(This post originally appeared in the California Writers Club Bulletin, Spring 2023.
In May, I presented “When Plots Collide — Create Suspenseful Page-Turners by Weaving Multiple Storylines” to the San Joaquin Writers, for the first time since my first time, back in 2017, and it went swimmingly enough I thought I’d write about it for the Bulletin.
Writing formulas are tricky — I find many of them useful, but if you stick to them too rigorously, you end up sounding, well, formulaic.
That said, almost all good stories have formulas and the trick is to write them so they seem fresh, even if the plots are ones we’ve seen before.
You’ve all seen colliding plots in action — it’s a formula used extensively on crime shows, like “Law and Order.” The book or the TV show starts with a couple of unrelated stories, but you know they’re going to bump into each other. Other shows that come to mind: “House of Cards,” “Downton Abbey,” “Breaking Bad.”
The trick is to use the formula so each story impacts the others and amps up the suspense. I’ll be mapping out the plot of Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s brilliant 1987 novel about New York City, to demonstrate.
(You don’t have to have read the book, but I highly recommend it.)
The protagonist of Bonfire is Sherman McCoy, a white, late-thirties bond trader who makes a million dollars a year, but is hemorrhaging money — on his Park Avenue coop, his wife’s extravagant decorating, his daughter’s private school, his Mercedes. The story kicks into high gear when he drives his Mercedes to JFK to pick up his mistress and on the way home they get lost in the Bronx. When he gets out of his car to move a tire in the road, he sees two young black kids approaching. They seem menacing. One asks, “Yo, need some help?” Assuming they’re predators, he throws the tire at them, jumps in the car — his mistress has taken the wheel — and as she fishtails away, Sherman hears a thunk. They escape.
Sherman is distressed. Did they hit one of the boys? Is he hurt? He searches the news reports, wonders if he should go to the police. He screws up one of his bond deals because he’s so distracted.
While Sherman stews, the book switches focus to other characters, starting with Reverend Reginald Bacon, a black minister who received $350,000 from a church to build a daycare center, but the money’s gone, nothing’s been built, and he’s in trouble.
Enter Annie Lamb, mother of the boy hit by Sherman’s Mercedes in the Bronx. Her son Henry is in intensive care, in a coma. Annie goes to Reverend Bacon for help, and he sees an opportunity to challenge the justice system for always putting people of color behind bars. How about this Mercedes driver who was white? The boy got a partial read on the license plate.
Then we jump to the district attorney’s office, where Abe Weiss, white and Jewish, is facing re-election in a primarily black and Latino borough, and there’s nothing that would help him more than what he calls “the great white hope” — a high-profile case with a white defendant. We follow Larry Kramer, a mid-level DA, who starts tracking down the Mercedes involved in the hit-and-run. He’s got a crush on a woman on one of his juries, a woman with brown lipstick, and he wants to make a name for himself.
But there’s more — a drunk, broke has-been British reporter, Peter Fallows, whose main goal is to figure out who he can cadge drinks and dinner from at his favorite watering holes. He interviews Annie Lamb, mother of the hit-and-run victim, for a front-page story in City Light.
When Sherman reads that story, he learns there are 500 Mercedes in the New York City area with license plates that start with RF and that the DA is going to investigate them all.
Finally the police visit Sherman, ask to see his car, and he falls apart. The police “know” it’s him. When the DA finds a witness to the hit-and-run to ID Sherman, he’s arrested.
What I love about these colliding plots is how an action in one story causes an action in another. We see Peter Fallows find his journalistic footing and redeem himself with solid reporting and writing. That’s his story. At the same time, his actions tighten the vice around Sherman.
Peter Fallows, Reverend Bacon, and Larry Kramer have their own hungers and hurdles — they don’t care about Sherman per se, they don’t even know who he is — but the more success they achieve chasing their goals, the more trouble they cause for Sherman. So even though Sherman is not a likable character, I found myself sympathizing with his plight.
There’s an old storytelling adage that you should chase your protagonist up a tree and then throw rocks at him. Keep the trouble coming, and your readers will keep turning the pages. The crux of this plot-colliding formula is that you’re throwing rocks at the protagonist even when he or she is not on the page. It’s as if your protagonist has a musical theme, and during those times when you’re following the other characters’ stories, you’d hear a faint refrain of that riff.
You can see more slides and a handout at johnbyrnebarry.com/when-plots-collide.
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