craft essay: on writing “the twist”
dillon sheehan
The question I most often got after reading “The Twist” was “How did you come up with that idea?” A political assassination on the ferris wheel at the Times Square Toys “R” Us. BuzzFeed reporting on secret government documents. Those are events that only happen in Bananas Town, Crazyville. To be perfectly blunt, I haven’t the slightest idea what spurs my ideas. That’s not to say I don’t put thought into them, but what I mean is that I work off of an impulse. I can, and have, spent hours searching my brain for some golden idea, something that I know will be unique from everything else. What have I found? The impulse is a gift, the proverbial oils to paint the canvas of literature. Yeah, that metaphor sucked ass didn’t it? It sucked ass because I was trying too hard to come up with an image. The more I spend drawing up the perfect sentence, wording, what have you, the more I spend obsessing on what sounds “good,” rather than what comes next in the story. I can always come back later.
I wrote “The Twist” for Kevin Wilson’s “Beginning Fiction Workshop” class. Sitting at my desk two nights before the story was due, I was at a loss for anything to type out. There’s nothing worse than a blank page. What’s the best opening line? What’s a funny premise? Those questions percolated in my head. I was revising nonexistence. I had to be honest with myself: the first draft was going to have Swiss cheese amounts of holes to poke through, but I had to write. Write something. It didn’t matter if I wrote trash, I had to write. I’m not beating up on myself, but a blank page is daunting. It so happened that I decided to take a break from doing nothing. One of those breaks. I’d put in a few good hours of sitting around. Why not take fifteen to scroll the doomscape of corporate news? Well, it turns out it was election season, so I was reading only the most polite and jovial of headlines. One of the myriad of scandals from either party gave me a little spark. See, the world is obscene, the most absurd bullshit occurs on a daily basis. My brain read the word “scandal” and it was off to the races. I played word association with myself and at some point the idea entered my brain, and then the next, and then the next.
I did not know how “The Twist” was going to end. I knew to an extent where I was going, but I write in a manner that is essentially me telling myself a story. If I’m bored, then so will anyone else who reads my story. Sure, it’s a good idea to know where a story may want to end up, and that more often than not shapes the direction of the writing, but I often roll with the track I'm on. I can always cut out unnecessary sections if need be, but better to have paragraphs upon paragraphs to spend time editing and reshaping than to have nothing on the page at all.
I write as a conversation. Dialogue is a gift from God, and is the best way to show, rather than tell, in my writing. We reveal ourselves through our interactions with others. Good dialogue also trims all the fat off of any “He retorted angrily”' or “They yelped in genial surprise.” If the dialogue is written well, the reader will pick up and visualize all the adjectives they need. They’ll essentially act it out in their head. I’m an actor, so I’m used to telling a story through talking. I’m also an improviser, and I’ve spent years taking one word suggestions and crafting an entire scene, let alone a world. When we as people talk with each other, we most often don’t have reasons for why we say what we do. Sure, we have some motivation behind the words leaving our mouths, but conversations flow, they happen naturally, and when they’re choreographed we can tell. It’s quite easy to recognize when someone’s prepared some remarks to say to you, and it's the same for written dialogue.
Stories were at first an oral tradition, so if you’re stuck, then try some oral. I often find myself talking out loud as I write. It’s my editing software, my self check. If I’m writing out loud and I trip myself up, then I know what I’ve just written will read clunky.
I could take a look at “The Twist” beat by beat, providing a commentary on each decision I made, but that would be bland, and dishonest. I do not remember why the story went in each direction it ended up going. What I do remember is that if it made sense to me, I wrote it down and went with it. Of course, those directions became sharper and poignant only after someone else had taken a look at the first draft. While workshopping it, Kevin Wilson’s biggest criticism was that there was no context to the piece. Why was BuzzFeed releasing these classified files? It was a fair question. What’s at stake? Sure, there were stakes within the narrative of the document series, but there had to be a reason for the leak. Such questions did not cross my mind because I wrote it; I had some form of mental context that I had not provided the reader. Furthermore, I was aware of how much contextualizing the narrative punches up the story. More sets of eyes and workshopping can lead to ideas that are completely unknown. Until I’m aware of the possibilities, I’m limited to what I know. Why not see what someone else thinks?
Framing “The Twist” as a period piece, both in the BuzzFeed article and the events of the narrative, was spurred through a suggestion by Kevin Wilson, and coupled with the looming 2020 election. The story is about governmental incompetence, and there’s an undercurrent of a critique of imperialism. I set the story during a Republican administration because that’s who was in charge in 2004, and there are some clear parallels between that admin’s handling of certain international conflicts and the bumbling cast of characters in my story.
A year later though, what has shocked me the most are the parallels between “The Twist” and the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. I’m not a psychic, but I did have a weird feeling rereading my story this past September and noticing the similarities between the swift fall of the fictional nation of Kardania and real-life Afghanistan. No pun intended, but that’s the funny thing about satire, the lines between it and reality are oft blurred. If there was one piece of advice that I could impart, it’s to write what you know, write what’s real, because sometimes it ends up being just that.
