Plot Twists

One of the great things about being a writer is that you think you have a story all figured out in your head (or jotted down in notes and storyboards) but then the story takes you for a surprise turn and you end up following it, rather than leading the narrative, yourself.

That's exactly what happened to me, last week, as I was working on my crime novel, Dark Water.

Image: ChatGPT

Now, I have to be careful, here, as I can't tip my hand and spoil anything. I'll have to write this post in general terms and not leave any clues about who dunnit.

Before I even wrote the prologue, I had a murder victim. I knew who the killer was and why that person committed the crime. I had suspects, I had timelines, I had primary and secondary characters.

And I knew how the story will end.

All I had to do, in writing the story, was to fill in the gaps by providing detail to the outline I had devised. As I said in a previous post, I needed to put meat on the bones.

By the time I hit my first 100 pages, I had a good storyline, with one suspect in custody but with the true story unfinished. There was still a lot to go, but I was on the right track.

One of the fears in writing the story was that I thought I was going a bit too fast. I was worried that my novel was becoming a novella. Not that there is anything wrong with that. If it's a good story, what does it matter how long it is.

As I said, I had the story mapped out, with the timeline for the crime and the direction the detectives would take in solving it. But as I wrote from the detectives' point of view (yes, there are two lead inspectors—if you didn't know that, I've already mentioned this fact in a brief synopsis), I tried hard to put myself in their heads, without the knowledge of my notes and storyboard.

And, as would be expected, Inspectors Calloway and Hayes have different thoughts, different ideas for what went down on the night that a woman ended up dead in the Rideau River (again, this is not breaking news).

In their investigation, the two detectives follow various lines of inquiry and meet all sorts of characters, many who I just make up as I go along. And with each new character, I come up with a name and add it to my spreadsheet that holds all of the characters and their role in the story, no matter how small. I do this because I never know if I'll have to circle back to the person, and it's good to have a list of names so I don't have to dig unnecessarily through the body of content to find them again.

Last week, my character list came in particularly handy.

(Again, I have to be careful about what I might give away. If you are interested in reading my book, when it's eventually released, you might want to skip the rest of this post. I'll see you tomorrow.)

There are a lot of throwaway characters, so far. Some names that came up because I simply needed a name. In other instances, the detectives needed to talk to someone and I needed to give that someone some substance, no matter how small.

And they needed a name.

But I've just hit a point in Dark Water where I've realized that I've needed to loop back, and I'm now writing something that I didn't expect to write. I didn't expect the story to go in this direction.

It's exciting for me. I feel as though I'm discovering something new, another layer that needs bringing into the light. I need to keep digging.

To quote from Inspector Calloway, "Some stories are buried too deep to stay hidden." (I had written this line before taking a break and going on vacation but recently found a good place to add it, and it was just as the story was taking this new direction.)

When I wrote Songsaengnim: A Korea Diary, I was faced with a similar twist. The main part of the story was simple because the book was largely based on my own experiences while living in South Korea from 1997 to 1999. That part of the story is almost autobiographical.

But the main character, Roland Axam, was purely fictional and his past was completely made up. I knew why Roland went to Korea but as his past came to light, I was treading down an unknown path, and there were times where I surprised myself.

It's not quite the same way with Dark Water. All of it is fiction. And as I focus on the two detectives, especially Mickey Calloway, I'm finding myself discovering that the meat that I'm putting on the bones of the outline can be unexpected cuts

It's all so exciting.

I'm moving at a slower pace than I had been going for the first 100 pages but I don't mind. The plot twist has me in unfamiliar territory, making the dark waters of my imagination as thrilling for me as I hope they'll be for you.