In 2015, I started playing Dungeons & Dragons. I leapt into the deep end, building a world to set my games and then running them for a group of friends. It's an amazing system for creative people to make a game out of telling fantasy adventure tales, and the role of Dungeon Master is something like an author, while the role of Player is somewhat like an actor. I'm a writer, and many of my players are actors, so this fits very well.
Anyway, during this original campaign (a 'campaign' is an ongoing story that follows the same player characters over a lengthy time, from their origins as wandering mercenaries to their climactic height as epic heroes, and can take years to complete) I had the players meet a friendly patron who gave them a headquarters and access to his airship so that they could travel easily around the world I had created.
The patron, and his family, were all vampires. They were good vampires, who abstained from drinking the blood of humanoids, only subsisting on the blood left over from the butcher's shop, but they had your standard vampiric qualities - agelessness, a great vulnerability to sunlight, and, well, the blood-drinking.
Still, I remember for years hinting at this fact - the players would only ever see them at night, usually having them come down for dinner just after sunset, and I described them as pale, and even had them pointedly eat their food with some sort of 'red sauce' rather than the garlic sauce the player characters had on their food.
Eventually, I had the patron take the group's paladin (a sort of holy warrior, most of whom are vehemently opposed to the undead) on a walk, where he showed the cart from the butcher's shop that brought his family their blood, and made his confession in the hopes that this character would recognize them as being the same good people, and not strike against them out of fear.
I was certain that the players had realized this about the character, and that only their own characters were ignorant of the fact. As it turned out, I was dead wrong. The players' minds were blown, and not a one had guessed at it.
I say this because I think that there's a logical glitch that writers sometimes run into: how to pull off a good twist.
Now, I've written about this before. But I've now hit a point in writing my novel where one of the largest twists has sort of become inevitable. I don't want to go into details, in part because it might change, and in part because if there is anyone who reads this blog and actually wants to read the book, it would be nice to allow that reveal to happen naturally.
But I hit a point where I had a character who understood enough about the world around him and knew enough about the history of one of its characters, that I could not logically keep him from putting two and two together.
Rather than simply have the character act more ignorant than he was, in my current draft of this segment of the story (I've been writing the novel in different parts, and am currently working on the fourth, though I don't know how many there will ultimately be - seven would be very fitting given its alchemical themes, but I don't want to hold myself to that until I have the story's shape) I simply have him come to this realization, or hypothesis at least, when it would make sense for him to do so.
I do worry, though, that this big reveal coming where it does undercuts the dramatic weight to it. This is where rewriting will come into play. I can limit certain information. I don't think I want to have the character acting on knowledge that the reader does not - I've been mostly using a George R. R. Martin-style viewpoint narrative, which is in the third person but still tends to (for the most part) stick to the perspective of one of three characters. As such, I think it would be playing kind of dirty to have one of these characters realize this but wait for a long time to have him reveal this, probably when he tells it to another of these characters.
Still, the basis for why I felt the need to reveal this fact at this point (I hope I'm not being too vague here) is that, to me, the pieces are too plain for the reader to see, and to avoid connecting the points would feel like an insult to their intelligence.
But an author knows all of the facts, or at least all the facts they've decided upon. To me, the answer is obvious, but that is because the answer came to me before I even laid the clues that hinted at this revelation.
A good twist, I think, should be detectable if one is paying close enough attention. But as an author, you can sometimes feel as if any evidence you lay in advance - any foreshadowing of that twist - is too bright and flashing and obvious, and that a reader will grow impatient for the reveal to happen so that they can move on. But the danger on the flip side is that a twist without good supporting evidence will feel unearned, and can wreck a narrative.
Sometimes, then, it can be fun to have your twist revealed early in a story, and to work through the ramifications of that twist as the meat of your narrative.
My story is undeniably an epic - so far, other than the brief vignettes of childhood life for its primary protagonist, it has taken place over the course of eight years, and in my perhaps irrational quest to avoid having the story labeled as "YA" material, I envision it seeing the protagonists into their 30s, which would make it take place over a minimum of fifteen years. (Honestly, I think my own deeply ingrained snobbery is the only reason I'd resist a YA label. The story does deal with young people navigating strong romantic emotions, rebellion against a corrupt older generation, and supernatural forces, so I think I may just have to accept that that is what it is. I hope that my integration of Jungian psychology and my genre-bending Weirdness will be enough to distinguish it from other ready-for-Netflix stories - though I should be so lucky that someone would like this story enough to make a screen adaptation).
Anyway, the fact that it is so large in scale means that this twist needs to land well before the end. But it also needs to be built to and feel like the grand reveal that it is. The fact that the main character is a dhampir and his absent father is an undead vampire are "first chapter" twists (though I think he technically doesn't learn these terms until a little later). We're operating in a world of fantasy and gothic horror here, and that's no twist. But there are twists that will come along the way to open that out - for instance, just how fantastical the world truly is, and also, where the borders of one world end and another's begin.
I'm so hopeful that I can finish this story, and not only write to the last page, but also have the stamina to go back and edit and rewrite it to the point where I feel ready to share it with the world. I'd also love to be able to get it published some day - I dream of being able to look at it on my own bookshelf. But for now, the focus has been on what I can write now, at any given now.
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