It’s
fairly common at readings and panels for writers to be asked whether character
or plot provides the starting point for their work. Where do you begin? Which
motivates your process most?
But here’s
a twist on those questions that I personally find more interesting—particularly
for short story writers: Is your focus primarily on plot or character at the end
of your stories?
Writers
often (too often?) strive to sneak a plot twist into the final line. The ink
was an exotic poison! The money was counterfeit! Those women were twins! But
while such reveals can surely offer immediate pleasures, I would argue that
character twists are often more effective. A new perspective on a character the
reader has gotten to know, a secret desire that complicates motives, an
unexpected action that nonetheless seems perfectly in character—these might
provide the reader a deeper satisfaction.
Crafting
the essay for that new handbook challenged me to think more critically about the
principles and strategies guiding my own writing—and to reflect as well on some
of the stories I’ve best loved and admired as a reader—all of which led to that
paragraph being, from my perspective at least, one of the most important in the
essay. So I was grateful when my fellow SleuthSayer Robert Lopresti emailed to
ask specifically about the idea of a character twist—and to invite me to return
to the blog to write about it at a little greater length. (Rob is also a contributor to How to Write a Mystery, I should add—along with another SleuthSayer, Stephen Ross. Even more reasons to check out the book!)
Unfortunately,
in the same way that writing the handbook essay helped to clarify things for
me, trying to draft this post—several drafts, in fact—has driven home something
I hadn’t fully thought about: It is terrifically hard to write about endings
and what makes them work. There are
two reasons for this.
First, the
best endings are integrally related to many aspects of the larger tale—not just
plot but character and theme and motif and tone and even small turns of phrase,
building on and resonant with that larger design. As Poe wrote, talking about
the ideal tale, “In the whole composition there
should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to
the one pre-established design”—as he called it, the “certain unique or single
effect” intended by the story. In order to feel that ultimate effect, a reader needs
to have experienced all those other words first. (Three
italicized words there, I know—emphasis intended!)
The second reason: spoilers! …primarily in terms of
“surprises I shouldn’t spoil for the reader” but also in another way. Trying to
summarize and explain Raymond Chandler’s “Red Wind,”
the first story I planned to talk about here, I realized how much I was
simplifying and flattening and spoiling at a more basic level the experience of
one of my own favorite stories.
I wanted to discuss “Red Wind” in part because of Chandler’s
own essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” in which he argues against the
“arid formula” of some detective fiction (British and traditional primarily)
and complains about that tradition’s characters as “puppets and cardboard lovers and
papier mâché villains and detectives of exquisite and impossible gentility”
doing “unreal things in order to form the artificial pattern required by the
plot.” Chandler’s plots, of course, took on their own formulas, and some of his
characters ended up inhabiting their own one-dimensional unreality, engendering
their own kinds of cliches, but I do love so much of what he wrote.
The
trouble is, “Red Wind” has a fairly complicated plot. As detective John Dalmas
himself remarks, “a murder and a mystery woman and a mad killer and a heroic
rescue and a police detective framed into making a false report”—and his
summary arrives not even halfway through the story.
Whenever I
teach the story, I have to reread it carefully, having myself forgotten most of
the twists and turns and how they work and why they matter and, honestly,
whether I should care. But one key thread of the plot stays with me: a strand
of pearls, a gift to a woman named Lola from a lover who’d died in the war, a strand
of pearls she has lied about to her husband, to dodge his jealousy. As Lola
tells Dalmas: “If it hadn't been for [Stan’s death],
I’d be Mrs. Phillips now. Stan gave me the pearls. They cost fifteen thousand
dollars, he said once. White pearls, forty-one of them, the largest about a
third of an inch across. I don't know how many grains. I never had them
appraised or showed them to a jeweler, so I don't know those things. But I
loved them on Stan's account. I loved Stan. The way you do just the one time.
Can you understand?”
The pearls have been stolen and—skipping big portions of that
byzantine plot—Lola needs Dalmas to get them back.
…which he does, but unlike Lola, Dalmas recognizes that
they’re fakes.
The character twist happens in the wake of that realization—and
this is the point at which, in my drafts of this post, I saw how laborious it
was to summarize the story, how much my summary undermined what I see as the
story’s beauty, how much trying to explain the experience of an ending
generally is like trying to explain the punchline of a joke… a move which
inevitably ruins the joke.
So I’m going to cut the five paragraphs I wrote to summarize
and explain the ending, and instead, I’m going to urge you to read the story,
which is widely available, and then to leave this assessment instead: Throughout
the story, Dalmas has been the prototypical Chandler hero— tough guy, loner,
wisecracking, cynical, disillusioned, hardboiled to the core—but in the final
scene, he reveals concern and empathy and he gestures toward a moment of grace, preserving Lola’s illusions even
as he finds own disillusionment unfortunately confirmed.
The twists and turns of “Red Wind”—I struggle to remember
those, to keep them straight each reread. But that final scene, the final image
of Dalmas by the ocean—that’s a keeper. That’s art.
Apologies here, but for the other stories I’m going to
mention, I’m taking the same approach—not risking deflating the power of a
story by summarizing it and instead talking in more general terms about what
stands out. I’ll encourage you to read each and provide links where I can.
 |
Stanley Ellin
|
Stanley Ellin is another favorite author and another who
seems a master of the character twist. His “Moment of Decision” famously stops
short of explaining what happens next at a pivotal and potentially
life-endangering moment in a bet between the two main characters, but as I
explain when I teach it, the story is nonetheless complete—because the focus
isn’t on plot but on character. “The Moment of Decision” closes on the moment
when the philosophy held so dearly by one of those characters—his massive surety
of self, his belief that “for any man with a brain and the courage to use it
there is no such thing as a perfect dilemma”—when that belief is irrevocably
upended.
Another of Ellin’s great character twists comes in “The
Question,” which focuses on a father and son relationship and explores the
morality of the death penalty. The father—the narrator—is an “electrocutioner,”
a term her prefers to executioner, and his monologues reflects on his
work, how he came to this duty, questions of criminality and justice and
responsibility, and then his relationship with his son: “The truth was that the
only thing that mattered to me was being his friend.” In the final scene of the
story, that son asks his father a question about his work: “But you enjoy it,
don’t you?”—which seems to be the question of the title, but it’s not. The
important and revealing question is the final line of the story, another
surprise, another upending, a revelation about the narrator that’s been hinted
at throughout the story and then, in the final line, dramatically brought into
view.
A couple
of years ago, I taught “The Duelist” by David Dean, another fellow SleuthSayer,
and it may well be my favorite of Dean’s stories; it originally appeared in the May/June 2019 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Here again, trying to
summarize the story would inevitability reduce it, shearing away the story’s
suspense and its emotion and more. In short, however, it’s the story of a
“fearsome marksman,” Captain Horatio Noddy, and of his unlikely challenger, Darius
LeClair, a “small, portly stranger” who seems to fumble his way through every
encounter and into his own duel with Captain Noddy. The story’s surprises are
many—unexpected twists and tensions nearly every step of the way—but it’s only
in the final lines that an element of Darius’s character steps to the forefront
as a motivation, something that’s been mentioned briefly in earlier scenes but
which takes on greater depth, quietly devastating depth, in the final,
heartbreaking reveal. (You can hear David Dean read the story at the EQMM podcast—and you
should.)
My own
story “Parallel Play” also deals, in its own way, with a showdown between two
people—a mother home alone with her son and the father of a boy who attends the
same pre-school playspace. That man has become fixated on the woman and
ultimately holds her hostage one rainy afternoon while trying to explain
himself to her—explain the connection he feels between them. At the end of the
story—spoiler alert—she kills him, but in telling the story I skipped over that
scene, skipping ahead to the aftermath, and only returning to the killing in
the final lines of the story. I remember a member of my writing group asking
why I’d decided to do that—why not just keep the story linear? But my goal
there wasn’t to emphasize what happened but rather to explore why it
happened, to explore something about that young mother that I had touched on
throughout the story, even as I’d tried to keep an aspect of that “something”
hidden until the final lines… where I’d hoped to emphasize that
hidden-in-plain-sight aspect of character inside the violence of the scene I’d
saved for last.
In all
these cases, I recognize that I’ve been analyzing endings without explaining
the endings… but I also hope that I’ve encouraged you to actually read these
stories with an eye toward the point I’m trying to make. There are others that
jump to mind as possibilities for exploration: Ruth Rendell’s “The Fallen
Curtain” and “The New Girlfriend,” for example, and Karin Slaughter’s “The
Unremarkable Heart,” just off the top of my head. And I’m sure that others here
might add their own to the list—and, in fact, I hope you do.
As you
might imagine, I’m always looking for more good stories to read.
