Do the Unexpected: Twist & Turn Your Plot

10 ESSENTIALS OF A DYNAMITE STORY  #5 TWISTS AND TURNS 

zzzzzzzzzzzzz …snort, cough ….

Oh, hello. It’s you. Sorry about that. I was reading a novel where everything turned out exactly like I thought it would and I dozed off.

#5 in the Ten Elements of a Dynamite story is “unexpected twists and turns”—in characterizations as well as plot. Very little will kill your novel quicker and deader than predictability. Story in any form—novel, television show, movie, cave painting–is best served piping hot, spiced liberally with surprise.

Consider:

So we’re sailing along through Finding Nemo when Marlin and Dory encounter three hungry sharks.

What should happen next? Crunch. Gulp. Marlin and Dory slide down the nearest gullet on a fast track to shark guano.

What does happen? The sharks, Bruce, Chum and Anchor have formed something like Carnivores Anonymous and have sworn off eating fish.

So a young man from a small town helps a beautiful princess save her people from an evil villain. They conquer the bad guy, fall in love in the process, get married and live happily every after.

You asleep yet?

But what if the young man turns out to be the twin brother of the beautiful princess? And the evil villain is their father? Throw in a master warrior who’s a green, cupie-doll-looking dude the size and shape of a fire hydrant, a mercenary whose best friend looks like Sasquatch and a robot without a line of dialogue whose beeps and squeaks steal the show and you have an edge-of-your-seat rather than a nod-off-and-drool story. George Lucas would be proud of you.

Every television doctor who’s graced the screen since Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare has been kind, gentle and self-sacrificing. House works because he’s a jerk.

Did you ever dream George would shoot Lenny in the final scene of Of Mice and Men? That Othello would strangle his own wife? That the three-eyed-green aliens from the machine at Pizza Planet would save all the other toys from a fiery death?

Predictable is booooring. If your story is going to hook Loyal Reader and drag him into the action, it better be a story that keeps him off balance, a story where he can’t begin to imagine what happens next.

So how do you craft stories with unexpected twists and turns? Learn from the masters: don’t start with stock characters. Ken and Barbie only work for five-year-olds. Need the driver of an 18-wheeler in a cameo role? Forego  burly, hairy and tattooed in favor of blonde and petite. (Actually, Barbie might work here.)

My favorite technique to add spice to a plot is the imagine-the-worst method. Your characters are doing splendidly—which is the point right before Loyal Reader goes comatose. So ask yourself, what is the absolute worst thing that could happen right now? John is down on one knee about to propose to Mary–what’s the worst-case scenario here? Mary says no, she’s dying of a horrible disease and by the way, John’s got it now, too. His wife shows up with their quadruplets. Her ex-husband shoots John, and Mary gets beamed into the 14th century? The moon rises and John turns into a werewolf. The sun comes up and Mary leaps into a convenient coffin.

You have to keep the “unexpected” rubber band pulled tight all the way through your tale. Every scene must surprise the reader in some way, while remaining tethered to the reality of the plot. Which means you must lay a groundwork of hints, like breadcrumbs tossed out to lead the reader to the climax. When you yank him in an unexpected direction, you want Loyal Reader to think: “Oh…THAT’s why …”

Which brings me to Dan Brown’s newest release—Inferno. Don’t read it without a neck brace handy, the plot twists in the story will give you whiplash. Perhaps even more artfully than Brown’s other books, Inferno is a study in the unexpected, where nothing that happens is what it seems and none of the characters are fighting on the side you think they are. If you haven’t read Inferno, perhaps you should. It demonstrates how to tangle up a plot like last year’s Christmas lights.

But I have to admit that by the time the switcho-chango elements in the book began to kick in, I was too brain dead to fully appreciate the effect. After roughly 5,500 (conservative guess) intricately detailed descriptions of artworks/historic buildings/long-dead rulers/popes/artists, I only had a handful of synapses still firing. Unfortunately, Inferno is also a case study in allowing the setting to hijack a book, an example of how to get so carried away with grandiose descriptions (to show off what an expert you are) that you totally lose sight of the fact that Loyal Reader just flat doesn’t care.

Let that be a learning experience for you, too.

Next week, #6: Dialogue

Write on!

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