginary arc line has climbed and climbed and here, it’s at its highest point. Resolution occurs (good wins) and the next scene shows how vastly different — ordinary, even — the scary old place looks in the daylight, with all threat of danger past and calmness reigning supreme. (Here, the story line drops precipitously.)

Now, let’s consider the arcs in something more complicated. How about “To Kill a Mockingbird”?

The story has several arcs, all of which interweave, and several character arcs, likewise. Scout’s and Jem’s arcs — the main story arc — concern growing up and are mostly visible when you contrast their various experiences/opinions of Boo Radley — Boo goes from being a ghostly, mythical, scary figure to being a neighbor: lonely, scared, human, and, ultimately, good. That arc’s climax comes when Boo saves the children from  Bob Ewell.  But you can see other parts of the “growing up” arc elsewhere — in what the children learn about living decent good lives from observing their father, in what they see about walking in other’s shoes when they interact with Mrs. Debose, in Scout’s initial impatience with the Cunninghams and her later reaching out to Mr. Cunningham and defusing a tense moment thereby. Each of these incidents shows progress, leading up to the climax of progress — the transformation of Boo in their eyes. (By the way, I’ve been drawing from the book up to now, but the movie is wonderful too. If you haven’t watched it in awhile, go get it. Boo Radley is Robert Duvall’s first role, and he has no lines whatsoever, and yet he conveys that poor scared man beautifully…)

But there are others. Atticus has a character arc — he is tested when he is challenged to defend Tom Robinson and knows he must do so, even at what turns out to be great risk to himself and his children. He meets this challenge, and follows it through to its tragic conclusion. Tom Robinson has a character arc — a good man, wrongly accused, who loses at trial and is killed trying to escape.

The story of the Robinson trial is a subplot whose arc spins into the children’s larger arc. You think that arc is finished — the trial is over, Tom Robinson is dead — but yet, that subplot becomes the catalyst for the main arc’s climax, when the resentful Bob Ewell tries to harm Scout and Jem, and Boo Radley saves their lives. (Many sources say subplots should be resolved just before the main climax, and here is an example of it being done profoundly well, because it’s not only resolved, it ties in and feeds the main climax.)

Scenes often have arcs, also. Think about Rear Window, for example — in one scene, Grace Kelly goes to Thorwald’s apartment to get evidence. There is tension because the threat of getting caught hangs over her head, and if she does get caught, Jimmy Stewart isn’t going to be able to help her because he’s sitting in a wheelchair with a broken leg. She breaks in, she searches around, she finds something — but Thorwald is coming back. Tension rises. He comes in and confronts her — huge tension, huge danger — and just as it looks like she might be able to talk her way out of it, we see Thorwald noticing the evidence she’s found — his murdered wife’s wedding ring. More tension. He menaces her — poor Jimmy is in absolute panic. Then, at the last possible moment, the cops come in and save her (well, actually, they’re arresting her for burglary, but the result is the same). Climbing, climbing, tension, climax, drop. Time to breathe again.

Another example, this one from Gone with the Wind. Scarlett takes the ill Melanie, her newborn baby, Scarlett’s whiny son Wade and her equally whiny maid Prissy and tries to make her way home through two armies in a wagon pulled by a stolen horse.  All she wants on earth is to get home. She wants her mother. She wants someone else to help her bear some of the burdens that have been dumped on her because she is the strongest person in her circle. The tension mounts throughout the trip — Atlanta burns. They’re in frequent danger of being caught by one or the other of the armies, and the horse confiscated. Melanie is deathly ill. Rhett abandons them. They are getting hungrier and hungrier. Every place they pass on their way home has been burned to the ground, and they have NO reason to think Tara will have been treated otherwise. Then they turn the corner, and, a miracle — Tara still stands. Breeeaaathe. (But it’s a false relief, for Scarlet’s mother lies dead inside, and her life gets anything but easier.)

A writer should be able to plot out, on paper, the rising tension points, the climax, and the precipitous drop, for the story-at-large, and for the subplots. It’s a good way to check to make sure your main story isn’t being overwhelmed by a subplot — sometimes you may discover that what you think is a subplot actually has star billing, and this will cause you to do some rethinking. You should think about your character arcs, also — a character arc is just another way of looking at character development, and if your characters don’t grow and change, your story is missing something essential. And while you’re looking at your subplot arcs, see if you can find ways in which they add to your main story arc — as they did in the TKAM example.

Happy climbing!

At its simplest, a plot twist is something happening that the audience doesn’t expect.

A truly effective twist has to be two things: 1) unexpected and 2) still in keeping with your characters. It should also carry some emotional risk or baggage with it.

Let’s think about kidnapping, particularly as portrayed in television and then in the movies. In the typical hour-long TV drama, one of three things happens: the ransom drop is made and the person either is or is not recovered alive (that’s one and two) or the cops interfere with the ransom drop, catch the bad guys and recover the victim (three). None of these are twists, per se, because we’ve seen them so often that all are television clichés by now. Twists would be hard to set up here because an hour in television terms isn’t long enough to set up expectations that would be betrayed by a twist — and, also, typically these are cop dramas, and kidnapping twists aren’t usually going to come from the cops. The characters who would do it — the suspects or the victims — aren’t well enough developed to take advantage of it, and the story isn’t usually told from their point of view.

Kidnapping in the movies is a different story. Twists are not only possible in this scenario, they’re practically de rigeur if you want anyone to go see your film. Here are a couple of examples:

In “Ransom,” Mel Gibson’s character turns the basic “kidnap, ransom, recovery” plot on its ear by offering the ransom to the public at large as a reward for turning in the kidnappers. The emotional risks are 1) living with himself if it is unsuccessful and his son dies and 2) his wife’s reaction — NOT good. It’s in keeping with his character — he’s a self-made millionaire, so clearly he’s not afraid to take risks for large rewards. He lives large, and it’s a large gesture.

In “Ruthless People,” Bette Midler is kidnapped by two completely inept criminals. When they contact her husband, played by Danny DeVito, with the ransom offer, the twist occurs — he doesn’t want her back. In fact, he wants them to dispatch her with, well, dispatch. The emotional baggage here is for the kidnappers — they’re screwed. They never intended to kill her, they’re just not that sort of people. But she’s being a bitch, so they don’t want to keep her either — and they clearly can’t let her go.

Some twists turn on a character’s identity. In “Sixth Sense” the twist is that Bruce Willis’ character is dead the whole time. In the Wizard of Oz, the twist is that the wizard isn’t a wizard at all, that it’s all been one huge joke played by a quite ordinary, scared little man. In the Scarlet Pimpernel, it’s the fact that a completely useless fop turns out to be the Pimpernel — master strategist, cunning, skilled, daring, brave, useful. (If you want to stick with the original definition — something unexpected — the producers of “Robin Hood — Prince of Thieves” pulled off a beaut in the uncredited surprise appearance of Sean Connery as Richard II — and everyone in the theatre gasped when he came out.)

Twists often get associated with drama, but comedy can turn on them also. “Ruthless People” is a very funny movie. Another comedy that makes use of a twist is “The Marrying Man,” in which the main character marries the same woman four times. The twist is NOT that he marries her four times. That’s the plot. The twist is how he winds up married to her the first time (go watch the movie!).

Now, a twist can’t be just what allows the main character to survive, although that can be a side effect (the twist in “The Marrying Man” is an example). Survival is an accepted function of main characters in most fiction. So if your character ends up being chased by a knife-wielding maniac and somehow gets the knife away and stabs him instead, that generally won’t be considered a twist — because your main character is EXPECTED to survive, and twists have to be unexpected, remember?

A couple of points from Robert Kernen’s excellent book, “Building Better Plots,” spring to mind: the twist can’t be implausible or too wildly out there, because it not only won’t be believed, it will ruin your story. (And you could well come off looking like you wrote the whole book just to find a way to use that cute little twist you thought up, and your reader will feel used and be heartily irritated about it!) Kernen also advises that it’s better to put the twist just before the climax — as a catalyst to it — than have it be the climax itself. I think that’s good advice.

I can think of one instance where it came after the climax — in Gone with the Wind. To me, the climactic moment is when Scarlet realizes she doesn’t love Ashley, hasn’t for years. She really loves Rhett — and she can’t wait to tell him. She realizes how desperately he loves her. She rushes home to finally get her happily ever after — and discovers him packing to leave. He doesn’t love her anymore. (For years, every time I read that book, I’d stop one chapter shy of the ending because that upset me so much. I wanted her to have the happy ending.)

I can also think of one where the twist comes near the beginning, and sets up everything that comes after: “Prizzi’s Honor” — where Jack Nicholson’s character discovers the woman he’s intensely attracted to is, like himself, a hitman. (Hitperson?)

Something that doesn’t work, in my opinion: making the twist be that something less than what’s expected has actually occurred. Here’s a scenario, using the kidnapping theme again — only this time it’s a missing 4-year old. The kid is gone, and all the resources are mobilized, a beat-up old white van was seen leaving the area at the time he disappeared, a sex offender lives less than a mile away and drives a beat-up old white van, high drama throughout. Then it turns out the kid wasn’t kidnapped at all — he’d crawled up under the house and fallen asleep.

That’s not a twist, it’s a letdown. At a minimum, twists should be at the level of the drama that the reader expects, just not the specific action the reader expects. They can be used to ratchet the drama up a bit, but they shouldn’t be below its level, or reduce the entire plot to something below its current level.

How to come up with twists? Well, sometimes they just occur to you. Others you have to come up with. One way is to look at the “cliché” pattern of a story (Kidnap, ransom, recovery. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. Murder, tracking, capture. Poor girl, ball, glass slipper, prince. Love, betrayal, revenge. Goal, strive, achieve.). Pick an element, and ask some what-if questions.

What if, after all that, Cinderella turns the prince down? What if Oedipus was totally ok with the idea of sleeping with his mother? What if someone turned down Brando’s offer that couldn’t be refused, and somehow got away with it? What if Little Red Riding Hood bargains with the wolf by giving him her little sister?

What if, indeed?