When Your Premise Paints You Into a Corner — Part 19 of the GSDWT series.

Sadly, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Happily, there is wisdom that can keep you away from that edge.

Let’s go back to process for a moment. There is really only one goal for your story development/writing process, even though some claim that “I’m just here for a good time” and they really don’t care all that much how their process turns out.

The means by which we get to that goal distribute over a singular process continuum–pure pantsing at one end, pure outlining at the other, with most writers operating somewhere in between–in which you are, in an order of your own choosing, scanning for and vetting a story idea, expanding that idea into a criteria-meeting premise (Chapter 7 seven the the book, GSDWT), creating characters and concocting scenes that populate an expositonal narrative, and then imparting those scenes to the page.

Then rinse, revise and repeat.

Earlier I suggested that, even if you don’t have THE ending of your novel in your head yet, it is orders of magnitude more productive, efficient, and even fun to write your story with at least a placeholder ending (how your story resolves) in place. Even if that ending gives way to a better idea as you go along, hey, that’s a win, right?

Indeed it is. You may have no idea how big a win that can be.

But when you aren’t writing toward something, then by definition you are–in much the same way that a still photograph differs from a clip of video or film–exploring a moment or a place or situation. Sooner of later something has to happen… and if there isn’t at a minimum a vague vision for that, then your story’s eventual and perhaps default ending is literally floating around in the vacuum of your process, waiting for you to somehow bump into it.

The most enthusiastic and successful organic story developers (pantsers) understand this to be true.

But even they can topple into an abyss of their own creation from time to time… though you’ll rarely hear about it, because a floor full of editors (or a few more years of bleeding from the forehead) will have solved the issue.

The solution is too often (when no logical expositional sequence of resolution manifests for you) to simply let God, or the Universe, or pure random contrivance, take care of things. To leverage a monumental coincidence or an unlikely turn of events–something that is not the result of your hero’s best efforts–as the plug-and-play ending to your otherwise seat-of-your-pants story.

Here’s the tale of an A-list novelist who actually pulled it off. Even though he got caught with a deus-ex-machina in his pocket.

Nelson Demille, who is one of my personal writing heroes despite what you are about to read, is one of the most popular commercial authors of the past few decades. Top ten, by any metric. In fact, his novel Night Fall was the book that shoved Dan Brown’s The Davinci Code out of the #1 spot on the New York Times Bestseller List in December of 2004, after occupying that ranking for over two years. Night Fall remained in the top spot for eleven weeks, when The Davinci Code won it back.

It must have been a pretty good read to accomplish even that much, right? And it was, if the writing of Nelson Demille and an alternative history of one of the greatest modern airline disasters—among other historic disasters—is your cup of literature. Personally, I love that stuff. Alternative history is as conceptual as it gets.

However, as good as Night Fall was as a hero’s quest leading to a dark end-game, Demille admits he got to the ending and wasn’t sure where to go next. A classic panster’s paradox (Demille is an instinct-driven, research-reliant pantser, by the way, which means he neither proves nor disproves pantsing as the preferred method for anyone else, just for his own work, which is the choice we all entertain; in Night Fall, however, the pantsing Nelson Demille found himself teetering over an abyss frequented almost entirely by pansters).

What he ended up doing is perhaps the most heinous, convenient and against-all-odds contrivance of any bestselling novel in modern history, because it delivered the poster child for deus-ex-machina endings to an extent never seen before. One that redefines the word coincidence.

The entire Part 4 quartile of the novel was the arrangement of dominos and choices that would lead the reader with him to this point of conclusion, which becomes evident only a sentence or two before it actually splashed onto the page with a thud that resonated around the entire publishing world.

A quick review: Night Fall was a speculative history based on the conspiracy theory that TWA Flight 800–which on July 17, 1999, exploded shortly after takeoff from JFK bound for Paris, killing all 230 souls on board–was actually shot out of the sky by a missile launched from a ship. Supposedly there were witnesses who swear they saw tracers from the missiles heading skyward moments before the 747 exploded into a fireball that slowly sank toward the pitch-dark sea.

Demille took that much, stirred in the loudest conspiracy theories, and he was off to the keyboard. The players in this novel, including the beloved hero from previous Demille novels (ex-NYPD homicide detective John Corey, whose wife had worked the crash investigation and pushes her husband to take a closer look), find themselves part of the secrecy-riddled aftermath of the investigations that followed, including the official version from the NTSB, endorsed by the FBI and the CIA, that state that the accident was the result of an electrical malfunction that sparked near the fuel lines, igniting a catastrophic chain of events.

Corey, of course, ever the rebellious hero (that’s why readers love him), dives into the collision of self-interests and agendas against the wishes of his FBI bosses, including those of the witnesses, the press and a plethora of various agencies, not all of whom want the truth to surface. Of course, hijinks ensue, people get killed, evidence disappears, stories change and generally it all descends into the cluster of chaos we’ve come to expect when final federal verdicts collide with popular mythologies about what actually happened.

In the Part 4 quartile of Demille’s fiction, the hero has managed to get enough people on the same page, and has arranged a gathering on a specific day, in a specific place, with irrefutable evidence in hand. The truth was about to be revealed.

That day, when the truth would at last be known, was September 11, 2001. That place was the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. The meeting was scheduled for 9:00 am.

Of course–kudos if you could see this coming–the hero was stuck in traffic and called ahead to say he’d be late. About twenty minutes late, in fact. Late enough, as it turns out, to survive the day, but with nothing to show for his investigative work, and no one left to back the truth.

Of course, the evidence, the proof of the conspiracy, including the identities of the guilty, as well as all the people who had the means and credibility to do something about it, all vanished that day, shortly after 9:00 am when a terrorist flew a 757 into the tower, changing life in our country as we knew it.

Notice, too, that there has been no movie version of Night Fall.

That’s a deus ex-machina on steroids.

Don’t try this at home. Don’t try it all, wherever you are. Because unless your name is Nelson Demille or one of his peers, it will get you rejected at best, or laughed off the internet in the reviews of your self-published novel on Amazon.com. As Picasso advises—stated earlier, but repeated and paraphrased again here, for relevance sake— Learn the rules/principles like a professional, so you can break them like an artist. As writers who aren’t yet famous enough to get away with it, we need to earn the ability to wield art that contradicts the wisdom of best practices.

Whether Demille was artful or simply stuck is another mystery that will never be fully revealed. More likely, he was inarguably famous enough to get away with it.

These excerpts are taken from my new craft book, “Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves,” with the addition of some framing new content here. Feel free to share with your writer friends, directly or via social media.