Finding the twist in the tale

Jeffrey Archer is an international best-selling author with over 250 million books sold. His writing is masterful, complex and engaging. He creates such multifaceted characters that you want to buy them a beer in their local pub. But it is not just his plots and characters and descriptions that propel his stories to their tumultuous endings.

It is the twist in each tale.

Archer admits in the clip that, "I never know more than three pages ahead; six would be a miracle. The twists and turns come on the day."

And his twists are always doozies. 

When you read a novel by Archer, what you expect to happen often doesn't. When you get to that moment, you will spend several minutes reading and rereading to figure out exactly where you went wrong in your thinking. 

It's like getting schooled by an omnipotent being who slaps your hand with a ruler when you fail to discern the true path of his plot. 

It leaves you breathless and wanting more. 

This video piqued my interest for two reasons. First, it touched upon the three pieces of the writer's platform that I am creating. Archer speaks about the publicity for his book Kane and Abel, published in 1979; "I had to do 17 cities in 21 days. You don't do that nowadays. You do tweet, blog, Facebook. And you don't even have to go to the United States of America." Authors have embraced the new tools of social media and this statement is the proof.

The second reason I posted this video was because of the last thing Archer said. In a quote attributed to J.D. Salinger and relayed to Salinger's longtime editor, "Paint yourself into a corner because the reader will never be able to work out how to get out, and if you take three or four days getting out, it doesn't matter because they'll be on to the next page." Archer agrees this is shrewd advice and I have taken it to heart with my own writing. 

I can only outline and plan my stories so far, but I need to relax a bit when it comes to making the story follow the path I want it to. I can only hope to master the twists and turns that make Jeffrey Archer's novels such compelling reads.