Losing the Core

A twisty, tortuous plot can provide a great amount of delight. The unexpected surprise, the sudden trapdoor, the unseen complication, the trail back into the past: all of these devices make a novel fun to read. If you like to create puzzles, you’ll likely attract a crowd of puzzle solvers.

As the plot is constructed, you usually find that branches keep being created. You start with the protagonist—call him Len—and maybe a friend, Kara, and they enter a spider’s web with the intention of finding the center. Pretty soon Len reveals his ties to a past acquaintance, and in order to explain why that past event is significant, branches are created to other characters related to the acquaintance. Kara might be kidnapped by a person she thought was good, and that two-faced Janus reveals an organization related to him, creating more branches in order to explain why it’s so hard for Kara to find out who’s behind the organization.

Story is unfolding from story in layers. Quickie bios are being created to differentiate characters. Logical plot skeins are thrown out in order to link up the different pieces of the web. Do you see what is happening? In order to make the branches matter, you need to keep elaborating on them. Pretty soon the book may be featuring scenes starring a cohort of Kara’s Janus character—and Kara is left twiddling her thumbs. That’s not to mention Len, who has basically dropped out of the proceedings altogether. Now your editor is going to raise a question: do you really think the reader will give a damn what happens to Janus’s cohort?

A successful twisty novel does not stray too far from a central principal. You’ll note the spelling, because I mean a character, not an abstract quality. Who, exactly, is being surprised by twists? Dismayed by untoward events? It had better be someone that matters to us. 

If it helps, think of the issue this way. If an building is burning, you’ll feel differently if a friend of yours has an apartment there as opposed to someone you barely know. You have a connection to the friend. You might have been in the apartment, and you know what is being destroyed. The same idea holds with a book. Keep referring the events back to characters we have grown to know well. In the end, the spider’s web will not spin forever outward, but fill out a plot that has formed a circle.

Exercise: Creating layers is fine, but if you pay attention, a lot of the information you need to impart can be told to one of a core cast of maybe five characters. In particular, keep track of your protagonist as the book develops. If he is no longer performing vital action, we’ll start losing interest in him. That means your reader has been left emotionally adrift.

“I am a bear and want to remain a bear in my den.’’ —Gustave Flaubert

Copyright @ 2026, John Paine