How to Write a Twist

Can effects cause themselves?

“The atheists,” Kelly said to me, the doppler-shifting sound of passing traffic telling me how fast he was driving, even though my eyes were closed. “In your stories. They’re all wrong.”

“How do you know?”

“The atheists don’t believe they’ve been created by a higher power. But they were. By you.”

“Yeah, but that’s just made up. I imagined them.”

“So?”

“So they’re not real.”

“Would they agree with you?”

“Of course not! But it doesn’t matter, because—”

“Then I guess it wouldn’t matter if I said you, me, and everyone around us in this world isn’t real.”

“N—what?”

“We’re not real, according to your definition of reality.”

“I feel pretty real,” I said, affecting more easy confidence than I felt.

“So do your characters, I imagine.”

“So you’re saying I’m no more real than the characters I write?”

“No, you are. If you’ve ever written any characters who are writers, the characters they write will be less real than themselves, and on down the line. I’m saying you are less real than the person who created you.”

“Who is…?”

“You haven’t guessed? Another writer.”

“How do you know this?”

“The author wanted me to know. I’m a plot device.”

“A plot device? Then what am I?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t told everything. But when we find the Director, you’ll have to believe everything I’ve told you if you want to beat him.”

It was a memory I had chosen to forget until now, and in recollecting it, I held the Director, even for a moment, in a state of utter disbelief.

“Knowledge isn’t always power,” I said, gesturing to the books around me. “Sometimes knowledge is a trap. You and I are merely characters in someone else’s story. And that someone is standing right behind you.”

The Director instinctively looked over his shoulder. No one there. “Hmm. Made me look.”

I dove out of his sight, lest he grow weary of our discussion and quantum tunnel all of my air away again. “Ah, but he’s only there when you’re not looking,” I said, scurrying in between the stacks like a rat in a maze.

“Why?” The Director’s voice carried through the library as if through a speaker system. The Director perhaps couldn’t see me directly, but I was only ever a step ahead of him.

I shrugged, then fireman-slid down to a lower level on an iron ladder. “Because it would ruin the story if all the characters could see him.”

“You’re trying to throw me off. Chucking unfalsifiable statements at me.”

“Says the guy who bends reality based on the principle that unobserved particles aren’t physically real. I didn’t believe it either, at first. But you already know that, now that I’ve granted you access to a new section in your library of stories. How do you suppose I did that, Director? I’m not a physicist.”

“No, you’re a writer.”

“Which means what you see as quantum indeterminacy, I see as a story whose ending hasn’t been decided yet.” I came to an expansive chamber, looked both ways, and sprinted across the open space to the thicket of shelves on the other side.

“Ah, the illusion of choice.” It seemed the Director lurked somewhere to my left now. “If you’re right, if we really are just characters in a story, then our fates were already sealed by a writer in an office chair.”

Gravity suddenly shifted under my feet, and I found myself sliding backwards toward the open reading area.

“Either way, I clearly have causal primacy. It seems your writer has willed your oblivion.” The wall opposite me folded over like a closing book, threatening to crush me.

“Maybe,” I said, bracing my feet to keep from falling into the juncture of the rapidly collapsing V. I had to think. I had to think like a writer. If I could take something out of this story, maybe I could add something to it… “I’m not sure if he’s willed anything yet,” I panted to the empty air.

“What makes you say that?” A voice echoed from far away down the chamber.

“Because I have it on good authority,” I said, “that he’s changed his mind before.” I closed my eyes, felt gravity return to a more sensible orientation, and opened them again.

Before me, in front of two massive wooden doors towering to the stone ceiling a hundred feet above, stood the Director. And behind him, bound and gagged, knelt Kelly. I’d written myself into the climax.