The Mist – story structure breakdown
I haven’t done a film breakdown here in a long time and I am on a roll with them because I’m teaching a story structure class this semester, the first time I’ve taught a whole semester-long class.
If you’re writing anything takes place in a limited, even one-set location, The Mist is an excellent example of how to do that. It’s as concise and exciting as a good play, and makes terrific dramatic use of its (basically) one set.
It is of course also an excellent example of a horror story, based on the classic horror novella by Stephen King, and adapted and directed by one of the only writer/directors who has ever been able to do justice to King on screen, Frank Darabont.
The Mist breaks down perfectly into sequences and is a great film to watch if you’re having trouble with the concept of sequences and the Three-Act, Eight-Sequence Structure. It’s even super-easy to name the sequences, to get an even better idea of what unifies a sequence.
And what really, really strikes me about the first act – actually, just even the first sequence – is what a great example of foreshadowing it is. I don’t think you can even call it foreshadowing: it’s just a progressive, relentless series of signs that something is drastically wrong, and it builds that suspense and dread in a beautiful and excruciatingly effective way.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, here. Let me just start this off at the beginning.
THE MIST
Written and directed by Frank Darabont
From the novella by Stephen King
ACT ONE
SEQUENCE ONE
OPENING IMAGE – the paintings protagonist David Drayton is working on for a movie one-sheet. This is a nod to Stephen King; several of the paintings are from his The Dark Tower series (and one is from The Thing) and there is something a little otherworldly about the canvases, to set the genre tone. Personally I’m not crazy about those paintings as an opening. I know this is Drayton’s profession in King’s novella, but I don’t really buy actor Thomas Jane as a painter here; he’s got a nice, solid, blue-collar energy, more a local than an out-of-towner. But it would have been difficult to make that change to such a well-known and loved story, so I get it.
For me the real opening image comes 1 minute 30 seconds into the film: the tree crashing through the plate glass window in the front of the house during the storm. It’s a startling and ominous moment, a nice genre scare, and a great example of a THEMATIC IMAGE: it’s a visual representation of the core premise that some science experiment conducted at the nearby military base has shattered the wall between dimensions and let these creatures from another dimension into our world.
I have to say, I didn’t much like the opening when I first saw this movie in the theater and I didn’t like it upon re-viewing. The opening scenes might feel uncomfortable because there was originally a whole other opening in the script, showing the military lab and the actual experiment that caused the rip in reality that brings the mist and all of the creatures into our world. I think Darabont was absolutely right to cut that opening, but it may have left some rough edges in the beginning, which feels sketchy compared to the masterful execution of the rest of the film.
1:30 Then in the aftermath of the storm comes a very ordinary scene, the Drayton family, David, Steff, and Billy, checking out the damage. The one ominous moment is the shot of the mist starting to roll down the mountains and over the lake.
4:30 Then we have the great character introduction of the neighbor, Brent Norton, a city lawyer with whom David is barely on speaking terms. Norton is an interesting character because he is so ambiguous: he may turn out to be an ally, or a fierce opponent, and that ambivalence is there from the very beginning. And I must admit that there is always something charming to me about the first several words out of a character’s mouth being variations of “motherfucker”.
6 min. So now David, his son Billy, and Norton head off to town for supplies, leaving the wife behind and thus breaking the cardinal rule of survival in horror stories: never, ever, EVER split up. However, aside from some mist, there is nothing particularly ominous that has gone on that would make the Draytons think splitting up is bad, or in this case, fatal.
It’s only after the men have left Steff and they’re on the road into town that we get a series of increasingly ominous signs of how out of whack things are:
* They pass numerous military vehicles on the road, all of which seem to be on a mission.
* David mentions the mysterious “Arrowhead Project” at the base (SET UP).
* David’s cell phone won’t work in town and neither will the pay phone.
* There’s a newspaper headline we see in passing with the headline “Biggest Electrical Storm on Record” – it was an unusual storm.
* Inside the grocery store, an MP comes for the three young soldiers who were just getting out on leave, and tells them all leaves have been canceled and that a bus is waiting to take them back to the base immediately.
These moments all happen one on top of each other in just five to seven minutes, creating a spiraling sense of anxiety and dread, and in between we get quick introductions to most of the players: the feisty schoolteacher, Mrs. Reppler; good guy grocery clerk Ollie Weeks; the prim store manager, Bud; lovely checkout girl Sally, the young soldier who likes her, Private Jessup; and the human ANTAGONIST, religious nut Mrs. Carmody.
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11:30 Then while David and Billy are shopping, sirens wail and a convoy of emergency vehicles rush by on the road outside.
12 min. And shortly after an alarm that sounds like an air raid siren blasts outside, and a man (Dan Miller) with a bloody nose runs down the middle of the street shouting, “Something in the mist! It took John Lee!” He runs into the store, and as the crowd gathers at the windows to look out, we see the mist rolling through town and overtaking the parking lot. One man panics and runs out to his car, and the mist swallows him, then we hear horrifying screams. And then the mist surrounds the grocery store, obscuring everything, and there is silence…. Then an earthquake hits, sending groceries flying and people falling to the floor, lights swaying and people screaming.
But that’s not even the sequence climax. Just as Spielberg did so effectively in Jaws (as I discuss in Chapter 28), that action climax is followed by an even more powerful emotional one, in which a mother says to the stunned crowed that she has to go back to her two young children and begs someone, anyone, to go with her. No one will; all the assembled crowd turn their heads away. That’s when we know that everyone in the store knows there is something profoundly unnatural out there.
The woman tells them, “I hope you all rot in hell,” and walks out by herself, to be swallowed by the mist.
David takes a weeping Billy back into the back of the store, and the lights fade on Sequence One, a classic curtain. (17 minutes).
SEQUENCE TWO
Not hard to name this one: The Loading Dock.
(Sequence Two takes place in real time, which gives it a great immediacy and even more terror. The whole movie is a good example of unity of place, time and action.)
17:40 Before David actually goes back into the loading dock, there’s a short scene in which some of the women have gathered around David as he tends to Billy: Mrs. Reppler, the elderly teacher, and another teacher, attractive Amanda Dumfries; Sally the checkout girl, and another sympathetic older woman, Hattie. (This is the beginning of GATHERING THE TEAM; these are the good guys that we will be rooting for throughout.).
19:30 The women stay with Billy while David goes back into the loading dock to get blankets for Billy. In a great low-budget move, Darabont takes the action into the dark loading dock, creating a whole spooky new atmosphere and isolated location within the grocery store (Well, okay, it was all there in the novella). David hears some huge thing outside battering against the metal door, then pressing it inward. He runs back out into the store to get help and two mechanics, local yahoos, Myron and Jim; good guy clerk Ollie Weeks (a brilliant bit of casting there of the fantastic Toby Jones), and teenage bag boy Norm follow him back into the room. The yahoos ignore David’s warnings about something dangerous out there, and raise the door. A huge tentacle slides in and snatches the bag boy.
A prolonged and horrific struggle ensues, with David and Ollie trying valiantly but vainly to save the kid while the yahoos freeze in terror. This is a TEST, which in a horror movie separates the sheep from the goats. David finds a strong and unlikely ALLY in Ollie in this battle; another GATHERING THE TEAM moment, and gives us HOPE that these enterprising good guys will triumph. Hope for survival and triumph is an essential throughline of horror; the horror will never be as effective if the reader or audience is not strongly invested in at least some of the characters’ survival.).
This is also a revelation of the NATURE OF THE OPPONENT: there is definitely something otherworldly menacing them, and David’s line really drives it home: “What the hell was even attached to those tentacles?” (One of the more effective techniques of horror is: “Keep the monster behind the door. Let the audience or reader imagine what’s attached to those tentacles.)
28 min. So the bag boy is killed, Ollie and David get the loading dock gate shut and the tentacles withdraw. David has a violent reaction and punches out one of the mechanics, accusing them of getting the kid killed, and then collapses to his knees and dry heaves – overcome with adrenaline and terror. (Good realistic reaction to a profoundly unreal situation).
31 min. Now they know what they’re up against, and David and Ollie have a quiet scene in which they discuss what they’re going to do next (PLAN). They know they have to tell the others in the grocery store what happened, and they talk about the serious problem of getting the others to actually believe what’s out there. David says, “I saw it and I’m not even sure I believe it.” This is a great example of stating the problem that the characters are about to encounter so the audience can start to anticipate the reactions – it’s a good technique for keeping the audience engaged in the action.
And the sequence, and Act One, end as David and Ollie go back into the market to face the others (location change to end the act).
ACT TWO
SEQUENCE THREE
32 min. Inside the market, David quickly changes his bloody shirt so Billy doesn’t see the blood. Jim and Myron and Ollie are already breaking into the beer.
Here Ollie also states another huge PROBLEM: “How are we going to keep that thing from getting in? The whole front of the store is plate glass.” Again, stating the problem creates dread in the audience/reader, and asking a question creates speculation in a reader’s or audience’s mind. (FEAR).
Ollie thinks they should start to inform people by telling Brent Norton what they’ve seen, because he’s a prestigious lawyer (therefore good to have on their side for persuasive purposes). David approaches Norton and we see the conversation from a distance (so we don’t have to hear the story multiple times). It’s obviously not going well. David brings Norton back to hear the other men corroborate the facts, but Norton simply refuses to believe them. He is certain the locals are trying to play a prank on him, to make him look stupid, and as payback for his lawsuit against David. There is a subtext of the racism Norton has experienced from the locals underneath this whole exchange that is very uncomfortable but makes the scene believable. Norton flat-out refuses to go back into the loading dock to see the evidence of the tentacle, and when David tries to physically pull him toward the door, Norton accuses David of assaulting him and threatens him with prosecution, making his case to the manager, Bud. Bud accuses Ollie and the others of drinking, but Ollie tells him to shut up and calls for the others in the store to gather around and listen.
David tells the gathered people, “There are things in the mist just like Dan Miller said”, and describes Norm being carried off by tentacles. Norton and Bud laugh it off, but Bud goes back to the loading dock with the other men to look. The piece of tentacle is still there, and first flops, then dissolves into acid when prodded by a pole.
Bud comes back into the market and announces, “It appears we may have a problem of some magnitude.”
39 min A shot of the mist outside to indicate some time passage.
Inside the store one group of people is stacking bags of dog food and fertilizer against the plate glass front of the store.
Alone in the dark bathroom, Mrs. Carmody prays: “Let me help. Let me preach Your Word. They can’t all be bad. Some can be saved.” It’s an increasingly psychotic scene in which she is playing both the part of God and herself. Amanda interrupts her as she comes in to use the bathroom. Amanda tries to comfort Mrs. Carmody, telling her, “It’s all right to be scared,” and Mrs. Carmody goes off on her: “The day I need a friend like you I’ll just have myself a little squat and shit one out.” Amanda is shocked, as are we, and we realize how gone Mrs. Carmody is (a NATURE OF OPPONENT scene – the creatures out there may not be the only danger.).
41:30 Back in the store, Norton is talking to a small group of people about “flimsy evidence”. David argues that this is not a court case and that Norton is making things worse. Mrs. Carmody tells Norton there is no defense against the will of God. We see that the trapped people are dividing into three separate groups: the practical ones who are creating the barricade and making weapons to defend themselves (David’s group); the deniers (Norton’s group) and Mrs. Carmody with her religious explanation.
(Norton and Mrs. Carmody are part of the FORCES OF ANTAGONISM).
Mrs. Carmody starts quoting Revelations about the End of Days, insisting, “We must prepare to meet our Maker.” Jim, now very drunk, harasses her. Amanda politely asks her to stop, “You’re scaring the children.” Mrs. Carmody says they should be scared, and starts on a rant about expiation and Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son to God’s will. (THEME of sacrifice to God). Amanda slaps her, and it’s clear Mrs. Carmody will have her revenge one way or another. She threatens that “They’ll come in the night and take someone else.” (Sequence Three Climax).
SEQUENCE FOUR
47 min. Billy approaches the soldiers who are off by themselves talking furtively, and asks them why “their friends”, the military, haven’t come to save them all, yet. The soldiers are evasive. (CLUE). David takes Billy away and tries to comfort him, saying that he will do everything he can to get them home to Mom.
The good guys: David, Amanda, Dan Miller, Ollie, and Bud, gather by themselves to discuss options. Amanda has a handgun in her purse, and Ollie reveals he is a champion target shooter (a characteristic of action and horror movies is this kind of “discovering hidden talents” reveal. The book The Poseidon Adventure is a great one to read for this kind of “unlikely hero” character reveal.). Again, this reveal gives us HOPE for the triumph of the good guys. Of course the FEAR is – what good is a gun against what’s out there?
49: There is a commotion in the front of the store as Norton and his small group of followers announce they are leaving. Norton explains calmly: “It’s clear we’re experiencing some kind of natural disaster, but it’s definitely not supernatural.” He’s going to lead people out to seek help. David asks him to tie a clothesline around his waist when he goes – so they’ll know if the group got at least 300 feet out. Norton is offended and refuses, but an old hippie says he’ll do it. He’s not going with the group, but he is going to make a try for the shotgun that another local man says he has in his car.
Norton and a handful of others walk out of the store and disappear into the mist. Then come a long, highly suspenseful scene as the people in the store play out the rope through their hands in total silence. The rope stops moving… then moves again… then suddenly starts to reel out so fast it burns people’s hands. Mrs. Reppler, thinking quickly in crisis, tosses David a towel to protect his hands. (TEAMWORK). The rope suddenly jerks up, and up – like a kite string as a kite lifts into the air. Then the rope thrashes and jerks, and all tension drops. The people holding on fall to the floor.
They frantically pull the rope back in, to find foot after foot of it soaked in blood. And then people start to scream as they see what’s at the end of it – the legs and bottom torso of the old hippie, who has been torn in half. They cut the rope and slam shut the door, and Mrs. Carmody asks, “Now do you believe?” 54 minutes.
(This is such a powerful scene climax that I am not going to argue if someone wants to say there are actually three sequences, rather than two, in Act Two, Part One: The Splitting Up Into Camps sequence, the Norton Goes Out Into The Mist sequence, and the next: Bugs and Birds sequence.)
Fade out, and dissolve up.
It’s night, now, and Jim and Ollie and Myron are rigging lights up.
Sally the checkout girl is by herself in the locker room and gets a scare when young soldier Jessup comes in looking for her. They talk about their families and then she asks why he never asked her out in high school – she knows he liked her. “I’m stupid, I guess,” he answers, and they kiss.
57 min. Outside in the store, a man is keeping watch at the window barricade, and gets a huge shock when an enormous bug flies up and lands on the glass. It’s hideous, but also fascinating. Everyone gathers to look out in awe at the softly buzzing bugs in the mist outside, which land and crawl on the windows. This is a scene you see often in horror films: there’s almost an awe of the monster. It’s a mesmerizing, hypnotic scene, which is also a trick of horror films: lower the audience’s defenses, make them relax so you can really get in a huge scare.
And true to form, a pterodactyl-like creature suddenly crashes against the window as it swoops in to eat one of the bugs, beginning a ten-minute sequence of non-stop mayhem. More pterodactyls swoop down, crashing through the window. Jim and Myron turn on all the lights they’ve rigged while Ollie shouts at them to douse the lights – the creatures are attracted to the lights. Mrs. Carmody mutters scripture while bugs get in through the broken windows. Amanda kills one of them, but another stings Sally, who has an instant and severe allergic reaction: her throat and face swell up hideously and she chokes to death. A pterodactyl gets in and flies clumsily through the store, knocking cans off shelves as people run from it. One young local man lights a torch mop to try to kill it but trips over the gas can and sets himself on fire instead. Ollie tries to get a clear shot at the creature, and David lights another torch to go after another. He and Amanda work together to light the thing on fire and kill it. (There is a lot of TEAMWORK going on in this action scene – the good guys working together. It makes us love the characters and commit to them more).
Meanwhile a bug lands on Mrs. Carmody and crawls up her chest while she stares at it, paralyzed (creating intense HOPE in the audience that she will be killed) – but she chants, “Thy will be done” and the bug flies away (and we know that will only intensify her mission).
David keeps beating a bird creature long after it has obviously died. The last bird creature goes after Billy, but Ollie shoots it just in time. The burned young man is put out, but continues to scream in agony as the completely traumatized others assess the damage.
A woman says numbly that Mrs. Carmody was right 1:06 MIDPOINT CLIMAX
(This is all a horrific scene to watch, but it was especially so the first time I saw it, with the war in Iraq blazing and the monstrous political situation in our own country, supported by evangelical fervor. In that context this scene was almost unbearable, with the military references and the evangelical ranting of Mrs. Carmody. The burning of the young man is still too much for me to sit through; I always have to be doing something else.)
ACT TWO, PART TWO
SEQUENCE FIVE
(The Pharmacy Sequence)
1:06 Cut to outside the store: something we can’t see comes in the mist and drags away the half torso that is still lying on the pavement.
Billy wakes from a nightmare and Amanda comforts him. She and David talk quietly while they both stroke Billy’s hair; Amanda says she always wanted kids. This is one of those HOPE scenes: this is what we want for them, that David and Amanda and Billy will survive this and go on as a family.
Ollie interrupts the scene to tell David the burned man is getting worse. David goes back with Ollie to the office, where the burned man begs them to shoot him, or give him the gun so he can shoot himself. (FORESHADOWING). David asks him to hang on and they’ll figure something out. (Again, this is pretty unbearable. But the storytellers had to create a situation bad enough for the good guys to venture outside).
Outside in the store, Amanda discovers that Hattie has killed herself with pills. (More FORESHADOWING and fear: people are just giving up).
1:09 David gathers Ollie and Bud and Dan and says they must get pain medication and antibiotics for the burned man. Bud says there will be supplies in the pharmacy, just next door. David says they have to think beyond that, too, to getting out of there entirely. Amanda interrupts the scene to tell them about Hattie, and the men carry her body into the loading dock. In the loading dock the scene continues: David says they should hit the pharmacy, get drugs for the burned man, then get in his cruiser and drive as far as they can. Others, especially Amanda, argue vehemently, but David persists – Norton’s group got at least 200 feet and David’s car is closer than that. They have only 10 rounds left in the gun, and they have to get out before Mrs. Carmody takes over completely. She will demand a sacrifice and David is afraid it’s going to be Billy, maybe Amanda. Amanda doesn’t believe it – she insists people are basically good and will see through Mrs. Carmody. But the men all believe that people who are scared enough will do anything. (THEMATIC ARGUMENT).
(I have to say I’m not really sure I buy that this many people letting one crazy woman dominate the situation so completely; this has always been my problem with this story.)
David ends the argument by saying they don’t have to commit now; they’ll go to the pharmacy first and then they can decide.
1:13 Back in the store, David tells Billy he’s going next door. Billy weeps and begs him not to go. David promises he’ll be back. Amanda tells David roughly to get his ass back for his boy: another HOPE moment that they will survive and become a family.
1:15 As the group heads for the door, Mrs. Carmody blocks them and says they can’t leave; they’ll draw the creatures to the others. The burned man’s brother says he’ll go alone if he has to. Mrs. Carmody says that he’ll die out there. She starts on a rant again and Mrs. Reppler throws a can of peas, hitting her in the head and silencing her momentarily. Mrs. Reppler and Jessup join the search party.
1:17 The group moves out the door into the mist, armed with axes, sharpened poles, a can of Raid. It’s almost total invisibility.
They hurry to the pharmacy, where the doors are standing wide open. David and Ollie hop the counter to grab drugs from the office. The other men hear skittering sounds. They all start out, then see cocoons hanging from the ceiling: it’s people wrapped in spiderwebs. One is the MP from the beginning of the movie. As they all start to flee, the MP grabs Jim’s shoulder (HUGE SCARE) and Jim screams. The MP chokes out “It’s all our fault… I’m so sorry” – then baby spiders burst out of his face and abdomen (Stephen King, in his classic book on horror, Danse Macabre, calls this a “grue” scene, a staple of horror, but cautions that suspense and dread are a higher form of horror.). Larger spiders appear to attack as the team starts to run from the store. Ollie shoots one, David axes one, Mrs. Reppler sprays one with Raid and lights it on fire; but the webbing proves acidic – it burns the face of one man and sizzles through the leg of the burned man’s brother. The others try to drag him out but he dies, and they leave him, while Dan spears the last spider in their way. (Each of our core good guys has his or her own battle within this scene, and each one wins. HOPE.).
1:24 Cut to the grocery store where the others are waiting in silence. Big scare as Jim’s screaming face collides with the glass door. The survivors pile into the store and David drops to his knees, clutching Billy in terror as Jim continues to scream, his mind totally gone.
SEQUENCE SIX
1:25 David wakes to Mrs. Carmody preaching to a much larger congregation, now including Jim. He’s slept through most of the day – passed out from exhaustion and terror (very realistic reaction and time passage). Ollie tells him the burned man died. Mrs. Reppler says she wants to come with them when they leave, but David says the plan’s off. He’s not going to be responsible for any more deaths. Ollie makes him listen to Mrs. Carmody; she’s calling for expiation again, a sacrifice. In two days people have reverted to complete barbarity. It’s too dangerous to say. Ollie says, “Let’s hide groceries and get out in the early morning.” (PLAN).
David says he wants to talk to the soldiers; the MP said that it was “our fault” and David thinks it all has to do with the Arrowhead Project. David looks for Jessup, first, and confronts him: “What do you know about this mist?” Jessup insists he has no idea. They can’t find the soldiers in the store, so they go into the loading dock to look for them. At the front of the store, Jim watches them go in, which we feel can’t be good. (FEAR).
1:29 David and the others find the soldiers have hung themselves in the loading dock. David turns on Jessup and demands to know “What was the Arrowhead Project?” Before Jessup can answer, Jim bursts in on them and drags Jessup out before Mrs. Carmody, saying it was his fault. Mrs. Carmody grabs Jessup by the throat and demands that he tell what he knows. Jessup says that they all heard “stuff” – that the military scientists believed there were other dimensions all around us and they were trying to create a window to look through. The other soldiers who killed themselves thought that the military had ripped through to another dimension. Mrs. Carmody blames Jessup and the crowd surrounds him; holding David and the good guys back. A man stabs Jessup with a butcher knife and Mrs. Carmody shouts: “Feed him to the Beast!”
The crowd lifts him on their shoulders and throws him out the door. As he pleads to be let back in, a giant lobster-like thing comes out of the mist and snatches him away.
Mrs. Carmody says to the stunned crowd, “The Beast will leave us alone tonight. Tomorrow… we’ll just have to see”. She’s clearly implying another sacrifice. FEAR, THEME.
ACT TWO CLIMAX
1:35 In a quiet epilogue to the climax, or bridge scene, Billy wakes David as he sleeps and asks him not to let the monsters get him. After the scene we’ve just seen, we don’t know if he’s talking about the monsters inside or the monsters outside. David promises him. (SET UP. This is one of those PROMISE SCENES I talked about: when another character extracts a promise from the hero/ine, you know the final battle, or at least part of it, is going to come down to that.).
ACT THREE
SEQUENCE SEVEN
1:36 Now Amanda wakes David again and says it’s time. They go over the PLAN once more – they will grab the groceries from checkout stand 2, then get out of the store and run for the car; whoever gets there first opens both doors so everyone can pile in as fast as they can. Our good guys creep to the front of the store to checkout stand 2 – but the groceries are gone. Mrs. Carmody is blocking the door, holding a knife, and there are other men with knives in the aisles. Mrs. Carmody says they can’t leave – it’s not God’s will. As her congregation gathers around, Mrs. Carmody says that the sacrifice must come from them. “Grab the boy! And the whore!”
As the congregation surrounds Billy and Amanda, Ollie shoots Mrs. Carmody dead, then turns the gun on the other knife-carriers, who drop their weapons. The good guys race out the door with Ollie saying he wouldn’t have shot her if there’d been any other way. (BATTLE WITH SECONDARY OPPONENT. Our heroes will have to go through three separate battles in a row in this ending: first with Mrs. Carmody and her congregation, second with the creatures in the parking lot, and the third, in the final scene, in which they have to confront their own fear.).
The good guys run for the car. Ollie gets there first and opens the doors, then is snatched by the lobster creature. He screams as he is cut in half; the gun falls to the hood of the car (the gun is a PLANT). (We may have an uneasy feeling that Ollie was killed because he shot Mrs. Carmody; perhaps Mrs. Carmody was right and God really is taking revenge. THEME.). Now spiders attack and kill two of the other men as David and Amanda and Billy and Dan and Mrs. Reppler scramble into the car. Bud is cut off and runs back for the grocery. In the car, David sees the gun on the hood and reaches out to get it as the others scream; he barely grabs it before a spider attacks. The spider crawls over the roof of the car and disappears.
The survivors sit in the car in silence and shock, then David finally starts the engine and they drive past the grocery store, past the rows of watching people inside, out into the mist.
SEQUENCE EIGHT
1:44 As bleak as all this looks, there’s still almost a parody of hope for this motley family: they are a shadow reflection of the typical mother, father, son and grandparents in the family car starting off on vacation. But as grotesque as the parody is, there is still that HOPE that they might be the only survivors on earth, who can start over. (Although the haunting Dead Can Dance music on the soundtrack undercuts that possibility – FORESHADOWING.)
David first drives back to his house, where they find his wife dead, wrapped like Sleeping Beauty in a cocoon of spiderweb. David breaks down and cries. Then they drive on, hoping to get past the mist.
They pass wrecked cars and downed telephone poles, and stop in the middle of a field as a skyscraper-sized creature thuds by above them. They can only stare up in shock (and again, awe) and silence.
Then finally, the gas runs out and the car stops. Billy is sleeping in Amanda’s arms. Dan says, “No one could say we didn’t give it our best shot.” David lifts the gun – and the adults all look at each other in agreement. This is a highly unusual FINAL BATTLE; instead of another horrifying confrontation with monsters, it’s a quiet and even more horrific scene as the good guys decide the only course of action left to them is suicide. There are only four bullets left, and five of them. David says, “I’ll work something out.” We cut to outside the car, where we hear four shots and see four flashes of gunfire, then hear David’s screams.
Cut back to inside the car, as David tries to turn the empty gun on himself. He stumbles out of the car, shouting – “Come on! Come on!” inviting the monsters to get him. He hears rumbling that sounds like a beast, and turns to face it – only to see a tank emerge from the mist… then more tanks, and then convoys of rescued people, including the woman who left the grocery to go back to her kids, who are now with her. (IRONY). The mist lifts as the army moves along, killing creatures with flamethrowers. David drops to his knees, screaming in now total madness.
(RESOLUTION and NEW WAY OF LIFE: Our hero has physically survived the ordeal, but we understand he is a dead man walking).
1:57
This TWIST ending was one of the most bleak, shocking and hotly debated in recent film history. People loved it, people hated it. I’ve seen horror aficionados pick it apart in every detail, but personally I think it was a great, King-worthy ending, for sheer emotional impact and ultimate horror. And as Darabont points out – the idea of the four bullets left and David’s line, “I’ll figure something out” are in the novella; King brings up the possibility, but ends his story with the possibility of hope.
It’s an interesting thing that David’s killing of the others, including his son, seems to bring on rescue and the end of the ordeal, almost as Mrs. Carmody has prophesied (a very dark point of view!) Personally I think that thread would have been more effective if the film had kept the sex scene between David and Amanda (from the novella), which gave David something he would have needed to atone for, but a thematic nuance like that is really, really hard to pull off, and might not have worked at all. All in all, I think this is a splendid adaptation of a classic tale that would have been hard to pull off even on a hundred million dollar budget, let alone the shoestring (and impossibly short production schedule) that Darabont had to work with.
- Alex
How to start a novel
I got a great – if slightly overwhelming – question recently about writing process. I’m sure a lot of you will be able to relate to Stuart Hughes’ honesty. As I look to my next project (that would be after the two I’m currently finishing) I feel exactly the same way:
“What process do you follow (from initial idea, to final draft) when writing a novel?
If I’m honest, writing 80,000 – 120,000 words that connect together and keep the reader interested seems like a mammoth slog right now. Any advice you can give me, to make the exciting prospect seem less daunting, would be gratefully appreciated.”
Well, isn’t that the ten million dollar question? (And don’t you just love a British accent?)
And yet, the idea of trying to answer that as a fairly coherent, step-by-step process is an interesting challenge that I might actually be up for, especially because I’ve written about a lot of it before, it’s just a question of putting answers in a different kind of order and filling in some gaps.
(It also helps to know that I already have written my definitive answer, here: Screenwriting Tricks For Authors.)
So I’ve been doing on my own blog – from picking the right idea, to getting a publishing deal. In order, in detail, and together. I need it just as much as anyone, right now.
I did six posts on the “idea” phase. I could easily have done ten more. This is a part of the writing process that people rarely spend enough time on, and is CRUCIAL if you want to develop a riveting book, even more crucial if you have any hope of being paid to write. You are going to spend TWO YEARS of your life, minimum, on this book (and that’s truly a minimum). Don’t you think you better be sure this is the right book to write before you start?
When people ask authors, “Where do you get your ideas?”, authors tend to clam up or worse, get sarcastic – because the only real answer to that is, “Where DON’T I get ideas?” or even more to the point, “How do I turn these ideas OFF?”
The thing is, “Where do you get your ideas?” is not the real question these people are asking. The real question is “How do you go from an idea to a coherent story line that holds up – and holds a reader’s interest – for 400 pages of a book?”
Or more concisely: “How do you come up with your PREMISES?”
Look, we all have story ideas all the time. Even non-writers, and non-aspiring writers – I truly mean, EVERYONE, has story ideas all the time. Those story ideas are called daydreams, or fantasies, or often “Porn starring me and Edward Cullen, or me and Stringer Bell,” (or maybe both. Wrap your mind around that one for a second…)
But you see what I mean.
We all create stories in our own heads all the time, minimal as some of our plot lines may be.
So I bet you have dozens of ideas, hundreds. A better question is “What’s a good story idea?”
I see two essential ingredients:
a) What idea gets you excited enough to spend a year (or most likely more) of your life completely immersed in it –
and
b) Gets other people excited enough about it to buy it and read it and even maybe possibly make it into a movie or TV series with an amusement park ride spinoff and a Guess clothing line based on the story?
a) is good if you just want to write for yourself.
But b) is essential if you want to be a professional writer.
As many of you know, I’m all about learning by making lists. Because let’s face it – we have to trick ourselves into writing, every single day, and what could be simpler and more non-threatening than making a list? Anything to avoid the actual rest of it!
So here are two lists to do to get those ideas flowing, and then we can start to narrow it all down to the best one.
1. Make a list of all your story ideas.
Yes, you read that right. ALL of them.
This is a great exercise because it gets your subconscious churning and invites it to choose what it truly wants to be working on. Your subconscious knows WAY more than you do about writing. None of us can do the kind of deep work that writing is all on our own. And with a little help from the Universe you could find yourself writing the next Harry Potter or Twilight.
Also this exercise gives you an overall idea of what your THEMES are as a writer (and very likely the themes you have as a person). I absolutely believe that writers only have about six or seven themes that they’re dealing with over and over and over again. It’s my experience that your writing improves exponentially when you become more aware of the themes that you’re working with.
You may be amazed, looking over this list that you’ve generated, how much overlap there is in theme (and in central characters, hero/ines and villains, and dynamics between characters, and tone of endings).
You may even find that two of your story ideas, or a premise line plus a character from a totally different premise line, might combine to form a bigger, more exciting idea.
But in any case, you should have a much better idea at the end of the exercise of what turns you on as a writer, and what would sustain you emotionally over the long process of writing a novel.
Then just let that percolate for a while. Give yourself a little time for the right idea to take hold of you. You’ll know what that feels like – it’s a little like falling in love.
List # 2: The Master List
The other list I always encourage my students to do is a list of your ten favorite movies and books in the genre that you’re writing, or if you don’t have a premise yet, ten movies and books that you WISH you had written.
It’s good to compare and contrast your idea list with this IDEAL list.
This list of ten (or more – ten is just a minimum!) – is going to be enormously helpful to you in structuring and outlining your own novel.
Let’s go deeper into the film/book list. Here’s part of mine, no particular order.
Rosemary’s Baby
Silence of the Lambs
Alice in Wonderland
The Haunting of Hill House (book and film)
The Shining (book and film)
Room with a View (film)
Withnail and I
A Wrinkle in Time
The Witching Hour
Pet Sematery
Hamlet
Arcadia
Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead
The Fountainhead
Atlas Shrugged
Notorious
Vertigo
Suspicion
Rebecca (book and film)
Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None
It (the book)
Bringing Up Baby
The Thin Man
The Little Foxes
The Children’s Hour
Pride and Prejudice
Bridget Jones’ Diary (book and film)
The Wire
Deadwood
Mad Men
I, Claudius
Fawlty Towers
Rome
Philadelphia Story
It’s A Wonderful Life
Groundhog Day
The Breakfast Club
Poltergeist
The Stand (book)
Carrie (book and film)
I included my favorite TV, and I could go into musicals, too, but I’ll spare you. Well, except I have to mention Sweeny Todd. And Phantom of the Opera. And Chicago. And…
And on the myth and fairy tale front:
Ariadne (Theseus and the Minotaur)
East of the Sun and West of the Moon
Eros and Psyche
Beauty and the Beast (all three of those last are the same story, essentially).
The Handless Maiden
The Yellow Dwarf
1001 Nights
Sleeping Beauty
Now, that’s a BIG list, of all-time favorites that I see/read over and over and over again, and it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface, but I want to keep this manageable. And on the surface, it seems to have a lot of disparate genres there. But there are underlying commonalities that are very specific to my own taste (and I’m the only one who can truly say what those are, just as you are the only one who can say what your emotional preferences are).
What do I see about that list?
Dark dark dark dark dark…. Except for the romantic comedies and swoony Room With A View.
Lots of horror, but more psychological than gory. Lots of psychological thrillers. Some adventure fantasy and fantasy fantasy. The Stoppard is about trippy extra-dimensional occurrences, plus he’s a genius. Actually that goes for Shakespeare, too, extra-dimensionally. Lots of psychology - the Lillian Hellman plays are dramas, but very dark ones that explore ordinary and completely chilling human evil. I especially like human evil so big it seems almost supernatural (as in Silence of the Lambs and Rebecca). Withnail and I is a flat-out drug movie, and has the British comedy of chaos I so love in Fawlty Towers. Lots of sex, or at least, the sex is part of what I love about a lot of those choices. (The Wire and Deadwood, for example…). Lots of Cary Grant. Oh, right, that would be sex.
What are some of the themes and subthemes of these stories? (For me, personally, I mean, and not trying to be too analytical about it – just spew:)
Good vs. evil (and good usually triumphing, ambiguously). Inability to distinguish the supernatural from reality. Inter-dimensionality. Erotic tension. Loss of control (and that absolutely includes the comedies on there – Fawlty Towers, Bringing Up Baby, Withnail and I, are complete rollercoaster rides of hysteria.) What is reality? Man Must Not Meddle. The deal with the devil. What it means to be a hero or heroine. Unlikely heroes and heroines. Coming to terms (or not) with one’s extraordinary gifts. Disparate people uniting to accomplish something as a team. A man and a woman who don’t trust each other having to work together, discovering they are divinely matched.
And even more importantly, what FEELING am I looking for when I read and watch these stories? What EXPERIENCE am I looking for? This may be the most important indicator of what genre you’re writing in.
I like a lot of sensation in my stories. That is, I want a story to make me experience a lot of sensation. And not easy, light, fun sensations either, for the most part. Fear, thrills, doubt, sex, urgency, loss of control, violent surprise. I love the overwhelming feeling of having something huge, possibly supernatural, going on around me (in the form of the characters I’m projecting myself onto). Something evil, even, but so powerful and mesmerizing I have to explore it, understand it. And that can be a situation, as in Rosemary’s Baby or The Shining, or a person, as in The Children’s Hour. I want a sense of cosmic wonder. I want a sense that good does conquer evil, that good people can make a difference, but without sugar coating. I like a lot of game playing, matching wits (Philadelphia Story, Thin Man, Silence of the Lambs).
So, what I write is psychological horror, or supernatural thriller, or supernatural mystery, or psychological thrillers with an extra-dimensional twist. And while that sometimes makes my books frustratingly hard to categorize (in libraries, for example…) it also has branded me in a way that has been useful to me as an author.
But now it’s your turn – tell me. What are you trying to make your reader or audience FEEL? Horror? Thrills? The glow of romance? The adrenaline and exhilaration of adventure?
- Alex
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Related posts:
How to write a novel from start to finish (part one)
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Screenwriting Tricks For Authors – now available on Kindle and for PC
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The Big Twist
I’ve been threatening a post on Twists for a long time, so finally, here we go.
WARNING: there are SPOILERS everywhere in this post, so I am providing an up-front list of the books and movies I discuss, so if you haven’t read or seen some of them and would like to, unspoiled, you may want to proceed cautiously.
Presumed Innocent
The Others
Oedipus (but honestly, if you don’t know that one…)
Chinatown
The Sixth Sense
The Crying Game
Seven
A Kiss Before Dying
Fight Club
Identity
The Eyes of Laura Mars
Psycho
Don’t Look Now
In Bruges
Boxing Helena
Open Your Eyes (Abre Los Ojos)
Falling Angel
Angel Heart
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
No Way Out
Eastern Promises
As horror or mystery or thriller authors, designing story twists is a regular part of our job. We employ classic story tricks… I mean, literary devices… like red herrings, misdirection, false leads, false alibis, plants and payoffs, irony and unreliable narrators, to keep our readers (or viewers) guessing.
If you’re interested in building your skill at twisting a story, I (as always) advocate making a list (ten at least!) of stories that have twists that you really respond to, and analyzing how the author, screenwriter, or playwright is manipulating you to give that twist its power, so that you can do the same for your readers and viewers.
I also think it’s helpful to realize that these techniques have been around since the beginning of drama, or I’m sure really since the cave-dweller storytellers (“The mastodon did it!”). Knowing the names of techniques is always of use to me, anyway!
And I’d also like to note up front that big twists almost always occur at the act climaxes of a story, because a reveal this big will naturally spin the story in a whole other direction. (If you need more explanation about Act Climaxes and Turning Points, read here.)
Let’s break down some different kinds of twists.
* ANAGNORISIS
The Greeks called twists and reveals Anagnorisis, which means “discovery”: the protagonist’s sudden recognition of their own or another character’s true identity or nature, or realization of the true nature of a situation.
This is always a great thing if you can pull it off about the protagonist, because we kind of expect to find out unexpected things about other people, or have surprises come up in a situation, but to find out something you never suspected about yourself is generally a life-altering shock.
So here’s a big twist that has worked over and over again:
* THE PROTAGONIST IS THE KILLER (or criminal), BUT DOESN’T KNOW IT
- We find probably the most famous twist endings of world literature in Sophocles’ OEDIPUS THE KING (429 BCE) in which Oedipus, the king of Thebes, is trying to discover the cause of a devastating plague in the city, only to find that he himself is the culprit, cursed by the gods for killing his father and marrying his own mother.
- I’ve talked at length about the influence of Oedipus on the Polanski/Towne classic film CHINATOWN (discussion here).
- But the noir mystery FALLING ANGEL, by William Hjortsberg, and Alan Parker’s movie adaptation of that book, ANGEL HEART, steals its twists from Oedipus as well: PI Harry Angel is hired by Louis Cyphre to find Johnny Favorite, who owes Cyphre (his soul, turns out!). Angel finds out he himself is the man he’s looking for, Johnny Favorite, and also that he’s slept with and killed his own daughter.
- PRESUMED INNOCENT (book and film) is another take on the Oedipal detective story, in which main character and detective (by dint of being a ADA) Rusty Savage is guilty, not of the murder of his mistress, but of infidelity, so he protects his wife, the real killer, from detection.
PRESUMED INNOCENT also employs a great bit of misdirection, in that the victim was sadomasochistically bound and apparently sexually tortured and raped – there was semen found inside her. So even though the cheated wife would ordinarily be the prime suspect, we and all authorities rule her out.
* THE UNRELIABLE NARRATOR
Another literary device that makes for a powerful twist is the unreliable narrator.
- Agatha Christie surprised and therefore irked some critics with this one in THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD.
- THE USUAL SUSPECTS has won classic status for its now famous reveal that meek Verbal Kint is the nefarious Keyser Soze he’s been talking to the police about, using random objects in the police station to add details to his fabricated story.
- FIGHT CLUB puts a spin on the unreliable narrator, as antagonist Tyler Durden is revealed to be an alter ego of split-personality narrator Edward Norton (called just “The Narrator”, which is a sly little hint of the device being used.)
- Of course multiple personality disorder can be used as a twist all on its own, most famously employed in PSYCHO, but also in, hmm, let’s see… THE EYES OF LAURA MARS, and dozens of cheesy ripoffs of the concept (fascinated as I am by MPD, this is one device I’m not sure I’d ever want to tackle, myself).
- The 2003 movie IDENTITY takes the MPD twist several steps further: EVERY character in the movie a different aspect of John Cusack’s fractured personality.
* KILL OFF AN IMPORTANT CHARACTER UNEXPECTEDLY
- While I’m thinking about it, PSYCHO has another famous twist, which I’m sure at the time of the film’s release was just about as shocking as the reveal of “Mother”: the apparent main character, Janet Leigh, is murdered (spectacularly) at the first act climax.
- This was copied much less effectively but still successfully in the 1987 thriller NO WAY OUT, in which the apparent love interest dies at the first act climax.
- The Brian DePalma film THE UNTOUCHABLES kills off a beloved sidekick (the Charles Martin Smith character) at the Midpoint, and as I recall I didn’t see that one coming at all (until he got into the elevator, that is…)
* THE “BIG SECRET”
The big secret reveal, done well, means a pretty guaranteed sale and often gonzo box office. Some famous examples:
- THE SIXTH SENSE. We all know this one: the child psychiatrist who seems to be treating a little boy who claims to see dead people turns out to be – one of the dead people the boy is seeing. This one is especially interesting to note because writer/director M. Night Shyamalan went through several drafts of the script before he realized that the Bruce Willis character should be a ghost. Which goes to prove you don’t have to have a great twist planned from the very beginning of your writing process – you can discover a perfect twist in the writing of the story.
- THE OTHERS takes a page from SIXTH SENSE and triples it: they’re ALL dead. A young mother and her two light-sensitive children think their creepy old house is haunted. A climactic séance reveals that actually the mother has shot herself and the children and THEY’RE the ones haunting the new family in the house.
- THE CRYING GAME’s famous twist reveals gorgeous, sexy Dil, whom we have fallen in love with just as surely as main character Fergus has, is a man. That was a twist that hit squarely below the belt, as writer/director Neil Jordan forced us to question our own sexuality as well as our concepts about gender.
THE CRYING GAME has a couple of earlier twists at the first act climax, too: IRA soldier Fergus becomes more and more sympathetic to his personable hostage Jody, enough so that Fergus lets Jody run free when he takes him out in the forest to execute him. We kind of saw that one coming. But then there’s a horrifying shock when on his run to freedom Jody is suddenly hit and killed by a truck. Devastating, and totally unexpected.
- EASTERN PROMISES. In one of the most emotionally wrenching reveals I’ve seen in a long time, Viggo Mortensen, the on-his-way-up chauffeur for a prominent leader of the Russian mob, turns out to be a Scotland Yard agent so deep undercover that in the end he is able to take over the whole mob operation – but must give up Naomi Watts in the process. A wonderful “love or duty” choice, which you don’t see often, these days. And if that isn’t enough to convince you to see the film, try: Viggo. Naked and tattooed. In a bathhouse. For a five-minute long fight scene. Did I mention he’s naked?
- We see another great reveal about the nature of a protagonist in BLADERUNNER: Harrison Ford, the replicant hunter Deckard, is himself a replicant.
* IRONY
Actually this whole post was inspired by my recent structure breakdown of THE MIST, the film, which takes the idea of its shocker ending from a line in King’s original novella, but gives it an ironic twist that is pure horror: After battling these terrifying creatures for the whole length of the movie, our heroes run out of gas and the protagonist uses the last four bullets in their gun to kill all his companions, including his son (with the agreement of the other adults). And as he stumbles out of the car intending to meet his own death by monster, the mist starts to lift and he sees Army vehicles coming to the rescue. People loved it, people hated it, but it was one of the most devastating and shocking endings I’ve seen it years.
* OTHER COMMON PLOT TWISTS:
Here are several twists that we’ve all seen often:
- The “S/he’s not really dead” twist – as in BODY HEAT (and overused in ten zillion low- budget horror movies).
- The “It was all a dream” twist: OPEN YOUR EYES, BOXING HELENA (I’m not sure what you’d have to do to make that one play, it’s so universally loathed.)
- The “ally who turns out to be an enemy” twist: as in John Connolly’s EVERY DEAD THING, William Goldman’s MARATHON MAN,
- And the “enemy who turns out to be an ally” twist: Captain Renault in CASABLANCA, Professor Snape in the first Harry Potter (and then reversed again later…)
* JUST BE ORIGINAL
A twist doesn’t have to be as cataclysmic as a “big secret” reveal. Sometimes a plot element or action is so unexpected or original that it works as a twist.
- I was watching THE BIG HEAT the other night, shamefully had never seen it, and there are several big surprises. I knew that too-good-to-be-true wife was going to die, but I was totally unnerved by villain Lee Marvin throwing a pot of scalding coffee in girlfriend Gloria Grahame’s face. Although you don’t actually see the burning, that brutality must have made people jump our of their seats in 1953. Then (although she’s one of my favorite actresses of all time and totally up to the task) I was equally shocked to see Grahame’s character take over the movie from hero Glenn Ford (kudos to writer Sydney Boehme and director Fritz Lang for that) and shoot another woman (a co-conspirator of Marvin’s) so that key evidence will be revealed, then go after Marvin herself and burn him in exactly the way he burned her (before he shoots and kills her).
What works as a twist there is the sudden primacy of a seemingly minor character – especially a woman who would normally just be there for eye candy. Sad to say, but portraying a female character who is as interesting as women actually are in real life still counts as a standout.
- In the movie SEVEN there’s a great twist in the second act climax when John Doe, the serial killer the two detectives have been pursuing, walks into the police station and turns himself in. You know he’s up to no good, here, because it’s Kevin Spacey, but you have no idea where the story is going to go next.
And of course then you have that ending: that John Doe has always intended himself as one of the seven victims (his sin is “envy”), and the infamous “head in the box” scene, as Doe has a package delivered to Brad Pitt containing the head of his wife so that Pitt will kill Doe in anger.
Hmm, can’t end this post with that example – too depressing.
- Okay, here’s a favorite of mine, for sheer trippiness: Donald Sutherland being killed by a knife-wielding dwarf in DON’T LOOK NOW – and the delightful homage to the scene in last year’s IN BRUGES.
And the above are not even scratching the surface of great plot twists – I could really write a book.
So, everyone, what are some of your favorite movie and book plot twists? Writers, do you consciously engineer plot twists?
- Alex
Related posts:
What are Act Breaks, Turning Points, Act Climaxes, Plot Points?
Do you believe?
The Unseen - out now!
The Unseen is a thriller that crosses elements of mystery and the supernatural, and is based in the real-life history of Dr. J.B. Rhine’s ESP and psychokinesis experiments at Duke University in North Carolina.
As I’m sure I don’t have to tell most of you, the Duke parapsychology lab was the first dedicated parapsychology lab in this country, founded in the late 1920’s. There, Rhine used the brand-new science of statistics and probability to test the occurrence of psychic phenomena such as ESP and psychokinesis.
Using Zener cards and automated dice-throwing machines, he tested thousands of students under laboratory conditions, and applied the science of statistics to the results. He is generally said to have proved the existence of ESP.
In my fictional story, two psychology professors at Duke discover a file on a long-buried poltergeist experiment (not many people realize the Duke lab also did field studies of poltergeists). The professors team up to take a couple of psychically gifted students into an abandoned Southern mansion to replicate the experiment… unaware that the entire research team ended up insane… or dead.
And I’ve started to do the interviews (always fun because you forget in the time between finishing a book and its actual publication why exactly you were writing things to begin with) and I don’t know why this should surprise me by now, but I keep getting that question that I always get:
“So, do you believe in all this? Have you ever seen a ghost?”
The first and obvious answer is – I grew up in California. What don’t I believe? If there’s anything I know, it’s that with the right combination of chemicals, anything is possible.
Actually I think it speaks to the prevalence of a belief in ghosts that people assume that I might have seen one.
After all, people don’t ask people who write about vampires or zombies if they believe in them or have seen them. Although there are a few people out there who do believe in them, actually believe they ARE them, in fact. But in general, people are much more likely to believe in ghosts in some form or another, and even people who don’t believe in ghosts tend to be more tolerant of people who do believe in ghosts than they would be of someone who believed in vampires.
Have I seen a ghost? SEEN one? No.
But when I first moved into my house in Silver Lake, I was afraid to go into the front bedroom at night. It was just creepy. It was always cold and I felt uneasy being alone in there. When a – friend – moved in and we moved the bed into that room because it was just bigger, I had wildly realistic dreams of some small, very angry woman coming raging out of the closet. Murderously, scarily angry. Always the same dream, just the impression of this woman raging out of the closet.
We moved the bed back into the small bedroom.
Then I got my cats, and whatever was in that room took a powder. Completely. However they did it, the cats cleared that room.
Was that a ghost? I don’t know. What I do believe is that a place can retain some kind of imprint of a past presence or event. That seems to be a common pattern of ghost or haunting stories. I like to believe that; I think it’s cool. It feels real enough to me that I can write it as if I believe it, and that’s what I like to be able to do.
A lot of people who have read The Harrowing have heard my high school story that inspired it – yes, I did have a poltergeist experience in high school (the classic time for poltergeist experiences), which became the seed of that book.
But as much as the idea of poltergeists and hauntings compels me, what I can say for sure I believe is more on the psychic side of things.
You read enough about psychic events experienced by ordinary people, as I did extensively to research The Unseen, and they’re all so very similar.
- The crisis apparitions, where a loved one is hurt or dying and appears in some way to a relative or mate at the moment of death, either as a full-fledged apparition or a signal, like a mirror shattering.
- The precognitive dreams: A young mother has a nightmare that her new baby is crushed to death when the light fixture above the crib falls – she wakes up screaming and runs in to the nursery where she finds the baby perfectly fine, sleeping soundly, but she takes the baby into bed with her and her husband – and two hours later they’re awakened by a crash from inside the nursery.
- The visitations from dead loved ones who have something to say about where your mother’s bracelet is or where the new will was filed.
- And of course the ordinary psychic things that happen all the time – the wife who dreams that there is another woman in bed with her and her husband – and discovers that he is, indeed, having an affair. The teenager who decides at the last second to take the left turn instead of the right, even though it will mean an extra five minutes getting to his friend’s house – and as he makes the turn he hears the screeching of brakes and a grinding of metal back there at that very corner.
Yes, yes – all these things can be explained by simple, ordinary perception. The young mother noticed subconsciously that the plaster around the light fixture was cracked and her dream warned her about a very real danger. The woman whose dead husband visits her in a dream to tell her where the bonds is remembering that her husband made that stop at a certain bank one day and her dream makes it her dead husband telling her so so that she’ll pay attention. The teenager registered that a car was driving too fast on that side street out of the corner of his eye. (I can’t as blithely explain how people see their loved ones at the EXACT moment of death, but I’m sure there’s someone out there who can debunk that one, too.)
But I think – reality is a lot more mutable than skeptics want to admit. And I’m not just talking about our perceptions and instincts and intuitions. I mean the whole of the universe gives us signs all the time.
The morning my grandmother died, I woke up and walked outside and the sunrise was just – surreal. The whole sky was flaming orange and red and pink – much more like deep sunset than the pallid pink of LA sunrises. The pecan tree in my back yard towered against that sky, and in the tree were hundreds, hundreds of cawing birds. It was earsplitting, mindblowing.
A half hour later I got the call.
When I look back at moments like that, I believe I knew something more than I realistically should have known. There is a heaviness to those experiences, an import, a hyper-clarity – even a time-slowing-down quality. And so it seems to me – and it’s said by spiritual teachers – that if we all paid more attention all the time to these insights, synchronicities, we’d be able to see the signs all the time.
That’s what I believe. That there’s a million layers to reality, and it’s all out there in front of us – and if we paid more attention to the signs, there’s no telling what we might discover.
So I know all of you have stories to tell about visitations, prescience, telepathy, dream signs. (Yes, all of you – even the people who don’t believe always have stories about friends…) Give!
And if this kind of thing fascinates you as much as it does me, I hope you’ll check out The Unseen.
- Alex
The Unseen
Buy now on Amazon:
Find an independent bookstore near you
Find or request a copy at your local library
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Your first draft is always going to suck
It’s an interesting thing about blogging – it’s made us able to get a glimpse of hundreds of people’s lives on a moment-by-moment basis. I don’t have a lot of time (well, more to the point, I have no time at all) to read other blogs; I can barely keep up with posting to Storytellers, Murderati and my own blog. But I do click through on people’s signature lines sometimes to see what they’re up to; it’s an extension of my natural writerly voyeurism.
And a certain pattern has emerged with the not-yet-published writers I spy on.
It goes something like this: “My current WIP is stalled, so I’ve been working on a short story.” “I’ve gotten nothing done on my WIP this week.” “I have reached the halfway point and have no idea where to go from here.” “I had a great idea for a new book this week and I’ve been wondering if I should just give up on my WIP and start on this far superior idea.”
Do you start to see what I’m seeing? People are getting about midway through a book, and then lose interest, or have no idea where to go from where they currently are, or realize that a different idea is superior to what they’re working on and panic that they’re wasting their time with the project they’re working on, and hysteria ensues.
So I wanted to take today’s blog to say this, because it really can’t be said often enough.
Your first draft always sucks.
I’ve been a professional writer for almost all of my adult life and I’ve never written anything that I didn’t hit the wall on, at one point or another. There is always a day, week, month, when I will lose all interest in the project I’m working on. I will realize it was insanity to think that I could ever write the fucking thing to begin with, or that anyone in their right mind would ever be interested in it, much less pay me for it. I will be sure that I would rather clean houses (not my own house, you understand, but other people’s) than ever have to look at the story again.
And that stage can last for a good long time. Even to the end of the book, and beyond, for months, in which I will torture my significant other for week after week with my daily rants about how I will never be able to make the thing make any sense at all and will simply have to give back the advance money.
And I am not the only one. Not by a long shot. It’s an occupational hazard that MOST of the people I know are writers, and I would say, based on anecdotal evidence, that this is by far the majority experience – even though there are a few people (or so they say) who revise as they’re going along and when they type “The End” they actually mean it. Hah. I have no idea what that could possibly feel like,
Even though you will inevitably end up writing on projects that SHOULD be abandoned, you cannot afford to abandon ANY project. You must finish what you start, no matter how you feel about it. If that project never goes anywhere, that’s tough, I feel your pain. But it happens to all of us. You do not know if you are going to be able to pull it off or not. The only way you will ever be able to pull it off is to get in the unwavering, completely non-negotiable habit of JUST DOING IT.
Your only hope is to keep going. Sit your ass down in the chair and keep cranking out your non-negotiable minimum number of daily pages, or words, in order, until you get to the end.
This is the way writing gets done.
Some of those pages will be decent, some of them will be unendurable. All of them will be fixable, even if fixing them means throwing them away. But you must get to the end, even if what you’re writing seems to make no sense of all.
You have to finish.
I’ve had a couple of weeks in which my page marker has not moved past the number 198 because I keep deleting. Nothing I write makes any sense. I don’t have enough characters, I’m not giving the characters I have enough time in these scenes, I have no conception of yacht terminology and am spending hours of my days researching only to find I’m more confused about how things work on a boat than when I started.
I have Hit. The. Wall.
Yeah, yeah, cue World’s Smallest Violin.
Because – so what?
It always happens. I’m not special.
At some point you will come to hate what you’re writing. That’s normal. That pretty much describes the process of writing. It never gets better. But you MUST get over this and FINISH. Get to the end, and everything gets better from there, I promise. You will learn how to write in layers, and not care so much that your first draft sucks. Everyone’s first draft sucks. It’s what you do from there that counts.
That is not to say you can’t set aside a special notebook and take 15 minutes a day AFTER you’ve done your minimum pages on the main project, and brainstorm on that other one. I’m a big fan of multitasking.
But working on that project is your reward for keeping moving on your main project.
Finish what you start. It’s your only hope.
- Alex
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Previous articles on story structure:
Story Structure 101 – The Index Card Method
What makes a great villain?
I suppose you all who have been following along with these articles have noticed by now that I haven’t yet done a dedicated post on character – hero/ine, villain, supporting, or otherwise.
That’s probably because while I feel comfortable expounding on how to create and structure a story, I am not so clear about how to explain how to create character. To be perfectly honest, it’s not a very explicable process, for me. I think what I do is create a space for them – a situation, a theme, the beginnings of a story – and pray that the characters will show up to inhabit it. Which, thank God, they always do. And then from there they do most of the work.
In other words, it’s magic – or possibly my author friend Dusty Rhoades is right, it’s mental illness – and I don’t know how to explain magic OR mental illness. Quite possibly I don’t WANT to know.
But I think – I’m pretty sure – most writers have characters in their heads from a very early age. Maybe ALL people do – because that’s what fantasy is, and we all daydream being other people, or superfantastic versions of ourselves. So in a way we’re all creating character all the time.
I do think there are things that are teachable about creating character. My best advice is always – take an acting class. Take a lot of them. Read books on acting and creating character – Michael Shurtleff’s AUDITION, Stanislavski’s acting series, Michael Chekov. Learn how to develop and play characters yourself, and it will translate to writing.
All that being disclaimed, I want to talk today with great villains and how one might – MIGHT – go about creating them.
Sometimes, if you’re lucky, a villain will just come to you whole, right? I’ve dreamed a few. I love that, when your subconscious does the work for you.
Sometimes you have a real, heinous person in mind, either a criminal you’ve read about who sparks such an outrage in your soul that you have to create him on paper just to destroy him the way he needs to be destroyed. Sometimes it’s a heinous person you really know – in the novella I recently finished I took great pleasure in detailing all the banal viciousness of a producer I know and then bashing his brainless head in.
But other villains I’ve written have been more conscious creations, have grown out of the specific situation of a story. So, while allowing for the pure magic of it – it’s not purely magic, is it?
I’d like to suggest that you can develop a great villain – or any other character you create – through the same process that I’ve been advocating for creating the structure of your story.
Make a list.
Who or what are your top ten villains? And I don’t mean make a list for the ages, or for popular consumption – I mean FOR YOU. What is it about these particular characters that makes them so delicious, or terrifying, or both? What turns YOU on in a villain? What particular qualities are you responding to?
You don’t have to think too hard about it, either, when you’re listing. It might be more useful to do it fast and see what comes up, because that non-thinking list will be more relevant to your present project, or a brewing project. These lists are never written in stone, either – you can make a whole different list tomorrow.
Breaking it down, analyzing the specifics, is like doing scales on the piano, or doing dance technique exercises at the barre. It gives you the foundation and the strength and mental coordination for the magic of art to happen.
My favorite villains, off the top of my head.
Rumpelstiltskin.
Dracula.
Hannibal Lecter.
Atia of the Julii in the HBO series ROME.
Mary in Lillian Hellman’s THE CHILDREN’S HOUR
Tony Perkins in PSYCHO.
“Julian” in Brad Anderson’s SESSION 9.
Bob Sugar in JERRY MAGUIRE
Stringer Bell in THE WIRE.
Al Swearengen in DEADWOOD.
Now, I can look at that list and already identify a lot of patterns going on. I like my villains sexy, perverted, bizarre, insane, diabolical, and preferably a combination of the above.
But now it’s time to go deeper. What is it about each of those villains that really works for me?
Rumpelstiltskin. The twisted dwarf is an archetype I particularly respond to. In Jungian psychology, the dwarf, or perverted little old man, is a strong recurring archetypal figure for women who have been sexually abused or have sexual trauma issues. I haven’t been, but with all my near-misses with predators, I can relate to that analysis. And studying Jungian and other world archetypes is great fodder for brainstorming interesting villains.
Dracula. The sex thing, obviously. Vampires are supposedly about addiction issues. I can relate to that, too. Marion Woodman has some hugely intriguing books about these archetypes.
Hannibal Lecter. The devil archetype, my absolute favorite. Thomas Harris created a monster for the ages by turning a serial killer into a mythic archetype (although for my money he should have stopped with SILENCE OF THE LAMBS). But what really does me about Lecter is the magician/mentor aspect of him. Here’s this evil, psychotic genius – who sees something in Clarice that makes at least part of him want to mentor her, even protect her. More than that, he UNDERSTANDS her – better than any other living soul. That to me is the ultimate seductiveness of the devil – that he GETS you – right down to your very soul. There’s no greater intimacy – and that’s a lot of what I was exploring when I wrote THE PRICE.
Atia of the Julii in the HBO series ROME. Gorgeous, sensual, ruthless schemer, played by one of my favorite British actresses, Polly Walker. Her relationships with her son and daughter are completely perverted and I love it. I understand her, because living in such a patriarchal society would twist any intelligent woman, and I love seeing her WIN.
Mary in Lillian Hellman’s THE CHILDREN’S HOUR – one of the most chilling portraits of a sociopathic child that I’ve ever seen. The final scene with the grandmother taking responsibility for her is particularly haunting. I love stories about evil children. I have to admit, I find small children frightening. They are ruthless, narcissistic and irrational; they operate according to some inexplicable set of rules that they are constantly making up as they go along. And they wield enormous power, totally out of proportion to their actual physical strength and stature. Is that not the definition of a villain?
Norman Bates in PSYCHO. The concept of multiple personality fascinates me even though it’s been done so badly so many times that I’m not sure I would ever attempt such a character myself. But you feel such poignant sympathy for Norman even as you fear “Mother” – it’s a terrible portrait of an imprisoned soul.
“Julian” in Brad Anderson’s SESSION 9. Is he a demon? A fragment of personality in a multiple personality patient which has assumed autonomy? It’s, well, mindblowing to try to wrap your brain around. And the slippery inexplicableness of evil is a theme that draws me again and again.
Bob Sugar in JERRY MAGUIRE – the blond, blandly sociopathic agent. Not hard to see why I respond to that! But I love Sugar as an example of an effective comedic villain. He’s pitch-perfect – there are hundreds just like him in Hollywood, soulless, narcissistic, casually malevolent. But he also makes a perfect foil for Jerry because he is a mirror image of Jerry – this is what Jerry is on his way to becoming before his attack of conscience in the opening scenes – Sugar is the thing we don’t want him to become. A villain’s story function is often to be the dark mirror of the protagonist, and Sugar is a stellar example.
Stringer Bell in THE WIRE. Oh, all right, that’s pure sex. No, also I love the reversal that Stringer is trying to get out of the drug lord business – that he’s taking business school classes, investing in real estate – and it’s the far greater sociopathy of the politicians and city developers that destroys him in the end. As with Atia, this is a man who has been forced toward villainy by the ruthless inequities of society.
Al Swearengen in DEADWOOD. Also pure sex – I’ve had a crush in Ian McShane forever. But there again, the devil archetype – a powerful, brilliant, sexual, violent man who has his own occasional staggering moments of morality and transcendence – the kind of man that draws women like moths to the flame. As with Lecter and Clarice, there’s a Beauty and the Beast undercurrent here – the monster that we just might be able to tame. I will never forgive creator David Milch for ending that series before Swearengen could have his way with Mrs. Garret – and she with him.
You see how that starts to work? I truly believe that taking the time to analyze what you love and respond to in a villain in the stories you love will get your subconscious working on crafting that perfect villain for YOUR story. So much of creativity is the DESIRE to get it right. Make your wishes specific, and the magic will start to happen.
Next post I’d like to talk more about villains and get into not just the story functions of single villains, but the idea of forces of antagonism, and non-human villains, since the opponent in a story can be multiple, animal, environmental, historical or societal, as well as just the classic single bad guy.
But for today – you don’t have to give me all ten, but who are some of the villains that really do it for you, and why?
- Alex
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Previous articles on story structure:
Best Holiday Movies
Okay, I admit to some holiday blues here.
Why?
- Probably all the staggering amounts of food, for one thing – always makes me nervous and irritable.
- All the Christmas cards arriving in the mail and e mail, making me feel guilty and inadequate.
- The endless Christmas music. We went out to a dinner with the in-laws the other night -very nice, but a Christmas tape was blasting (who decreed that EVERY SINGLE SONG you hear during the month of December has to be a Christmas song?). I went in to the bathroom and a waitress came in without realizing that there was anyone else in the restroom, and “Winter Wonderland” started blasting over the speakers, even louder in the confines of the bathroom, and I heard her mutter, “Just shoot me now.”
My sentiments exactly.
The fact is that I am JUST NOT a homebody, so any holiday that revolves around decorating, baking, shopping, and obligatory writing of greeting cards is bound to give me the hives. My friends know I love them. I hope. They know I love them enough not to cook for them, anyway.
I also got a really unpleasant surprise in the mail this week – my editor sent me the galleys of THE UNSEEN so that uninterrupted time I thought I was going to have at the end of the year to finish my current book is gone. More anxiety for the holidays. Thanks a lot, St; Martin’s. Clearing your desk to dump it on mine is not my idea of holiday spirit.
Read more…
How do you know what’s the right book?
My question today is – “How do we choose what we write next?” And I really, really want to know.
When on panels or at events, I have been asked, “How do you decide what book you should write?” I have not so facetiously answered: “I write the book that someone writes me a check for.”
That’s maybe a screenwriter thing to say, and I don’t mean that in a good way, but it’s true, isn’t it?
Anything that you aren’t getting a check for you’re going to have to scramble to write, steal time for – it’s just harder. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing, or that it doesn’t produce great work, but it’s harder.
As a professional writer, you’re also constricted to a certain degree by your genre, and even more so by your brand. St. Martin’s isn’t going to pay me for my next book if I turn in a chick lit story, or a flat-out gruesome horrorfest, or probably a spy story, either. My agent wouldn’t be too thrilled about it, either. Once you’ve published you are a certain commodity.
You’re even more restricted if you are writing a series – a kind of restriction I haven’t wanted to take on, myself. You have a certain amount of freedom about your situation and plot but – you’re going to have to write the same characters, and if your characters live in a certain place, you’re also constricted by place, so I’m really interested in hearing our series authors talk about how THEY decide on the next story they write.
I don’t let a lot of time go by between when I turn in a project and start the next one.
Part of this is mental illness. I know that. My SO sighs and shakes his head. Perhaps one of these days he’ll leave me over it; it’s not out of the realm of possibility.
And maybe I would be a better writer if I took more time to decide. actually. It’s an interesting question.
But I need to know what I’m working on. For me it’s better than Xanax. I’m not a very pleasant person when I’m floundering in the gaps between projects.
It’s a huge commitment, to decide on a book to write. That’s a minimum of six months of your life just getting it written, not even factoring in revisions and promotion. You live in that world for a long, long time.
But how does that decision process happen?
If you’ve been working at writing for a while you have a lot of stories swirling around in your head at any given moment, and even more in that story warehouse in the back of your mind – some much more baked than others. But I find it’s not necessarily the most complete idea that draws you.
Sometimes, maybe often, you need to do something different from what you’ve just done. THE HARROWING was about college students so I wanted to do something more adult. THE PRICE turned out to be maybe TOO adult – it was a very emotionally grueling book to write for me; I had to go to even darker places than usual, so instead of going on to write another book that I had completely outlined already, but was equally dark, I jumped in to a story that I only had the vaguest premise line for. THE UNSEEN has turned out to be much more of a romp than my previous two books, insomuch as a supernatural thriller can be a romp. It’s lighter, more romantic, and more overtly sexual than the other two (that last really was because when I stayed in the haunted estate that I used for the haunted estate in the book, there was a distinctly sexual imprint on the house, and it influenced the story. I had nothing to do with it. Really.)
For my new book, I knew I wanted to do something around water, because bluntly, I want to spend more time at the ocean this year, and research is one of the job perks. You take them where you can.
But again, once I’d turned in THE UNSEEN, the ocean story that I had been working on for a while already was not the one that pulled at me. I wanted to do the beach desperately, but I wasn’t feeling excited about that story, and it finally occurred to me that it was about a character who was very isolated, and a lot of the book would be about what was going on in her head, and I was just balking at the idea of having to write that. I really wanted to do something structurally more like THE HARROWING, more of an ensemble piece, with a lot of dialogue and one-upmanship among the characters. And suddenly it hit me that I did have a story idea about a group of people that also had a lot to do with the beach and the water, which I won’t say much about because I just don’t talk about it at this early stage. But I started piecing that one together and it just started to fly – the kind of can’t-write-fast-enough-to-get-the-ideas-down writing that we all live for.
And that brings me sort of to my point.
The way I really know what to write is when the entire world around me is giving me clues. Like when I keep getting into random conversations with strangers that turn out to be exactly what my book is about. Like when I am writing a scene about rum on the plane and I walk off the plane and the first thing I see on the causeway is a rum bar (I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a rum bar). Like when I am having no luck Googling the specific information I need on rumrunning during Prohibition and that night the History Channel has an hour special on rumrunning during Prohibition. Like when I meet a person on the street or see someone on television and realize THAT’S one of my main characters that I had been struggling to define.
Synchronicities.
In other words, it doesn’t feel like working – I’m in the flow. When you’re in the flow, your book comes alive around you and all you have to do is write it down. It’s being in love – an altered state in which everything feels ecstatic and RIGHT.
And you can feel the whole shape of the book in your head – it’s almost like being able to pick the story up in your hands and heft it and say – “Yeah, everything’s there. I can do this one.”
That may not make any sense, but it’s a really palpable feeling for me, physical, visceral. And such a relief to finally get there, I can’t even tell you.
So how do YOU know?
Bouchercon – the World Mystery Convention
It was a surprise to no one that the conference organizers – the great and amazing Ruth and John Jordan and Judy Bobalik (all hail!) had found the perfect venue, but I just have to rave for a moment, because I don’t think I’ve ever had an easier time navigating a convention. The setup was a marvel of efficiency and logic – the entire convention corridor: panel rooms, book room, registration, green room, hospitality suite, signing room – was right off the hotel lobby, so you never had to leave the floor except to go down to the basement for the “Karaoke” events (which I never actually made it to.) The hospitality suite was a large and nicely dim bar right off from the lobby and the corridor (and stocked and staffed by Sisters in Crime (all hail!) which meant there was plenty of coffee, bottled water, fruit and yogurt as well as more sugary and salty snacks all day long). It was a refuge.
All the panel rooms were on the same floor. All of them. Can you even imagine the convenience? The overflow hotel (which is where I was) was a mere catwalk away from registration, and the deck between the hotels was a central congregating spot in the spectacularly sunny and breezy weather. And the hotel bar was just across from the library, large enough to accommodate the night crowd and no one really HAD to go off site, and there were actually enough waitstaff to go around.
I think the only complaint I heard was that the hotel was kept too warm. I wasn’t bothered by it but I run freezing and usually conventions are glacial on top of that. Outside was PERFECT weather, archetypally fall. My Virginia friends had totally lied to me when they told me it had turned cold, so I arrived with a suitcase full of coats and sweaters, but luckily also my Obama tank tops acquired on Melrose Ave. – sparkly enough to make it look like I made an effort while I was keeping cool, and they made me a lot of friends over the week.
(Can I just say that I love Baltimore men? Now I understand why THE WIRE had one of the sexiest, funniest, and just plain mouthwatering male casts I’ve seen on TV in ages: they were just casting for Baltimore type. If I were single… well, all right, let’s just not go there. Definitely a perk of the weekend, though.)
I was really grateful for the concentrated layout of the convention, because it was literally no effort to do anything, and since I was as we say in Berkeley “hormonally challenged” in a big way this week, and barely capable of remembering my own name, the ease was lifesaving.
By now I’ve got the convention thing down, which means I know you don’t really have to do anything at all, just drift randomly, or have a seat, and the world will roll in ecstasy at your feet, as Kafka would say. It is a bit overwhelming by now how many people I know and how much you can get done just by sitting still.
Thursday was a bit frenetic – not just because of the whole arrival deal, but also my first panel was early and I had an off-site signing that night, too. “Thank The Lord For the Nighttime” was a panel on using the supernatural in mystery fiction, and not only was it a pleasure to discuss my favorite topic with such great women (Cathy Pickens, Heather Graham, Wendy Roberts, Elena Santangelo) the audience was very engaged and engaging – there’s something about ghosts that brings out the best stories.
More drifting and rolling in ecstasy, this time also in the bar (lovely bartender that evening, I’ll take three of him) then I set off with Gary Phillips, Chris Chambers, Ken Wishnip, and Murderati regular RJ Mangahas for our DARKER MASK/POLITICS NOIR signing at Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse. I just have to make a note that “It’s a couple blocks, let’s just walk” is the second biggest lie in the male lexicon. Well, okay, maybe the third biggest. Twelve blocks through Baltimore humidity – but a dazzling sunset – later, we arrived at this great, eclectic little basement shop and care – to find there was no air conditioning. Thank God for the tank tops, is all I can say. Don’t leave home without them. Our DARKER MASK editor Eric Raab superheroically came to my rescue with a cab on the way back.
My entire college life was flashing before my eyes that evening, from the tofu sandwiches on the menu to the Anarchy posters on the walls, to the group that showed up to protest the treatment of employees at the Sheraton (a long story that I still haven’t sorted out to my satisfaction, but it was interesting to look back at my own activism at that age as compared to now. I had a wonderful, passionate time then. I like being older a whole lot better.).
I could be writing all week so I’ll just bullet point the highlights (that is, I would if I could ever figure out how to DO bullet points).
- Getting to rave to Jason Starr about how much I loved THE FOLLOWER, a thriller with such a uniquely chilling voice and frightening portrayal of the detached narcissim of its young characters. that I find myself thinking of it and still getting disturbed, months later. And having him start to rave back about THE PRICE, which he’d just read, and then being able to have a conversation about voice and POV that got me thinking in all kinds of new directions about the new book. It’s really amazing to have bonded with someone over unspeakable Karaoke and an epic bike ride through Anchorage and then have this whole new level open up.
- Getting to hang with Heather Graham and Dennis Pozzessore in yet another genre environment, and having one of the best meals I’ve had in a long time with them, F. Paul Wilson, Blake Crouch, Kathy Love and Erin McCarthy in Little Italy – eating ambrosial sea bass and laughing so hard we even broke up our hilariously unflappable waiter.
- Walking down to the harbor with Heather and experiencing that amazing Barnes & Noble, five stories of shipping warehouse with rooms cut into the enormous pipes.
- Visiting Poe’s grave and having a slightly supernatural experience that was a dead ringer for a scene I’d just written in the witch book. Chills!
- The St. Martin’s party at the staggeringly opulent Tremont Grand Historic Venue. Molly Weston (“Meritorious Mysteries”), librarian Karen Kiley and I broke away to sneak through the rest of the building and it was one theme room after another – the Mirror Room, the Tuscan Room, the Gothic Room – marble corridors and bathrooms and columns – truly, palatial. Kind of great to be able to do the business I needed to do in a few casual conversations with my editor and agent in a setting like that. Having the glow of three pieces of extremely good career news, even though I don’t want to talk about them yet (soon!).
- The Murderati get-together, where we were able to meet “Rati regulars RJ Mangahas, Will Bereswil, BG Ritts, and the incomparably lovely Kaye Barley. Near hysterical breakdown over the concept of doing a column consisting solely of the words: “Joe Konrath, Angel or Demon? Discuss.” And then leaving it to the commenters. (Cooler heads – meaning Pari – prevailed).
- In just my second year of being published, having the heady experience of an actual line in the signing room. It was very concrete evidence that my books really are out there and people really are reading them. Miraculous!
- The decidedly British slant of the conference – dozens of authors from across the pond, which meant I was constantly surrounded by that accent. Fabulous. If you ever want a laugh, get a panel of men from different parts of the UK to say “Monkey in the cupboard”. I swear.
- Being introduced to the great and criminally charming John Connollyby the bookseller he’d killed off in BLACK ANGEL.
- Getting to see Ken Bruen again, finally! – and seeing him so happy with his new girlfriend, Lisa, who is just a joy – they simply glow together.
- Meeting Mo Hayder, my new favorite author in the universe, at Lee Child’s pub party and being able to tell her – even slightly coherently – what an impact her books have had on me.
- Doing a talk at the Pratt Library with Heather and having the city’s resident Poe expert come down to answer our questions about Poe’s final days – then being trapped in a van in the middle of marathon traffic and being entertained by the colorfully and articulately apopleptic rants of our driver.
- The privilege of Murderati being nominated for an Anthony for Best Mystery Blog.
Of course those are only a fraction of the wonderful moments, because that’s what conventions are. There were some sadnesses, too: I particularly missed JT Ellison and Cornelia Read, who were benched for illnesses. I truly regret having to miss the crypt tour with Kelli Stanley and Tana and Heather (but very much looking forward to the psych ward at Alcatraz that Kelli promised us). I do think we missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have the entire Bouchercon cast of thousands assemble in the street to sing a chorus of “Good Morning, Baltimore”.
And you never get enough time with anyone, really – but the consolation is that we will do it again, several times a year, all the years of our lives.
I am so grateful for the privilege of my life and the work I do, which in circumstances like these, just never feels like work at all.