Video Transcript (computer generated - may contain errors)

Sara Gentry: Hello, writers! I am so happy to have Samantha Skal with me here today. Hi, Sam!

Samantha Skal: Hi! Thank you so much for having me, Sara. I'm so excited to be here.

Sara Gentry: Absolutely. I know Samantha does all these great things within the writing world. But, writers, if this is your first time meeting Samantha, let me just tell you a bit about her. She is a fan of the scary, the mysterious and suspenseful, and she is the executive director of thriller fest, the co-founder of shadows and secrets, writing retreats which is specifically focused on thriller mysteries, correct?

Samantha Skal: Yes, exactly.

Sara Gentry: Awesome, and she is an Author Accelerator certified book coach, who specializes in coaching mystery thriller and suspense authors from novel planning all the way through the delightful hell that is revision. Her superpower as a coach is brainstorming twists without ground up rewrites, and she is an enthusiast of homemade sourdough bread and cheese of all kinds. Sam writes stories that keep her up at night and lives in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, and Sam thanks again for joining us and writers. If you haven't figured it out, Samantha's here with us to talk about scary stuff and twisty stuff, and all the things that I tend to shy away from, because I am a lightweight when it comes to the scary, but I do enjoy a good twist so maybe let's get right to it here with twist, because whenever someone is talking about crafting twists, I'm like you need to go find Samantha Skal because she is the Queen of the Twist. So I just wanna make sure that we're setting maybe some equal footing here for writers who might not be aware exactly of what we're talking about. But you know, what do you think constitutes a twist when we're talking about, you know, book writing? What are we calling a twist?

Samantha Skal: Sure. So in mystery, fuller and suspense, it's the villain's journey that is really what we're dealing with, and the reveal of what actually they're doing. That's the twist. If you're talking about, not Mts mystery fuller suspense, then it's just the antagonist, right? So it's twisty, because it's unexpected to the protagonist who's the one receiving the story and like bopping along. And then every time one of those truths kind of pops up, or that they have to face it. And they understand what's actually happening. That is a twist. So a twist to define it fully is a reveal of what's actually going on behind the scenes of the story.

Sara Gentry: I love that.

Samantha Skal: Yeah. Opposite sides of story protagonist, antagonist. This is how we end up having it be really fun and oftentimes scary. If you're talking about MTS.

Sara Gentry: Yeah. Yeah. So the twist I love, how you're talking about it happening sort of behind the scenes, or at least to the protagonist point of view, like not really within their realm of knowledge yet. But it's intentional. It's when you're talking about a twist you're not talking about, and then there was this random strike of lightning like that's not our twist that we're aiming for, correct?

Samantha Skal: No, no, I try to avoid coincidences at all costs in MTS. Particularly. I think you maybe get one, maybe, but I would be very cautious of that, just because readers expect, and really like to have everything be sort of brought back together and neatly fit together. Right. Think of it like a puzzle or a 3D. Puzzle is the best way of describing it, and we want there to be reasons that everything is there? We don't want anything to be random, because that's a little less satisfying than if the author has done all this work to create this wonderful world that's very unexpected and twisty to the reader and the protagonist, and tying it all together in the end, is one of the most satisfying things that I think one can do as an author.

Sara Gentry: Yeah, and there's something about like that underlying stuff that's happening that establishes the antagonist as being someone that's a worthy antagonist. If there's like this thought that's going behind it. And it's not just like this chaos of evil.

Samantha Skal: Totally. Yeah. I mean, that can work. There are stories we can all think of where somebody's done that successfully, but in general, the more intentional, and then the more, the better you know your antagonist or your villain, the more satisfying they're going to come across to the reader and the protagonist. It's like, as you just said, a worthy adversary. We don't read books because we want to just see one side of things. We want to see both sides. We want to sort of question why people are doing what they're doing, and if so, if your villain has a very good reason for doing what they're doing. That's interesting, right? Because fillers and mysteries and suspense are all about the exploration of how somebody can make a series of bad choices, and how far can it go? And what would you, the reader, if you're in this position, which hopefully you'll never be in, because again we don't want these things to actually happen, how would you react in that situation? Those are the kinds of questions we want to bring up in the reader's mind. So interesting villains are the ones that actually have some oomph behind them, and we know why they're doing what they're doing.

Sara Gentry: Yeah, yeah, that's wonderful. Well, it's wonderful reading, maybe not wonderful for the character. So when you are working with writers, because you have worked with lots of mysteries and thrillers and suspense, what are the types of things that you like to encourage with your writers? Like, are there some ground rules that you have for making either a good twist or satisfying twist if that's something that's not currently present in their work?

Samantha Skal: Yeah. So I would say, the number. One thing I see is that writers have not thought through who their villain is, you know sometimes, and I made this mistake when I 1st started writing in this space, too. So no judgment but you know, when we enter writing for the 1st time, particularly with beginning novelists. Our input, our inclination is just to follow what the protagonist's journey is right. And that's the story. That's the entire story. That's what your goal is. What we're missing is what's underneath the surface of the story. And that's what the villain or the antagonist is doing. And so, at a certain point, you know whether you're a discovery writer, or you know you like to pants the whole thing and then go back, or you're a plotter. I myself fall somewhere in between. I like to call myself a plantser. I discovery right until I have to have boundaries, and then I figure out what's actually going on, and I figure out my benchmarks. But the very 1st step is understanding who your villain is, and why they're doing what they're doing. And you know, I like to ask people like, what was your villain doing on the day the protagonist came in and ruined everything right because oftentimes. That's the start of your stories. Like, you know, if it's a Mts. Story, you may have a dead body on page one. You may not. You may have something else scary that happens, but that's the start of the journey, of how these 2 people are going against each other, and, you know, because it's MTS, the protagonist is usually gonna win. They're the one we're rooting for. But we're there for the journey. We're there to see how it plays out. And then only after that can we start to figure out these other genre expectations like multiple twists. There's always going to be one at 50%. The midpoint turn is another way of saying that that's classic across all stories. Right? Your climactic twist again. That's just the climactic moment where your protagonist faces the story question and solves it. And then, unique to Mts is this 98% kind of final twist, which is something that's new. This may well be the actual villain that's behind everything like maybe the person that the protagonist conquered in the climax is someone they hired or someone they framed or something. That's where you start to get really fun in this particular space. That doesn't show up often, and you know, more contemporary, or whatever else.

Sara Gentry: Yeah, where all the pieces fall into place. I don't read as widely in this space, but I have seen plenty of films that would satisfy where all of a sudden, I'm thinking, of course, of the Usual Suspects.

Samantha Skal: Absolutely.

Sara Gentry: Like oh!

Samantha Skal: Yes, yes, and how fun is that right? I mean the Sixth Sense. There are some people I've talked to recently who saw it coming, and I'm so impressed with that. I was not one of them. I was just as shocked as everybody else. But you know those clues were there throughout the entire story. We just didn't know to look for them, because we were being misdirected by the Pov of the protagonist.

Sara Gentry: Yup, Yup, so that actually leads me to a next question that I did want to ask was about this perspective, because, as writers are working through their story, are you encouraging them to mislead the reader in order for this twist to seem even twistier?

Samantha Skal: Absolutely. So the best way to do that is interiority. I like to tell. People, you know, have this kind of constant inner monologue for your protagonist asking scary questions like, what if I walk into the woods right now? Is there someone hiding behind that tree? Is there going to be a bear around that next corner? Am I walking myself into a trap where someone's going to try to hurt me? Am I doing the right thing? What am I missing? You know all these kinds of things can increase suspense for your reader, and also misdirect the reader and the protagonist because maybe there is. Maybe there isn't. But there's going to be a logical explanation for why they're thinking this. So you know, to get a little scary, like, if you're talking about the woods example, let's say that someone thinks that someone is following them, and they have. They found, like, I don't know, a jacket outside their house that doesn't belong to them. So then, when they go on their daily walk through the woods, they're wondering if someone's going to jump out at them. Your actual villain may well have looked at the person who dropped the jacket and thinks like, Wow! That was a silly move, because now this person thinks that someone's following them. But I'm not the one who's actually following them. I'm over here watching from up in the tree, or whatever it is right, so your actual truth can be very different from what the protagonist thinks is the truth, and that is misdirection. That's how you get red herrings, the jacket in this example. And it's great fun. But if you don't know what's actually going on with your villain and your protagonist before you start doing this. It gets very confusing very quickly. And so I always always focus on that first.st And then we build out.

Sara Gentry: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, I do think at some point, you mentioned the plotting and the pantsing. And I do think at some point it would make sense that a little bit of planning has to be happening before we're like diving in a hundred percent.

Samantha Skal: Yeah, I give myself and my people. Somewhere between 5 to 10,000 words of discovery writing just to figure out what you want to write about when you're first starting out.

Sara Gentry: Yeah.

Samantha Skal: For me. That's often a scene, or you know, I'll picture something that's oftentimes scary, because again, this is the space I write in, and I'll write it from several different Povs, and figure out what resonates the most with me. And then once I kind of start thinking like. This one! This is the fun one. I’ll force myself and my clients to back off from that. And then we start planning, and we figure out bumpers, you know, using the inside outline using story spines and figure out where the story is going to go, what the villain is doing. First, because again, the protagonist's whole journey in MTS is to experience what the villain is actually doing. So it's really about what the villain is doing, and your protagonist is the person receiving it, translating it, experiencing it, solving it, and so if you don't know what's actually happening, then you don't, your story can oftentimes break down. That is not to say that you can't fix it once you've already written, or you get stuck, or something, because oftentimes the backs of our brains, particularly if you read in this space, have already sort of thought of this, and so unexpected villains can and do happen particularly if you're stuck in the climactic scene like this happened to me with my 1st book. I was writing along, and I got to the point where I thought my person was gonna face off the person doing the bad things, and it turns out that that person was not the bad person at all. It was this other person over here. And that can be really fun. It just takes a little bit of work to figure out how to get it, to make sense in retrospect.

Sara Gentry: Yeah, no, I love that. It's such a fascinating group of genres really like this, this clump of genres because you are experiencing, as you have said, the villain story, and yet the villain may or may not appear on screen. That's what's so fascinating about it.

Samantha Skal: Yes, and it's something that's so overlooked. I think, when you know, there's so much great writing advice out there about how to write a good mystery, and you know much of it I agree with, but I do think that the villain is one of the most overlooked pieces of that, and it takes, you know, it takes a little bit of effort upfront. And then, as to your point, we don't really see them until we face them on the climax of the final twist scene. And you know but you're gonna have these like truths that pop up through the story that you have to deal with as a protagonist, because twists are unsatisfying when the reader has no chance of figuring out that they could have this could have happened this way. Readers are clever. They're constantly looking for little clues that you, the author, have planted, that they, the reader, knows they're being misdirected away from using the protagonist, and if we've done our author job well, our readers will go through with the protagonist and think like totally. It's this, or you know the protagonist isn't thinking this, but it's definitely this person over here. And then, when we actually gets revealed, we look back and we're like, it was there the whole time, you know, like this clue and this clue, but it totally got misinterpreted, and I'm so satisfied because I had a chance to figure it out. If those villain truths are not there, we have no way of figuring it out, and that's when people throw the book against the wall and are like, no, I'm never reading you again, because you never gave me a shot right. And the reason we read it is puzzle solving.

Sara Gentry: Yeah, absolutely. And it's also so interesting that you get to the end. And you realize what it was. Whether or not it was what you thought it was going to be. But then it can make you inclined to like, Okay, I gotta start over and like, see it with a new lens and the new information, yeah.

Samantha Skal: Yeah, I've definitely done that a handful of times where I'm like this definitely wasn't stated this way, and I would have picked up on it, you know, and I go back, and I'm like my gosh, they totally nailed it like it. It was there the whole time, and I just didn't remember, because they did such a good job misdirecting my attention.

Sara Gentry: Right? Right? So you've got the clever catch phrase of writers stuck in revision hell.

Samantha Skal: Yes.

Sara Gentry: So what is it about the mystery, thriller, suspense categories that you think is particularly challenging for writers? I mean, I think every genre has its good stuff, and its stuff that makes it so difficult. There's no easy or more difficult genre to write. But, what is it about this MTS category that you think puts writers in revision hell?

Samantha Skal: Yeah, well, it's when you have to explain it. All right. So it's when usually I mean, most often, I get people in this revision health space when they get to their climactic scene, and they have to explain, like they have that that face off scene with the villain, and the villain explains why they've been doing what they've been doing, or what they've been doing, or the point of what they've been doing, or whatever right their motivation has to be there, but there is no motivation, and so all of a sudden it falls flat. It feels kind of not exciting. It's like you feel the suspense come out of like a balloon losing its air. You know it. Just the story just loses Oomph, because without that, you know, it just doesn't feel good. You can tell when you write it, and it gets really frustrating, really quickly. And so people will come to me and they'll have a great setup right? We have like a really cool crime, and you know, a spunky protagonist who's trying to solve it. And they've gone on all these twists and turns throughout the story to get there. But we, because we don't understand the villain, we, the writer and me, don't understand the villain yet we lose that oomph. And so the coaching through that is basically just going back to the villain and figuring out like, who is this person? Why do they want to do what they're doing? Why didn't they take every single easy out they had, which usually is just like walking away right, you know? Why did they keep going when the police were chasing them? When you know I don't know. The protagonist was chasing them when whatever there's always a good reason for them to stop doing it unless they have a driving reason, just like your protagonist, to push them through the story. So that's a rough spot to be, and I have been there myself. I know what it feels like. It is very hellish, which is why I named that revision. Hell! But I have yet to meet a story where we haven't been able to figure out some other character, or something that just we add in a little bit, and all of a sudden unlocks it, and your villain becomes this, you know, 3D. Like deep, motivated character. That's really interesting. And then we have our finish line, you know, out to the end of the story.

Sara Gentry: Yeah, yeah, that's really astute. Because I do think that that big reveal moment, perhaps more than other genres, I mean the climax and and whatnot of any book is important, but I feel like, especially for the genres that you're talking about, because it makes or breaks the entire story, you know, like romance. I might have this great climactic moment, but maybe the couple could have gotten together another way, or, you know, like have been other solutions, and still that would still have given us a satisfying finish but for the MTS it’s everything. If you've forgotten something, it's like a belly flop. 

Samantha Skal: Totally. That's a great way of saying it. Yeah, I mean the suspense and the, we read, MTS readers read MTS I won't include everyone in that because we want to be scared. We want to be held. We want the story to suck us in and not let us go in a way that's sort of uncomfortable, right? We're here. We're there to be a little bit scared to be a little bit nervous, and we want to have it just increase in suspense all the way through. And the climactic scene actually is sort of just a little dip and then it keeps increasing until the very end. So the air doesn't go out of the balloon until, like the last page of the book, whereas in romance the air goes out of the balloon when they decide to get together. And that's why we read romances. We know they're gonna get together. We're there to figure out how in MTS we know that our good guys are gonna conquer our bad guys. We're there to figure out how. But we don't want to be let down. It's just a steady, steady, upward tension ratcheting, you know, so it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse until it gets resolved at the very very end but without motivation, you know that can be, it can fall flat.

Sara Gentry: Yep, yep. So I know that twists are used in other genres as well. I mean, everything can have a twist even in picture books. We talk about having a twist. Are there ways that writers of other genres might benefit from learning about twists, you know, given this perspective, that have?

Samantha Skal: Yeah, absolutely. So it's all about motivation. So let's take, I don't know. Let's take a kid's book, for example, where you have like, you know, kiddo, and say a goose. And the kiddo's gonna make a bunch of assumptions about what the goose wants and the goose, whether or not they're talking is going to have some assumptions about what the kid wants, and oftentimes those can be wrong. And so the reveal of what the true motivation is that's your twist, because it's unexpected, because your kiddo, who's telling the story, is going to be bopping along and thinking like the goose definitely wants to be my friend or doesn't want to be, let's say, doesn't want to be my friend right? The goose is a little bit scared, or something, or keeps like trying to go over to this little pond over here. And the kid is sad because the goose seems to not want to hang out. But actually, the goose does want to hang out. They just can't go over to this pond over here because reasons capital R.

Sara Gentry: Yeah.

Samantha Skal: And when all that gets revealed, that's your twist. And so just think about how you can have your protagonist make logical assumptions based on their own filters. And it needs to be logical. That's a really, that's a really key point. We don't want our protagonist to be like, I definitely think someone's after me, but I have no reason to think that right. That's not very satisfying. But if they have a reason to think it, it may not be the right reason to think it, but the assumption of motivation is how you build a twist in any story. And this is works in romance, too. Right? It's like, I assume, depending on your trope and where you start, like the assumption is either that they don't want to be with, or they do want to be with. And how do you, the protagonist, feel about that? How do we get to the end of the story with those assumptions in place, and then the reveal of the other person's assumptions is what makes it twisty.

Sara Gentry: Yeah, that's really, succinctly and well said.

Samantha Skal: Thank you.

Sara Gentry: So now, writers will know exactly why I say Sam is the person to talk to about all things related to twists. Yeah, that's really well said. So Samantha, I want to be able to make sure that writers can find you if they're writing in these categories, and they want to learn more about your retreats and all the things. So where can the writers go to learn more about you and your work and your writing, and all that.

Samantha Skal: Oh, thanks, so much. The easiest place is just samanthaskal.com. That's Samantha, just like it sounds. And then SKAL and I have links there to both the retreat which is called Shadows and Secrets writing retreats. That's the website for that, if you're curious. But there's a link on my website, and I also have a little product, a little Mini course, called find your final twist, which kind of leads you through this concept of figuring out your villain and figuring out how they might fit into a final twist which can be applied in all genres again. It's just motivation revelation. And that's a really fun little course that I put together, and I really enjoy it. And I hope you will, too.

Sara Gentry: That is awesome. Samantha, I just want to thank you again for your time for this fabulous conversation.

Samantha Skal: Thank you. This is so fun. I love talking about this stuff.

Sara Gentry: Alright writers. Thank you so much for joining us, and we will catch you next time. Bye.

Samantha Skal: Bye.