Ep. 256: How To Create Plot Twists

In this bonus miniepisode, Rachael talks about how to create plot twists for a good mystery, and what should I do if I’m about to miss a deadline? 

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Rachael Herron: Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #256 of “How do you Write?” This is a bonus mini episode. This is well, it’s for everybody and that’s the cool thing about these bonus mini episodes. But if you would like to send me questions, if you would like me to be your coach, you can send me any question you want about anything. If it’s dirty, I’m not going to answer it. But other than that, there’s nothing off limits. Preferably about writing, but whatever semi questions, that’s at the $5 a month and up level over at patreon.com/Rachael and you can become part of that. And I really, it really means a lot. Plus, you get all the essays that I write and sometimes I record them in there just for patrons. So you can go look at that, but in the meantime, let us jump into the two questions that we have here. 

[00:01:06] All right. First this is from Kate, and Kate says, “Hi, Rachael! I love your podcast. And so excited to be a new patron and able to get your advice. Thank you, Kate. I am working on my first manuscript, a middle grade kid, detective story. Side note, that sounds awesome. I’m having trouble with plotting out the story because I am simultaneously learning to craft a compelling story and trying to figure out how to write a mystery with clues and red herrings and twists and turns. There’s lots of resources out there for plotting story structure, and I’m using those as a guide, but I need advice on how to write an interesting mystery and layer in the clues and red herrings. I have a basic idea of who done it, but the story doesn’t feel very mysterious. It all seems really obvious who the bad guy is. I have had trouble finishing drafts. I’ve gotten halfway through five drafts now and back to outlining again because my previous mystery elements just weren’t working. And my biggest goal now is to actually finish a draft. I know some clues can be layered in later, but big tweak, twists seem like I need to know before I start writing because they affect story structure so much. Any advice you have on writing mysteries? Any resources you’d like to recommend to learn more? So I have advice and I have a strange resource for you. 

[00:02:24] First of all, congratulations on working on this. That sounds super exciting and so fun. I love that you’re writing it. Most of all, congratulations on determining that you will finish this. That is the number one thing that you have to do in a mystery or a thriller or any kind of suspense novel in order to figure out how to hide the stuff that you want to hide. And I know that you’re expecting me to say this, everyone listening to this who has ever heard me speak on any topic at all is expecting me to say this, but it all can be finished in revision. And more than that, it has to be finished and fixed in revision, inside revision, you are not going to get the great ideas about how to hide twists that you haven’t even thought of yet until you write the whole book. The answers to those questions will come to you as you are writing the crappy first draft. And the crappy first draft is the one that telegraphs to the entire world who the killer or the bad guy is for this. I’m not sure if you have a killer and, why I hope you do. That’d be fun. Ignore that. You can have one or not have one, but the person who did it, who did the bad thing, your first draft will have it pointed out like they’re lit up in neon. That is completely normal. I think I have told this story recently and I can’t remember where I told it, so excuse me, if I just told it on the podcast last week, but – I think it was in an interview. So you haven’t heard it yet. 

[00:04:04] For Hush Little Baby, the thriller that just came out. I wrote a full synopsis, a full treatment of everything that happened in it. And my agent went over it with me. My editor went over it with me, everyone approved, we all signed off on it. This was a great story. And it was going to be a complete mystery as to who the person was, who was the bad guy in this book. I wrote it, I wrote the first draft and it was the worst thing ever. And I wrote it to the synopsis that had been approved. And none of us, the three of us who are all professionals in the industry had not seen in the synopsis that what I was writing was an aero to the person who was the bad guy. It didn’t have the twists that I came up with after I wrote the first draft and knew what I was wrestling with. The final version had those twists, the final version had that person so well hid that I haven’t talked to anybody who figured it out. Early or easily, or at all when reading that book. But it took writing a terrible, terrible first draft that professionals had signed off on as a good idea. It was not a good idea.

[00:05:20] It was a bad idea. It was a bad draft. It was a terrible draft. I had to take it completely apart, put it back together again with a new twist, new surprises. I actually changed the person who it was after the book was written and believe it or not, I changed everything. And I had to, because I wrote, I wrote it badly. Our brains are not smart enough to come up with big twists, big surprises when we’re just sitting at our desk and plotting, we have to be writing the book. We have to be really, learning from the book that we want to write in order to come up with that kind of brilliant, surprising, you think of it in the shower after you spent an hour working on it that day. You have to write the book first. So getting to the end of this crappy first draft, that’s all you need to do and then start revising. And then you will be figuring out what to do, but as to resources, here’s the best resource possible. You can read all the books you want. There’s a ton of ’em out there. Those have never helped me. What has helped me with writing? Suspense fiction has been plot lunches with other writers. And what I mean by that, is it doesn’t have to be a lunch. It doesn’t have to- you don’t have to be in person. You can do this over zoom, but everybody who’s listening to this podcast needs a community of writers around them, that you know, personally and who know what you’re working on. Please don’t critique your work with them ever. You know how I feel about that first drafts and even second drafts are too or just too fragile to share with people.

[00:06:55] However, you can share ideas and it almost doesn’t matter who you do this with. Sometimes it doesn’t even need to be a writer. Some of my best plot lunches, as we say are with my wife who is not a writer, but I throw what I’m working on at her or at my friends. And I say that this is happening and she’s trapped here. And it’s obvious that this person did that and I can’t figure it out. And you’ll have three different voices or two different voices, or however many around you giving you ideas. And here’s the thing: It’s not the ideas that they give you. That help you, at all. I rarely use the advice that my friends give me or that my wife gives me, but them saying things that my brain could not come up with because it’s not inside my brain. That’s not part of my personality to think that way, what they say triggers the actual solution or the actual epiphany. That is the best resource I have ever found for writing suspense fiction. And the two people that I do this with most regularly are Sophie Littlefield and Juliette Blackwell. You’ve heard me talk about them many times and between, I’ve only written two suspense novels, but I’ve had big twists in my other books that I needed their help with. But they are both crime writers and between us, I’ve written two and they’ve probably written 60 crime novels. And this is what we do for all of their books. They come to lunch with an idea, they know it’s stupid and they can’t think their way out of it. I say something that has nothing to do with what Julie thinks of, but Julie looks at me with wonder in her eyes and she goes, yes! And then this could happen and that fixes it. It’s so obvious. Why didn’t I see that before? That’s how we use the resource of our community. If you don’t have community, everyone I’m talking to you, you need to start making it. It’s the best investment that you can make in yourself as a writer, is to have a couple of good writing friends and not writing friends that you tolerate, not writing friends that are just like, oh, I’m using them. 

[00:08:57] I’m using them to be part of my community. You want to find writing friends who will be real true friends. And where do we find those? We find those on things like meetup.org (meetup.com), Shut Up and Write. Look for that in your neighborhood, anything NaNoWriMo related and those kinds of events and things happen all year long. you can come to RachaelSaysWrite, which is kicking up again on September 8th. You can look at RachaelHerron.com/RachaelSaysWrite. You gotta spell my name right. And we meet twice a week, and we write together and over the course of time, we don’t talk in there very much. There’s a little brief window of time where you could talk to other writers and it’s for one minute, and then it’s for four minutes and that is it. But people really get to know each other there, and people have formed community of their own. You can private message a person that you really get along with and say, Hey, could I get your email? I’d love to bend your ear or have a zoom with you sometime. People do that in RachaelSaysWrite, because you get to know the people who are like you who have your same sensibility. I’m not saying you have to do it with me. You don’t, but do it somewhere to get that community, to take your ideas where you know you’re stalled and where you know they’re not strong enough yet. And hash them out with somebody who can reflect back something to you that will give you the actual answer every once in a while, they give you the idea that is the one that you needed most of the time you figure it out because of something they said.

[00:10:29] So that is my recommendation. Finish your book, talk it out with some people. And I am so excited for you, Kate. And this is a question from Lucia and she wanted it to, I need to anonymize some of the details. So I’m going to just kind of allude to some things, but I can read the first few sentences, she says, here’s my problem: I’m about to miss my second deadline, August 31st ‘21 with a publisher, but I can tell I’m doing good work. I’m not procrastinating. I start teaching in a week and I haven’t had any time off since before COVID, I’m finding it very hard to stop and take care of myself because I’m so discouraged that the teaching is starting again. And I still don’t have a manuscript in hand. Would you have any wisdom about this? And here’s what she and I talked about offline, just email and all I did was push back against that story that she had to meet her deadline. We don’t have to meet our deadlines sometimes. And sometimes we can’t, she’s writing a unique book that only she can write that is already wanted and purchased by a publisher. So she’s in a unique situation but she couldn’t get it done in time. She’s not procrastinating. She’s doing the work. What she wasn’t able to see, which I was because I have the outsider perspective is that, she just needs more time. And so interestingly, what happened then, is she said, oh my God, you’re right. I’m going to ask for another year. And she asked for another year and she got another year. She wrote to me and she said, I have another year! It’s not due until 8-31-22. And I said, nothing is going to change between now and then. You’re not technically procrastinating, but the work is expanding to fill the time allotted Parkinson’s principle. 

[00:12:27] So why don’t you go back to that editor and say, great, I appreciate the extension. Hopefully I’ll have it done before then, but can I get you X amount in three months? And we can start talking about that. So what she did was she picked an amount and I can’t remember actually what she picked, but she’s going to send that to her editor in three months and then they can start working on the book together. Also that gives her a soft deadline of getting something into a manageable form that she can hand off to somebody else, because we all come up against that fear of like I’m working, I’m working, I’m working, but it is not good enough yet. I have to have more time to make it better before I hand it off to an agent who asks for it from a query or from an editor to whom I owe the book. So we have to have those kind of deadlines. But we don’t, she didn’t need a year. She might’ve been able to finish the book in a month, but hey, give herself three months to do this X amount of work to hand in is really, really useful. So what does this mean to you? If you’re listening, you’re like, well, great, Rachael, I don’t have a book like that, that is already purchased by a publisher. And who is able to give me that extra time. What does that mean for me? What that means is you need a deadline. Everybody needs a deadline of some sort, and that’s where community can come back in really handy. Again, not exchanging work, don’t do that, but the best thing writing groups, writing communities are for, is to form accountability groups, which we all, all really need. There’s only so many times you can go to your writing partner and say, oh, I can’t get, I can’t tell you that I wrote a chapter this week and you didn’t tell them that you wrote a chapter last week and you didn’t tell them that you wrote a chapter the week before that because you didn’t do it. 

[00:14:14] Eventually, you either stop communicating with that particular writing community partner that you’re working with, or you do the work. That’s the easiest softest deadline. The second hardest deadline, which actually works for me incredibly well is to hire an editor of any sort. It doesn’t really matter what type that you hire. However, if you’re writing something that’s going to need a developmental editor at some point, hire the developmental editor, put them on- it’s not retainer. Put them on schedule, you have now something that you have to finish and revise to the best of your ability in order to get it to that person who is a freelancer. So they are depending on the money you are going to pay them to do this work in order to feed their family. That one gets me to write. That one, you know, use that one with caution. If you’ve never written a book before don’t go hire an editor for six months from now, you don’t know if you can get a book done and revised in six days. But hiring somebody to help you do something, absolutely one of the best ways, if you’re going to self-publish, you can always put up a pre-order. Again, dangerous if you’re just starting to write your first book. Absolutely do not put up a pre-order, but if you’re working with an editor, and you’re like, oh my God, I’ve got to do these revisions. And I just don’t know when put up a pre-order if you miss it, Amazon in particular is pretty punitive. You are not allowed to do another pre-order within a certain amount of time. I don’t remember what it is or was changing, things like that. It might be a year, do something that puts your work on the line, have some kind of external deadline, external accountability, and have it for a shorter time.

[00:16:01] Then you want, if you think you could do it in three months, well, you know what I’m going to, I’m going to contradict myself. Sometimes if I think I can do it in three months, I tried to get myself two and a half months to do it. Cause pressure is good for me. Other times, and this is most of the time I recommend that if I think I can do it in three months, I give myself four months. Cause I’m going to have migraine days. I’m going to have days where I just don’t feel like it. I’m going to have days when New Zealand suddenly went into lockdown completely unexpectedly and I’ve got to rejigger my life that way. So think about what might work for you and when a deadline might come in handy and then set it somehow, there are other ways of doing it. There’s a program called STIKK, S-T-I-K-K, I think. But you give them money and if you don’t hit your deadline, then they donate your money to a cause that you hate. I’ve never done that, but people have really good success with that. Be creative in making this deadline for yourself and challenge yourself in some way to do that. So, anyway, I think I’ve been preaching enough. I think we have talked about this. I am really, really happy that both of you reached out to me to talk to me about this and that you use me as your mini coach.

[00:17:12] And as I always say, at the end of these episodes, I don’t have any more questions, everybody. Who is supporting me at the $5 and up level? I’m your coach. Send me some questions. Let’s do another mini episode soon. Otherwise I hope that you all are getting your writing done. Just do a little bit, just all you gotta do. A little bit repeated over time adds up to whole books. Okay my friends happy writing. 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.