Samantha Skall: 0:00

Once you figure out what your villain is doing and why, think about what your protagonist will assume is going on, because assumptions of motivations is another way to think about twists. I'm assuming this very logical thing about why this person is doing this thing and I am wildly wrong. And the wildly wrong reveal is your twist. So if I'm in my awesome dress and I'm in this basement in Prohibition era and there's barrels of whiskey or whatever all around, I'm going to assume that it's about the whiskey. But maybe it's not. Maybe it's about the building, maybe it's about who this person was.

Savannah Gilbo: 0:33

Welcome to the Fiction Writing Made Easy podcast. My name is Savannah Gilbo and I'm here to help you write a story that works. I want to prove to you that writing a novel doesn't have to be overwhelming, so each week, I'll bring you a brand new episode with simple, actionable and step-by-step strategies that you can implement in your writing right away. So, whether you're brand new to writing or more of a seasoned author looking to improve your craft, this podcast is for you. So pick up a pen and let's get started.

Savannah Gilbo: 1:03

In today's episode, we're exploring what it means to write twists in mysteries and thrillers, and I have a special guest today who is an expert in this topic. Her name is samantha skull and she is the director of thriller fest, the co-founder of shadows and secrets writing retreats, which get. This is a series of thriller and mystery focused writing retreats in Salem, massachusetts, of all places, and in their most haunted hotel how cool is that? And she's also an author accelerator book coach who specializes in coaching mystery, thriller and suspense authors from planning through revision, and Sam's superpower as a coach is brainstorming twists, and that's exactly what she's going to talk to us about today. So in this episode, you're going to hear us talk through things like what it means to write a twist, and how this might show up a little bit differently depending on if you're writing a mystery or a thriller. We're going to talk about what happens when you don't play fair with readers, giving them all the clues they would need to have in order to find out who done it or why they did it and why this is such a big, big mistake. You're going to hear us talk about where writers go wrong when planting clues and how you can more effectively distract readers from the true clues that you do plant.

Savannah Gilbo: 2:12

We're going to talk about how to come up with ideas for your mystery or thriller, especially when it comes to those twists, and you're going to hear Sam's thoughts on when to worry about having all the clues and red herrings figured out. So she's going to talk about is this a first draft problem, a final draft problem or something else? We're going to talk about why you should start with your antagonist or villain when it comes to planning a twist in your mystery or thriller, and so much more. So I don't want to make you wait any longer to get into it. Let's dive right into this conversation with Samantha Skull about planning twists in your mystery or thriller. Conversation with Samantha Skoll about planning twists in your mystery or thriller. Hi Sam, thank you so much for coming on the Fiction Writing Made Easy podcast today.

Samantha Skall: 2:56

Thank you so much, savannah, for having me. This is just I adore you and I adore your podcast.

Savannah Gilbo: 2:59

so it's a thrill to be here. Oh my gosh, it's a thrill to be here and talk about thrillers. I love it. We're going to probably have so many puns today of thrills and thrillers, we sure will. I love it. So I already gave you a more formal introduction in the intro, but in your own words, could you just let my listeners know who you are, what you do and things like that? Sure.

Samantha Skall: 3:14

So I am Samantha Skoll and I focus on mystery, thriller and suspense, with a focus particularly on twist brainstorming. I adore villains, I adore all the dark stuff. I dabble in horror a bit. I'm not the very best with the literary horror, but if you have something supernatural and freaky, please come to me. And I am also the executive director of Solar Fest. So I'm all up in this world and I just murder stories all day, every day.

Savannah Gilbo: 3:42

Yeah, that should be like a bumper sticker. You had a couple good ones there. Murder stories all day. Or you said if you have anything dark and paranormal, I'm your girl.

Samantha Skall: 3:50

Yeah, yeah, exactly Bumper stickers, the scarier the better.

Savannah Gilbo: 3:53

Yeah, I love it. Okay, so, like we kind of spoiled, we're going to talk about writing twists, because that is the thing that Samantha specializes in. It's the thing she loves. So I think most of us know what twists are. But how do you think about these things?

Samantha Skall: 4:07

So I think of a twist as the reveal of the villain's truth, and also they're built on misassumptions and misconceptions from your protagonist about what's actually going on, and so it's not actually just an out of left field, which they sometimes can feel like, which can work really well, but really well done. Twists have been well thought out by the author, and the author knows exactly what is going to happen when, and everything is very understood, which, honestly, as you're writing, can take a little bit of the fun out of it. It feels like it's going to be so obvious, but as a reader, it's incredible when I mean, that's that like tightly plotted feeling that you get when you put down a mystery that we all adore.

Savannah Gilbo: 4:45

That's what we're after, yeah, and what gives us goosebumps when the reveal happens, and things like that. So we're going to talk about what they are, what they aren't Before we get into that. Are there any differences if I'm a writer of a mystery versus a thriller writer? Are there any differences to how I should be approaching twists in those genres?

Samantha Skall: 5:02

It's a really good question. So I would say that thrillers you generally have a little bit more latitude with more POVs, and so you can get weird with even the killer, the person doing the bad things. We know who they are as the author and we know what their goals are, but we don't know everything and so you still have some misconceptions on both sides. That gets kind of like expert level and I don't recommend starting there. But mysteries tend to be kind of first or third POV. We're just following one person throughout the story, so misconceptions are very easy to pull off.

Savannah Gilbo: 5:32

Yeah, very, very easy to pull off. And something I talk about in my course and in the podcast a lot is the red herrings, how we use red herrings to help us pull off these twists. And something I say you tell me if you agree or not, is that in a mystery we kind of use red herrings to distract us from what has already happened. So whodunit, what happened? And then in thrillers we use red herrings to make us incorrectly believe something's coming. So maybe something did happen and there's a little mystery to that. But it's more about what's coming than what has happened.

Samantha Skall: 6:03

My God, so well said, completely agreed. I like to think of mysteries as, exactly as you just said, like the exploration of understanding what has already happened, and then thrillers are preventing what's going to happen.

Savannah Gilbo: 6:15

So very strongly agree. Same page, I love it, okay, and so you kind of already hinted at this. But there's, you also have a take on what twists are not. Can you talk about that a?

Samantha Skall: 6:24

little this, but you also have a take on what twists are not. Can you talk about that a little? Yeah, so twists are not just something that you think of as you're writing and you're like, oh, that's random, I'm going to put that in there. They always need to be logical from the standpoint of looking backwards, after the reader has experienced them and the protagonist right. So if I'm a protagonist walking through the woods and I see something and I make an assumption and then it turns out that thing is absolutely the thing that I was afraid of, the logic will be that it's not because I will have thought, oh, somebody else left it there or whatever. And then, after we get through the story and have to look backwards and be like why didn't you see it for?

Savannah Gilbo: 6:58

what it was Like. You know, yeah, yeah, and I think one of the top mistakes is exactly what you just said. It's not playing fair. So it's kind of like, no matter what we know or don't know in the first draft, I'm talking about the final product.

Samantha Skall: 7:10

So in the final product.

Savannah Gilbo: 7:11

We need to play fair. We need to give readers all the clues and then misdirect them. That's where the art comes in, to do the twist right, Absolutely.

Samantha Skall: 7:20

I'm nodding vigorously over here. Yeah, I like to think of it like on screen. I'm nodding vigorously over here. Yeah, I like to think of it like on screen. If you're watching a movie or watching a thriller, go by through your eyes as you're reading it in a mystery, the little clues that pop up that the protagonist, like, clocks on the page and then looks over here and is like, oh, that's bloody footprint, isn't important. I'm going to go focus on this dead body or whatever and sorry, that's super dark. But yeah, you know, the bloody footprints are what's important and the reader will clock it but not necessarily pay attention to it, because we, as the author, have manipulated them through the protagonist to looking at something else, right?

Savannah Gilbo: 7:51

So yeah, the other thing that I see a lot is that writers will they go about that drawing of attention in the wrong way. So sometimes if we use your example of the bloody footprint and the body, well, I guess in that scenario both are related. Probably right, but let's say there's like a clue. Also on the sofa there's a wristwatch. So we have a wristwatch, a bloody footprint and a dead body and it's almost like sometimes the writer will make us pay so much attention to that wristwatch because maybe it's coming into play later and it's, yeah, okay, if we're in our character's shoes, realistically they're not going to like inspect everything when there's a dead body to their left and a bloody footprint in the middle right, and we can talk about this more later. But it's like, once you play fair and you have all the clues, it's about knowing where to put that spotlight and how much time to let that spotlight linger, and I think that's where sometimes we go wrong that's so well said.

Samantha Skall: 8:43

Yeah, I, yeah Early drafts of mysteries. I will say they're not bad, right, like we as writers evolve over time and so it's okay to have a draft where it's like, wow, that's obvious. Yeah, but you know, as you revise, you can look and you can think, as you just said, like logically, what would my character do? Like they're not going to be like, ah, dead body, whatever. I'm going to focus on this thing for 20 minutes and then come back over to this thing Because, trust your reader, your readers, especially mystery readers, are noticing every single thing that the protagonist notices and looking for that manipulation. And I think that's 90% of the fun of writing mysteries is the reader knows that we're trying to mess with them and so we're trying to mess with them, even though they know that we know what they know. Yes, we're trying to outsmart each other.

Savannah Gilbo: 9:26

Yes, yeah, I love that, and so I know we're going to talk about how to ideate thrillers, because that's kind of your specialty.

Savannah Gilbo: 9:34

But just since we're on this track of mistakes, the third thing I was going to mention is that sometimes it's like we don't have a solid enough red herring to distract us. Like what we've both been saying is, sometimes we set up something and we want readers to be looking over here and it's, but logically that doesn't make any sense, or like you've also given me evidence to know that this person is not the killer or whatever. And, like Sam said, there's first draft problems and later draft problems. But yeah, and so we're going to talk about how to ideate in a second. But it's like I just want to dump everything on you and then have you parse through my thoughts Amazing as my true trail of clues. So it's almost like because I'm thinking of being a writer and hearing you explain what you just did is I might be like, wow, that sounds hard and it is, but it's also kind of not, because you just kind of plot two stories right and then at the last minute you kind of switch what we are thinking about.

Samantha Skall: 10:37

Oh gosh, you just kind of blew my mind. That is such a good way of saying it. It's exactly what red herrings are, you know. They need to make sense. They can't just come out of nowhere. It can't be like I'm going to focus on this cute cat instead of the dead body. It's got to be logical, and so coming up with something that is plausible for your and believable for your protagonist to focus on logically, that's the difficult part. But once you figure that out, it actually is pretty easy, because you're just going to follow their logic for what they're looking at, assuming they don't know what's actually going on, which is what the villain actually did.

Savannah Gilbo: 11:08

Right and there's so many. You're dropping so many good nuggets because it's so important to get in your character's head, because what is happening to your character is happening to your reader, ideally, if you've done it right. It also allows you to play with, like you said earlier, what they think they know. So they're going to interpret all kinds of things right and wrong, which is great.

Samantha Skall: 11:27

Usually wrong.

Savannah Gilbo: 11:28

Yeah, usually wrong, which is great for us and it's great for how your reader is going to experience the story. But again back to what you said is we do not need to know all of this as we're drafting, and sometimes the more obvious we are to ourselves when drafting, it's cool, it's out in the page.

Samantha Skall: 11:45

Now we can finesse it from there, absolutely. Yeah, I mean sometimes when I I mean we'll get into ideating in just a second, but I could jump the gun for just a minute. But sometimes when I'm just starting out, I'll figure out what the actual story is with the villain and then I'll go back in and figure out like well, what else could they focus on? What would be logical? Because villains don't generally want to be caught. The people doing bad things want to keep doing the bad thing, which is what makes them an antagonist.

Savannah Gilbo: 12:05

So yeah, yeah, I love that. And so, okay, let's talk about ideation, because that's like your jam. So if we're trying to write a mystery or thriller and let's say we don't even really know anything about what we're doing, we know we want to write a book. We're aiming for, like, let's say, 80,000 words. Yep, maybe we know that we want to write it in the prohibition era. Like, maybe we know something about setting, right, what do we do next?

Samantha Skall: 12:31

So I tend to start with a single scene, and that's what I tell my people as well, the people who hire me to help them is you know, sit there and pick up something that, if we're writing about prohibition, right, so that my mind immediately goes to like speakeasies and underground and things that are not. You know, it's all about what happens beneath the surface. There's like the shiny surface and then there's like the dark, fun, illegal underground, and so see if you can come up with a scene where something happens. If we're writing a mystery, there's usually going to be a dead body in the first chapter. So picture the dead body. What do they look like? Is it a male, female? What are they wearing? Are they rich, are they poor? Are they holding a bunch of liquor or are they like running from something, whatever?

Samantha Skall: 13:13

And then I like to think of how I would tell that story from many different perspectives, and I'll give myself 200 words, 500 words, a thousand words, whatever, and one of those typically ends up being my protagonist, because your protagonist always needs to find the dead body in a mystery. And so maybe the villain's there, maybe they're not, maybe the villain is watching through a hole in the wall because prohibition, and then you kind of just go wild, right. But once you have that initial core scene, you can start to figure out like, okay, what brought us there? Because, again, mysteries are about what already happened and we're trying to figure it out and thrillers are about what's about to happen. So if we're in the mystery mindset here, it's absolutely going to be focused on like, okay, what do I see? What clues exist here and world's your oyster from there. It can go so many different directions.

Savannah Gilbo: 13:59

I love that, what you said about looking at it from different perspectives, because in all stories that's true, where each character has their own version of events. But in a mystery or thriller.

Samantha Skall: 14:09

It's like, yeah, that's super important because they're all going to be right and they're all going to be wrong in their own way, obviously, the master of writing these locked room mysteries, which is a genre that I completely love, but in all cases, it's about discovering what happened, but from all these different perspectives, and you don't have to have seven POVs, you can have one, but they're going to be interviewing people and they're going to be getting experiences throughout, and so I think, just let yourself be open. If you have an initial scene, just think, okay, is there someone spying through the door? Is there someone peeking from underneath the floor? Is there another body? Is there whatever right there's? Just let your mind run wild and just see what kind of pops to the surface for you.

Savannah Gilbo: 14:54

Yeah, and then I'm sure you can take what you come up with and dig into any piece of that more Exactly yeah, so let's say we've done that and we know the gist of why the crime happened. Maybe we've identified this is our protagonist, this is the antagonist. Do you recommend people start by fleshing out the antagonist?

Samantha Skall: 15:12

But for mysteries and thrillers, generally speaking, the person doing the bad things is your antagonist, because their goal is to not get caught and your protagonist wants them to get caught, Right, so that's your forces of opposition.

Samantha Skall: 15:30

So I love digging into why people do what they do and I think that's what makes a really rich dig your nails in and understand a really cool antagonist. And this is what makes it not fall flat when you have this big discussion that typically happens in the climactic scene or the final twist of what actually happened why did you do this thing? It's so much more interesting if some, instead of someone, just you know, saying oh I do it because I like murdering people or whatever they're like. Oh, I really I wanted to save my father's company, so I made a series of increasingly bad decisions and ended up with this person being murdered and one other little note focusing on this like dead body scene in the beginning. What we're really doing with the mystery is unpacking what has already happened for the last like two months, month, six years, whatever, and so it can really help to think through, like everything that happened right up until the point where we enter the story and then that's your protagonist journey is figuring out the why.

Savannah Gilbo: 16:25

Yeah. So that's really cool because I hear a lot of it's like you're opening doors into multiple versions of backstory. So the protagonist, what got the villain to be where they are today? Why was the victim chosen? Was it random? Was there a specific purpose? So it sounds like we can start by just brainstorming all these things and asking why about?

Samantha Skall: 16:46

everything. Yeah, I mean exactly Right. And then all of a sudden you end up with a lot that you're looking at and you can pick and choose what story you want to pursue the most you know. And sometimes that dead body maybe they were the supervillain and your villain killed them because they had to and the final twist is who this person really was. Right, like some reveal of motivation. Yeah, the motivation is so key and I think that's once you figure out that there's usually like this semi audible click when you're on a call with somebody and or you're yourself or writing, and you sit there and you're like, oh that that I just figured it out.

Samantha Skall: 17:19

And then it all falls into place from there.

Savannah Gilbo: 17:21

And it's amazing too, because even if you're not writing a mystery or thriller, the motivation piece of any character unlocks everything 1000%. Yeah, suddenly it's like you know why they're showing up on the page the way they are. You know why their quirks are their quirks, or why they're taking certain actions. So yeah, huge piece of the puzzle. Okay, so let's say we've thought about this. We know our villain's motivation.

Savannah Gilbo: 17:45

Usually, it seems like the protagonist just gets caught up in things and there's then like a personal connection of why they care about uncovering the crime or whatever. What do we do next, like how do we sort through all the possibilities of what a plot can be, what a red herring can be? There's so many options.

Samantha Skall: 18:03

There are so many options and I think this is partly this is a good place where people get overwhelmed. It's very frequent to feel overwhelmed at this stage, so just keep pushing through it. If you're listening to this and you're like, that's me. So once you figure out what your villain is doing and why, think about what your protagonist will assume is going on, because assumptions of motivations is another way to think about twists.

Samantha Skall: 18:25

I'm assuming this very logical thing about why this person is doing this thing and I am wildly wrong. And the wildly wrong reveal is your twist, right? So if I'm looking, I'm in my awesome dress and I'm in this basement in prohibition era and there's barrels of whiskey or whatever all around, I'm going to assume that it's about the whiskey, but maybe it's not. Maybe it's about the building, and then you can play it out like that, but always think about the fact that your person who's doing bad things is trying actively not to get caught, and so they will be putting things in place to prevent your protagonist from figuring out what's happened, which can be red herrings, right? This, I don't know, chest of gold. That is obviously the reason this is happening. What if that was planted there for the sole purpose of derailing your protagonist's investigation into what happened.

Savannah Gilbo: 19:20

Yeah, that makes sense. And so there's things, like you said, the villain can do. There's things that think about. If you have, let's say, five people in the room, right, there's another person that might have been cheating on their spouse and so they might be worried they're going to be found out, so they're also trying to manipulate, even though they have nothing to do with the crime. They just don't want to be questioned, Right? So it's like it all goes back to that motivation. There could be someone else that's in the country illegally and they don't want to be found out, so they don't want to be questioned. You can just think about what is everyone doing, which I find really helps populate the plot.

Samantha Skall: 19:53

Absolutely, and it's not.

Savannah Gilbo: 19:54

I like to come at it the way that you do. Which is villain first, and then who else can make this messy? And then what's my protagonist going to do, knowing they have the agency to start solving the crime?

Samantha Skall: 20:06

Yes, absolutely yeah. I love the idea of what can I think of to make this messy?

Savannah Gilbo: 20:10

That's a really good way of saying it and you're so right.

Samantha Skall: 20:14

Like everyone, someone who's being shifty when being questioned, the assumption is going to be that they were a part of the crime, but if they have a very good reason for that shiftiness, that has nothing to do with it. All of a sudden, there's a twist, right, and it doesn't have to be like a major twist. It can just be maybe closer to your midpoint, maybe 65%, and just keeps it moving. Yeah, yeah, it's a great way of looking at it.

Savannah Gilbo: 20:36

Yeah, and there's thinking of our plots too. There's usually multiple suspects, we kind of go through.

Savannah Gilbo: 20:40

Absolutely so some are dismissed pretty quickly, some are dismissed a little bit in the middle of the story. So you know, you have think about too like the strategies that the protagonist will go through, and it's usually usually they have to start with the assumptions and the most obvious. So they're going to start that way. They're going to kind of close the door on somebody and then what opens up the next door of suspicion, and then we have to kind of also run parallel what's happening that way versus what the villain's really doing. So everything else makes sense in the end. This husband who is cheating on his wife we thought it was him, but then we uncovered it's not him. However, what also was the villain doing to play into that?

Samantha Skall: 21:19

Yes, yeah, so one of my favorite things to do when I get to that point is once I kind of have a landscape of what's going on and I have all this messy stuff.

Samantha Skall: 21:27

I figure out what I want my climactic kind of moment to look like and which person my protagonist is going to face off against. That doesn't always have to be your person doing bad things. Ultimately it does have to answer the story question of who killed the person in the body on the first page, but you can have all kinds of stuff that happens before then and so mapping out, like what my protagonist is experiencing is what's on the page, is the plot, and they'll have like sub bullets of what the villain is actually doing during all of this and what they're like oh my God, they're too close, I'm going to burn this building down or whatever. And then seeing how the protagonist reacts to that on-screen clue basically of like, oh, the building burned down because of lightning or because this eating spouse decided they didn't want their evidence to be uncovered. But that doesn't actually solve my initial crime, and so getting messy really good way of saying it.

Savannah Gilbo: 22:17

I like getting messy. That's the fun part of the ideation. The hard part is then taking the mess and making it something. But something else that I've found that helps writers is think about, for whoever you're going to suspect or whoever was in the room. Think about motive, means and opportunity, because that's a big one right. Usually, if we've done all the work you've set up until now, we know the villain's motivation, means and opportunity. But think about, even like the most innocent person in the room, is there some way that you could build in that the motive, means and opportunity so that then they could become a potential suspect or just someone in the background that readers might suspect?

Samantha Skall: 22:53

Absolutely. And that's like the next level up is looking as you get through a rough draft of your story, reading through it with the eyeballs of a new reader, if you at all can, and thinking like, oh, I super suspect this person and then running with that, knowing that the reader will assume the author is messing with them so they're not going to suspect that person.

Samantha Skall: 23:12

that person, but maybe they do, and so this is where it can get really fun with the manipulation. But that's kind of like end of drafting, end of revision, tweaking things we have this joke in our house.

Savannah Gilbo: 23:22

I don't know if you're an office fan, but there's this one episode where dwight talks about like how to solve a murder and he's always the person you least most suspect. So now, when we're watching thrillers or mysteries on tv, I was like who do you least most suspect? So now, when we're watching thrillers or mysteries on TV, we're always like who do we least most suspect? That's probably who it is. It's so funny. We want to give your readers a person you least most expect as well as the true bad guy.

Savannah Gilbo: 23:44

But okay, so you said something important, right? There's different layers or levels of when we need to think about this. So if I'm a writer, I might be thinking, yes, I want to do all of these things. What would you recommend I do in the planning stage versus the drafting phase, versus the editing phase?

Samantha Skall: 24:00

Great question. So the planning phase I figure out the villain first, and then I figure out how the protagonist experiences the villain's truth, and in that way I have the core storyline and then I start figuring out the mess on their side. So people, they're focusing on whatever, and that'll get you to. Probably, if you were to write that, then it would probably be like 40,000, 50,000 words. And so then we need to figure out what kind of will make it expand more. And that's when I start getting into interiority and having my protagonist look and think about OK, well, my inner turmoil, my major malfunction, is making me view this in this way, but of course I haven't figured out my malfunction yet, so everything is through my own filter, and this layer of the emotionality is, I think, also what creates really meaty mysteries that aren't just this happened and this happened and this happened, and also gives your protagonist a really good way of having agency throughout the story. Because that's another really common mistake I see is that the protagonist is just plopped down into a scene, and maybe this is how your story does start.

Samantha Skall: 24:59

There's a lot of great mysteries that start where the protagonist sees something and then gets sucked in. Right, but what are they going to do? Are they going to try to get away? Are they going to lean into it? I often wonder. I thank God have never actually discovered a body on my own, but I wonder what would I actually do? Right, probably I'd call the police and run the other way, right, like I don't want any part of that in real life.

Samantha Skall: 25:20

But I love writing about it and I love writing about people who are like, oh, I'm going to insert myself in this and that agency is super important. But that also is fueled by who this person is, and so you can expand a kind of bare bones plot about just this happened and this happened, with a ton of interiority and like not not a ton enough to make it interesting, right, but that gets our character from A to B A being like their initial, like I have a big chip on my shoulder about something to B being the end after I've realized my aha moment and helps me conquer the villain. And then editing, like I like to read through it with different hats on, but I have to give myself a break in between them and then I figure out. I'm sure you've talked about this a ton, but revision is like big stuff first and then down to little stuff, because the big stuff takes up a ton of time.

Savannah Gilbo: 26:09

So yeah, and there was two important things you said. I was just jotting down a note, so one of them is you talked about interiority, and that's something I do see that tends to go missing a lot in thrillers and mysteries.

Savannah Gilbo: 26:21

And then when I edit a draft, I say I don't understand why this character did what they did, and the writer will really know why they did what they did. It's just not on the page. So in our weird little example we're making up today, it's you know, imagine if the first suspect of your protagonist is the person who cheated on his wife and in the protagonist backstory their dad cheated on their mom. Like it makes sense why they would potentially choose to investigate that person over somebody else.

Savannah Gilbo: 26:47

Absolutely so sometimes it like, although it sounds, we're talking about making a big mess with details and ideas. Sometimes the mess is good, because you uncover all these things that you don't know are going to connect and then, when they do, you're like this is pretty cool.

Samantha Skall: 27:01

Yeah, I mean, I like to you know some of my favorite. They always tend to be heroines, but whoever like, your favorite protagonists are the people who sit there and they're like, okay, I am making this decision in their interior. I'm going to choose this because I know this for sure and that knowing can be the misbelief right.

Samantha Skall: 27:20

Or like the filter. So if we go with a child of somebody cheating on someone else, they're going to have a big chip on their shoulder about that. They're going to make some probably incorrect assumptions about motivations and not see things completely clearly or with zero prejudice, right?

Savannah Gilbo: 27:35

right, and even if there's a person who's in love and they're like the dream couple they're gonna probably judge that couple, because how could they possibly be in love?

Samantha Skall: 27:43

love's not real, exactly, exactly. And then your emotional arc there can be understanding that love can be real, even if it doesn't look like what you thought it should look like, with your own filter.

Savannah Gilbo: 27:53

And then how does that translate into the crime? Yes, start connecting all these different things, which is kind of fun. Maybe we should write a book together. I know, yeah, let's see the speakeasy, the death of the speakeasy.

Samantha Skall: 28:06

It's going to be a cozy mystery with a title like that, but I'm okay with it.

Savannah Gilbo: 28:13

Cozy cat mystery at the speed of easy Even better. The second thing you said I'm trying to remember it was around oh, like, how do we get someone personally invested in the crime to give them agency? This is something I see a lot of writers struggle with because they might say okay, well, if I'm a woman walking down the street and I find a dead body that I don't know, how do I make someone personally invested in this if they have no connection to the body?

Samantha Skall: 28:33

Yeah, great question, and I think that gets into their backstory, right? Maybe our protagonist has just been fired from her job and she secretly has always wanted to be a detective. Maybe the dead body is her neighbor or someone she sees at the coffee shop every day or something. There's something just enough to make her curious. It doesn't have to be something. It's like their brother or whoever someone super close to them. But even if it's just, I can't just walk away from this right, like just that human nature of like this terrible thing happened and I am witness to it, so I need to help. Maybe there's a romance subplot and she falls for the cop. I don't know, you know.

Savannah Gilbo: 29:06

Yeah, this book I was editing and I know the writer won't care if I share this because I've talked about her stuff on the podcast before but she has a mystery subplot in a fantasy world. And the kind of tie between the victim and the protagonist is that they are both treated as second class citizens.

Savannah Gilbo: 29:23

So when this protagonist sees that someone with her skin color is murdered. She doesn't know her, she doesn't know anything, she just sees herself in that person and that's enough to make her take action on it. So it really can be anything. But I think without that, either the story falls apart and writers are like what the heck am I even trying to do? This makes no sense. Or the draft happens and it's executed, and it might be executed well, but without that initial connection or that motivation that makes sense, it reads weird, totally.

Samantha Skall: 29:54

Yeah, and that's honestly one of my favorite places to come in and help people is when they have a solid idea about what they want the story to look like, but we're missing the connections. The way my weird brain works is finding those connections, and so I've had so many breakthroughs with people where it's okay, well, we have this as your villain right now. What if it wasn't? What if it was this other person? What if the reason that they're connected is because of this long lost thing and not a coincidence? You know it's always there for a reason. Just open your mind as if you're stuck like that and just think, what if this was connected? And see what you come up with. Sometimes you can break your own way out of it.

Savannah Gilbo: 30:30

Yeah and I've actually found that to be true too that sometimes it's like our first ideas are great red herrings. So if your first idea of a villain might be actually a really great red herring, that could be like the next to last suspect that cross off the list. And then, or it's okay, maybe your villain is correct, that person is correct, but maybe you need to swap motivations with someone else you were ideating. So I totally agree, like thinking what if? Thinking outside the box, thinking like what would readers least expect right now?

Samantha Skall: 31:01

and then maybe playing into that.

Samantha Skall: 31:03

That can be fun too yeah, and you can also play with, like the structure of the twist, right? So the climactic twist, as I mentioned earlier, always has to answer the story question. It has to be who killed the person or who stole the thing or whatever, right, but that person can be the villain that the the protagonist is focused on from 50 to 75, 80 percent, and the final twist is that they didn't have a choice in doing the thing, or they were doing it because of something that the protagonist couldn't ever have understood except by viewing it through this certain lens and all the clues on the page. And that leads us to the final twist, which is the mastermind villain is what I like to call. It is the person pulling the strings and being like ha ha, you know, they're following my path that I've laid out for them, or I've done all this to keep myself safe, and so I'm like throwing people under the bus right and left.

Savannah Gilbo: 31:50

Yeah.

Samantha Skall: 31:50

And yeah.

Savannah Gilbo: 31:51

Which probably I'm imagining. In the work you do with people you have to think about theme and stuff. I mean, I know for every story we do, but in that example you just said, it's like if the person is guilty, but they're guilty because someone else did something worse, yeah, what are we saying about justice, right? What are we saying about punishing someone who did something bad, but maybe for a good reason?

Samantha Skall: 32:13

Well, and that creates a very interesting climactic scene that can lead very lovely, lovely, that's not the word but into your protagonist having an emotional aha moment, which can happen, you know, in all number of places. But I love those where, you know, we view the villain, the fake villain, climactic villain, in a in a new light and see their motivations and we understand their why and all of a sudden have empathy for them. And most protagonists in books are not just going to go nuclear on people and like destroy everything. They're going to try to have some understanding and it creates some really interesting stories and I love those mysteries that make us think too, you know particularly if you're writing, kind of leave us with an echo of like, what would we do?

Savannah Gilbo: 32:53

Yes, yeah, exactly, yeah, okay, I love that so much, so we kind of already spoiled. I wanted to ask you about common mistakes people make and we said probably the number one is not playing fair with the reader. We talked about not having a solid enough red herring to distract us. So maybe it's too obvious, maybe it's not there. And then we talked about putting the spotlight on the wrong clue or maybe too long. What are some other things you see, people do?

Samantha Skall: 33:19

Not having the villain be on the page is a pretty common one. It's this delicate balancing act between having the villain enough on the page that your reader can clock them and dismiss them for logical reasons because your protagonist clocks them and dismisses them and having them not be so obvious. Right and this is one of those things that comes with betas and like final drafts honestly, is giving it your best shot and thinking like, ok, I think no one's really going to get who this person is until like 85 percent or something. But your betas read it and they're like everyone gets it on 40%, you're like okay, well, what happened?

Samantha Skall: 33:53

to 40% that I need to pull out so that people don't get it quite so quickly. But what we don't want is some new character to come out of left field at 90% of the way through the book, unless they've already been mentioned or they don't have to have physically interacted with the protagonist. But they do need to be known.

Savannah Gilbo: 34:13

Yeah, and that's definitely a hard balance. I see people trying to figure out too because sometimes it's about having the villain be physically present whether it's like as kind of a shapeshifter, where they appear to be one way and then we find out later the villain, or it's like how do we just have them mentioned, Because sometimes they can be off the page while still being on the page, so they're mentioned.

Savannah Gilbo: 34:35

Or maybe we see effects of the villain that we don't understand until later. So I know we're not talking about middle grade fantasy, we're talking about thrillers and mysteries, but I love the mystery part in the first harry potter book and everyone knows I just spent forever digging into that book and there's things. Why was har Harry attacked at the Quidditch match? We have a suspicion of who it is. We think it's Snape, but that's an effect of the villain, even though we don't see him like taking action on the page.

Samantha Skall: 35:04

Yeah, that's a really good example, totally.

Savannah Gilbo: 35:07

Yeah, and so the other thing you said, too. That made me want to ask you because this is what people ask me all the time how do we balance having a book, one antagonist, with a bigger antagonist or series antagonist?

Samantha Skall: 35:20

Yeah, connection right. So each story in a series. Let's say you have like a seven book mystery series. There's a lot of those out there. I'll just plug my friend Tessa Weggert's Shana Merchant series are amazing and she did a fabulous job of having these books work over a big arc and each one stands alone in their different little mysteries, but they're all focused on and somehow related to this I'm not going to spoil anything but somehow related to this initial big crime that she needs to, shana the character needs to solve.

Samantha Skall: 35:51

I still want to interview Tessa about whether or not she knew the entire thing before she started writing. Yeah, they're great if you want to check them out, but I think that the biggest thing is to have each little chunk of story, each of these seven, stand on their own but have that overarching connection. That's your mastermind villain, right? So it's almost like I mean, I'm not going to quote Hero's Journey because I don't that's an area that I know is in mysteries. The Hero's Journey is something I don't know as well, but like that bigger arc of we have little pebbles on the way to this final standoff and that final standoff can be like book four, but there's going to be something new that gets revealed. That means we still have something to solve, and that can be internal, that can be somebody that caused this initial person to do this other thing, or yeah, it's hard to answer in short.

Samantha Skall: 36:39

But I do think that that focus, knowing what your overarching scope is, will be very, very helpful. And then figuring out the kinsey milhoun series is another great example. Those were incredible books and they managed to have each one stood alone, but they also told a story about what it was like to be a pi in santa barbara in the 90s.

Savannah Gilbo: 36:58

Right, yeah yeah, I think that's all great, like all great points to think about. If we're writing a series and something that I see because you said connection and that's the word I got hung up on I see writers struggle with that kind of connection too, because they might say well, I have a mastermind villain and I have an idea for book one villain and I don't really know. They don't know each other, they come from different parts of the world or whatever, and it's okay, that could be true. And then that's when I think you can get into the mastermind villain's head and say could he see this person or what they're doing as an opportunity to get what he or he or she or they, whatever, what they want?

Savannah Gilbo: 37:32

yeah, totally so sometimes you can make the connections without having it be like well, that's his father yeah, it can be like.

Samantha Skall: 37:38

it can be like is there like a mid-villain, like you have stacks of villains, you have the person who's being ultimately manipulated, who's your villain in book one, and then it turns out they were being manipulated by this person. And then this person I'm moving my hand up. Yeah, it's just. What are the layers of power basically?

Samantha Skall: 37:54

I mean those tend to get bigger and bigger, because the person who's manipulating five levels of people tends to be very powerful and you get more into like filler territory in that point, because it's usually world ending and it's bigger stakes. That's the other thing is escalating stakes throughout each book. Yeah, hunger Games. We started small-ish and then we just get bigger and bigger.

Savannah Gilbo: 38:15

Worldwide. Yeah, exactly, yeah. So yeah, I think that's great. We can think about connections. They can be very literal or they can be kind of like once removed or a little bit more figurative. That's okay too, as long as we understand it and this relates back to another mistake I see, which is not closing out each book's plot. Yes, you can definitely open for a series at the end of each book, but you still need to answer that story question of who done it in this book, or like why did we do it? Or things like that.

Samantha Skall: 38:43

Absolutely. Yeah, it's like chaos to order on a small scale, like you may not control the entire chaos of everything, but absolutely agreed, story question must be answered and knowing your story question is another good way of ideating.

Savannah Gilbo: 38:56

Yeah.

Samantha Skall: 38:56

Right, and in mysteries that can be as simple as who killed this person and answering that, but then the why becomes your twist breeding ground.

Savannah Gilbo: 39:05

And speaking of that, you just reminded me of something we talked about a long time ago in one of the book clubs we did. We were looking at the Guest List by Lucy Foley.

Savannah Gilbo: 39:13

And we were talking about how it's really interesting that you know there's someone has died, so that question. Because we were talking about how writers sometimes they leave open so many story questions that we're like what are we supposed to be reading about? So I thought that book was a cool example of we close the story question of someone has died, so it's not about did someone die. That's not what we're reading for. We're reading to find out literally who did it and why they did it. And then once we know who did it, that question's closed. So it becomes why. So sometimes it's helpful to think about your story like that and you can totally give away most mysteries right in the beginning. We know exactly who died.

Samantha Skall: 39:50

Exactly, yeah, and I was. You just made me think of the guest list. That's a good example of something being kind of the Venn diagram of mystery and thriller. Yeah, you know, because we know we don't know everything, and so that's the thriller part of it. Nor do we know the initial mystery, except that like someone's going to die, so it's in the future, but it already happened and it's like yeah.

Savannah Gilbo: 40:10

Yeah, so it's. I think it's great to know, like, what that question is for you. And there's people who are writing books like that and they're like, well, I don't know, am I mystery, am I thriller? And I think you laid out a good way to think about it, like, is it in the past? Are we reading to find out what happened in the past, or are we reading to understand so that we can prevent something in the future?

Savannah Gilbo: 40:29

And you know, of course there's going to be some crossovers and things like that. But that's like another thing I see that writers do a lot is they just leave all these things open and they're so vague because they think it's going to pull us forward and make us curious and really it's just like we have nothing to latch on to. I don't care about anything.

Samantha Skall: 40:45

Yes, god, so well said. One of my critique partners said this really well, and she said confusion does not equal suspense. So it's just we think, when we first start writing, this is such a common thing that, like, the more we leave open, the more engaged people are going to be, and it's the exact opposite. It's give us. Lead me into this. Author. Tell me what I should focus on, tell me exactly what I should be questioning, and then I want you to suck me in so hard into this book that I don't get up off the couch for four hours, because I'm not hooked.

Savannah Gilbo: 41:16

Yeah, and I find the same to be true. It's all. It really is the opposite. So I feel like there's a listener out there who needed to hear this. So we are literally telling you it's the opposite. Be more specific, be more purposeful and then focus on what is that central question, because we don't need to have a thousand open questions. We need to have a central open question, and then things that lead us to that answer, and and there can be many questions, of course, but vague is never the answer- it is not.

Samantha Skall: 41:43

Yeah, and that just reminded me like big big plots or big big cast lists. That's another pretty common thing I see, and particularly with mysteries, I like to think that readers can handle probably about eight people without losing track of everybody.

Samantha Skall: 41:58

But six, especially if you kill somebody off right away. That always helps, but the more people you have, the more you're asking your reader to remember and clock. I know Game of Thrones has a lot of fans and critiques and whatever, but, like Diana Gabaldon too, like huge cast lists and people have compendiums that they keep to keep track of all the characters, and so if you want someone to sink in, you don't want to risk confusion, and confusion is what causes people to put down a book. So keep it tight, answer the questions that need to be answered for the reader to understand and then leave open the stuff you want them to be like ooh, what's going to happen?

Savannah Gilbo: 42:33

Yeah, and most of the time on that cast note, it's like you need to have a purposeful reason to have the eight characters. So I see a lot of writers start from the opposite angle and they're like I just want eight because that sounds really cool, or it sounds like I can cast a lot of suspicion on a lot of people, and it's sure, but it's going to be a lot harder for you to pull off and harder for readers to engage with. So I always say start small and improve why you need more. Because also, too, I see in the drafts I edit it's like you might start with eight and then you realize four of them are duplicates of the other four.

Samantha Skall: 43:05

Yes, and you have to trim anyway, and combining characters is a good way of fixing twists too. If you're at that point where you're just blocked when you're writing, who can you combine on the page and then go back and fix it later?

Savannah Gilbo: 43:18

And also kind of layering things, Like if you know someone's motivation but the other person has means and opportunity, that's a great thing to combine them. Yeah, totally.

Samantha Skall: 43:26

And round them out. Or people working together that we don't expect are working together. Those are always fun.

Savannah Gilbo: 43:31

Yes, I love that too, so I love all this. I think this is going to be a super helpful episode, and I know you have a very cool resource for listeners, so can you talk about that?

Samantha Skall: 43:40

Yeah, sure. So I came up with kind of 17 ideas for how to ideate your thriller and particularly why your villain would be doing what they're doing. It's a free download, it's fun. Hopefully it'll spark your imagination and think like, ooh, what would happen if this person saw this? I mean, does your protagonist see a dead body, or do they witness a crime, or do they think they witnessed a crime, like rear window or whatever it is? But there's just I just brainstormed and just it's out there free on my website. Love for you to download it and good luck. Thrillers and mysteries are an absolute delight.

Savannah Gilbo: 44:14

They are a delight. They're hard but they're so worth the challenge. You know they are, so we'll link to that freebie on Sam's website. We'll also link to where you can find her on social media and all those good things. But any parting words of wisdom for our listeners.

Samantha Skall: 44:28

Don't compare yourself to mysteries on the shelf and thrillers. I am guilty of this myself sometimes when I'm having a bad day writing. I'm an author too. I get it. It's really hard to have like a very tightly packaged, tightly plotted book that you see that's gone through 17 iterations to your first draft, and so just give yourself some grace, have fun with it, ask what if? And know that we are a avid group of readers over here in the MTS Mystery Solar Suspense community and it will never be enough. So please write your book.

Savannah Gilbo: 45:00

Yeah, please write your book, and I love that message to not compare, because those books definitely don't pop out that way, and don't you wish? We could see it behind the scenes of like how something like the guest list started, or you know, yes.

Samantha Skall: 45:11

My God, what a dream interview that would be yeah.

Savannah Gilbo: 45:13

I would love that too, maybe someday. But yeah, don't compare. And then definitely go grab that freebie from Sam and check out all her resources, and thank you so much for being here today, sam. I think this was such a fun conversation.

Samantha Skall: 45:26

So fun. Thank you so much for having me and to everybody listening, thanks for being here. This is a blast.

Savannah Gilbo: 45:33

So that's it for today's episode. As always, thank you so much for tuning in and for showing your support. If you want to check out any of the links I mentioned in this episode, you can find them in the show notes listed in the description of each episode inside your podcast player or at savannahgilbocom forward slash podcast. If you're an Apple user, I'd really appreciate it if you took a few seconds to leave a rating and a review. Your ratings and reviews tell Apple that this is a podcast that's worth listening to and, in turn, your reviews will help this podcast get in front of more fiction writers just like you. And while you're there, go ahead and hit that follow button, because there's going to be another brand new episode next week, full of actionable tips, tools and strategies to help you become a better writer. So I'll see you next week and until then, happy writing.