From The Archives: Gimmicks And Twists

Note: this list was developed around screenplay tropes, but the point stands in general for fiction.

Gimmicks are twists to the way in which a story is told.

Gimmicks:
• Real time narrative
• Discontinuous narrative (story told out of sequence)
• Narrator’s POV throughout (very limited access to information)
• Multiple narratives intersect
• Multiple narrators tell same story (Rashomon)
• Flashback / dream story
• Story told backwards
• Unusual format (3-D, silent, animated, etc.)
• Story within story
• Same story told several times, differently each time
• Alternate versions of story for different outcomes
• Full-length narration- story as living anecdote
• Story told in several languages w/o subtitles
• Switch genre of story (Shakespeare in the Bronx, cowboys in space)
...and so on.

Twists are sudden changes in story that reinvent what we know.

Twists:
• The main character proves to be a ghost
• The hero is the villain
• The best friend is the enemy
• The safe place is not
• The woman is a man
• Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father
...and so on.  With twists, we simply need to know one thing for sure, and have that turn out to be utterly wrong.

So all twists are gimmicks, but not all gimmicks are twists.  Twists are distinct from other gimmicks in that a twist is entirely story-based, regardless of the method of telling; gimmicks are the method of telling.  They're both valid devices, but I've found they are often confused with each other, although they operate on completely different aspects of narrative.

Notes

Write like you talk.  But without um, fuck, and unfinished sentences.

Forget about genre while writing.  The term means nothing except to limit your storytelling options.  Genre is assigned when the project is finished, for the benefit of marketing departments.

The villain is more important than the hero.  James Bond is just a psychopath.  He has no dreams; his motivations are little more than excuses to lash out with violence in the name of the status quo.  His opponents, on the other hand, are people of vision, genius, and ambition, driven by baroque demons, dedicated to transformation on a global scale.

A character's weaknesses are more important than their strengths.  Weakness, as it concerns fictional characters, means inherent disadvantage.  A character's weakness can be virtue, or modesty, or good looks; it depends upon the narrative.  An innocent man in a prison breakout story suffers the weakness of his innocence: if he escapes, he is no longer innocent, even if free.  A loving, attentive husband that falls for another woman is far more interesting than a philandering swine that does the same, simply because the good man is working against himself, while the womanizer has no dilemma. 

The danger lies in assigning stereotypical weaknesses: the drunken sheriff, the doormat girlfriend, the killer with a conscience, the boxer with a glass jaw.  Weakness is conditional to the narrative.  The 'weakest weaknesses' are the universal ones; the best are weaknesses only in the context of this particular story.

Indiana Jones makes an interesting illustration to this point.  The character has some wonderful weaknesses.  He's a magpie, greedy and deceitful, for example, and vain with his rivals, which drives him into situations a more virtuous man would avoid.  But he also has a classic 'bad writing' weakness: he's afraid of snakes.  As it happens, this is ingeniously paid off in a suspense sequence.  But if that ophidiophobic weakness had been central to the story, Raiders of the Lost Ark would have been a far lesser movie. 

Which leads to another point: the stronger a character, the greater his related weaknesses.  The Meryl Streep character in Doubt would not drive the story forward if she was merely a capable administrator, a strong leader, fierce in defense of the children in her charge, and a woman of great faith.  It is the counterproductive traits that matter.  Her insuperable certainty that she knows better than everyone else, that she's smarter and right, makes things happen.  Her pride and defiance push things past the point of no return.  Her strengths and weaknesses work hand-in-hand, the former giving wings to the latter.