This last week, I listened to the audiobook of Lisa Jewell’s NONE OF THIS IS TRUE. It’s a psychological thriller with one of those fun formats where it’s told in a combination of straightforward narrative, podcast blips, news clips, and other media bites. The book’s first half revolves around one character telling the other the (increasingly horrific) story of her life up until they meet. Given the title, one has to assume that all or part of this story is bullshit.
What follows in the second half of the novel is a series of twists, as one would expect from both the title and the genre — most thrillers are really just high-drama, frequently violent mysteries. The thing about this particular book, though, is that the twists don’t stop, not until the final pages (or moments) of the story unfold. The narrative is so unreliable that you can’t really be sure whodunnit until the book is completely over. Each satisfying explanation is undermined, and in the case of NONE OF THIS IS TRUE, it happens maybe one too many times.
It makes me think about this piece about suspense in literature, written by Kathryn Schulz and published a couple of weeks ago. In it, she writes:
“The secret to succeeding at suspense is to keep readers interested despite keeping them on ice. That’s why the most important part of a bomb, from a literary or cinematic perspective, is the timer. Counting from one to ten is boring, because what happens next is eleven. But counting from ten to one is gripping, because what happens next is: boom!”
You learn pretty early on, both in the narrative and from the name of the book, that the story you’re hearing isn’t entirely true. But, because it’s a relatively convincing story, you can’t tell exactly which parts are fabricated, or how. That alone, as Schulz explains, makes for a pretty pleasurable reading experience, assuming you’re into psychological thrillers in the first place. This makes me ask the question, then: when are twists too much for the story? Or, put another way: at one point does the pursuit of jaw-dropping twists detract from the reader’s ability to suspend their disbelief?
My knee-jerk reaction is to posit we’re desensitized to shocks. Who among us could repeat the satisfactory twists of Gillian Flynn novels, for example? Did GONE GIRL ruin me? Did SHARP OBJECTS set the bar too high, in terms of stories unraveling and villains being revealed in a story’s final act?
My secondary reaction, though, is that writers are under a lot of pressure to up the stakes in their stories to untenably tense levels. (I say this having received criticism that some of my fiction lacks in stakes! I get it!) If you’ve received that criticism, or if, say, you’re trying to write some sort of thriller in a post-Flynn publishing universe and you’re trying to convince publishers/agents/magazines to take on your work, you’re probably going to feel pressure to make your plot twists as off the wall as humanly possible. Beyond humanly possible, even. You’re going to want readers sharing your work with that “holy shit, the ending!” stamp of approval. So, when does this go too far?
It’s difficult, I know, especially if you’re not an outliner or your idea hasn’t come to you fully formed, to know for sure how your story is going to come together. It’s harder, I think, when you feel like the only way to stick the landing is to shock your readers, or worse, trick them into shock. And it’s that bit, the latter bit, that I feel like I’m seeing a lot of lately. In workshop terms, we might call it an unearned ending.
When I shared on Instagram that I finished listening to NONE OF THIS IS TRUE, two friends reached out to me to discuss the ending. They both had the same reaction I did: maybe that was a bit too much?
As both a reader and a writer, I know how much of a bummer an underwhelming ending/twist can be, and I am not writing this under the supposition that there’s an easy way to solve these narrative problems. But, what I do think, is that as a reader I’m less interested in being shocked than I am in seeing all of the pieces come together. As Schulz wrote, “in books and movies, we do not necessarily care if the outcome for which we have been waiting is good or bad—our primary concern is that it resolves the feeling of suspense in a satisfying way.”
I wonder if the Publishing Machine has forgotten this. When a really shocking twist is pulled off well, readers will love it; but I don’t think the twist needs to always be bananas shocking in order for people to want to read and share a book/story. Speaking as a reader, I want to feel like I’m in the hands of a masterful storyteller. Someone is taking hostage of my brain while I read, and I want that person to know what they’re doing — to have a plan. When things get too over the top in a story’s final moments, that sense of mastery wanes, and I start to wonder if that story was worth so much of my time in the first place. I’d rather opt for a jigsaw puzzle: the picture’s on the box, but it’s the coming together that gives you the serotonin boost in the end.
In other news, here’s a short piece of fiction from TV Spring, written by Sarp Sozdinler.
I’m still slogging through submissions for summer. The essays take a lot of time!
xoxo
Monica
By Sarp Sozdinler
The day my eldest cousin cast a spell on me I was sucking on the icy remains of my Diet Coke until my tongue went cold and completely numb. She started accusing me of being a limp-dicked prick, of gobbling down her last onion ring without asking first—a crime to which I still plead not guilty. However much I tried to convince her otherwise, she refused to accept that it was in fact Cricket, our family labrador, who swiped the last bite of her three-storied caramel swirl with a nimble twirl of the tongue when my cousin was not looking. Instead, my cousin started mumbling some foreign words at me, words that I failed to understand but could tell by the way she was looking at me were nothing short of ill-intentioned. The day after, I started noticing some valuable pieces of our household going strangely missing or getting damaged to an unsalvageable degree one after the other. First, it was my father’s World Cup 1998 Luis Figo collector’s card mysteriously torn into two by a phantom perpetrator, then the electric shortage pausing an 8-bit Tsubasa figure mid-bicycle kick on my Atari. My Pokemons could somehow never fulfill their destiny, their evolution stagnated to the point of dwarfism. Even my Tamagotchi stopped eating her food shortly after, until she gave her last breath and left me all alone one Christmas evening. These days, I admit to taking pleasure in watching my cousin serve the third year of her twenty-eight-year sentence somewhere uptown, one hundred and thirty miles from home. With no possibility for parole. One garden hour a day, in state prison. Every night, before going to sleep, I fantasize about writing her a letter, one that would read something along the lines of: Look who’s won now, motherfucker? But then every day, shortly after I wake up, I find another part of me gone missing, something deep and hollow, reminding me of the curse I couldn’t dispel even after all these years. Reminding me of those lifeless images of the man my cousin had cut open with a breadknife, obviously under the influence of some heavy narcotics. So, like, good-fucking-luck fucking around with a kid half your age, queen. Good luck with everything karmic you now have to deal with. Thanks for absolutely nothing.
Sarp Sozdinler’s short fiction has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, DIAGRAM, Normal School, American Literary Review, among other places. Some of his pieces have been selected or nominated for anthologies (Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Wigleaf Top 50), and awarded as a finalist at various literary contests, including the 2022 Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction Award. He’s currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.