While it’s hard to watch in parts, one of the things I
really like about Quentin Tarantino’s The
Hateful Eight is that, once you get past the cinematic Western setting and
Tarantino flourishes, it’s a parlor room mystery. All of the characters are
locked into a cabin together, all of them rather nefarious and none of them a
traditional detective, trying to solve a crime. It doesn’t surprise me at all
that there’s been talk of adapting TheHateful Eight for the stage.
What did surprise me was something Tarantino said about his
writing process for The Hateful Eight:
He just kinda threw all the characters in the cabin together and let the action
unfold.
That’s a fun, naturalistic way to write a story, but it seems
like a miserable way to write a mystery (in fairness to Tarantino, I don’t
think he originally envisioned The
Hateful Eight as a “mystery” per se). There are clues to plant, plot points
to hit, etc. Without that groundwork, a plot twist isn’t a plot twist – it’s
just a dick move on the writer’s part. Just letting my characters do their own
thing seemed like a good way to write myself right off a cliff.
Also, I wanted to avoid the laziness of stupid character
decisions. Ever find yourself yelling at the TV screen because the characters
are pointlessly, almost willfully, not
doing the most obvious things because the plot demands it? Yeah, I want to avoid
that like the plague. Much of that came down to research – what exactly should
you do if someone you know goes missing? – but thinking through what should be
done versus what a given character would do was extremely useful. That’s
especially true since I don’t have a professional detective in the mix. So no,
while my characters may do dumb things, there will at least be a concrete
reason why they do those dumb things.
Finally – and it makes me laugh how incredibly complicated
I’ve made this for myself – my vision for the story has not one but three characters running different types
of investigations. As such, I needed to know who was where and knew what at any
given time. Especially for those times when they encounter each other.
So while some people map out their story on a white board
and others use index cards or sticky notes, I ended up making a flow chart.
Here’s a small piece of it:
Obviously, I’ve scrubbed the flow chart of plot details and
whatnot. The point is that I found this extremely helpful in mapping out the
progress of the investigations, particularly in relation to what is happening
to the other characters.
Would you find this helpful? Or do you think this is
borderline OCD? Let me know in the comments below.
It's actually not uncommon to write without the twist in mind. I've done it both ways. I have a novel that involves a serial killer, a detective, and an unusual bank heist--that final twist I knew from the start because the story demanded I knew the backstory of the characters involved in the twist. In my horror/mystery, Shelter, I did not know the final twist when I started writing. It came to me a little ways in when I realized I didn't want a particular character to die anymore, and I found I had set up plot points that contributed to saving that character and the twist ending.
ReplyDeleteThen there's my approach to my Fairy Tale Chronicles, which was similar to Harry Potter's twists: Voldemort (the recurring villain) did it--but the twist wasn't in the WHO but in the HOW. We always knew Voldemort did it, but how was he involved, and how did it happen, and how is everything else in the book connected to this reveal (or previous books' reveals). In my Fairy Tale Chronicles, it's always the same big bad, but the mystery came in how the book and all the plot points came together to give the "how" twist.
I often find the "how" twist is more fun to create naturally--just writing the story, contemplating what you've written, and then, eventually, everything naturally clicks into place to give you that perfect twist you didn't even know you had. Usually this has to happen anyway, as characters always send you in directions you didn't plan when you first started writing the book (when I started FTC, Georgia was going to be my main character's jerk sister who disappeared from the first book after a few chapters. She ended up being my main character, derailing everything I thought I knew about the first book and beyond).
That being said, I have a book I've wanted to write for some time--a comedy crime caper (akin to something like Snatch, but where all the stories happen concurrently), and a chunk of the mystery reveals itself with every new section. My problem is it's so intricate--because of how connected everything is--that the pre-planning how everything happens both overwhelms and bores me.
I actually ended up really enjoying the elaborate pre-planning -- it was like working out a puzzle. I get what you mean by the "how" being more fun than the "who," but I think they kinda go hand-in-hand. If the "who" isn't justified by the "how," that's not so much a twist as just screwing with the audience.
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