"I drew a cross square, lines down representing the characters, lines across representing chapters 1-15. Most of the characters died, in fact only one survived the book, but when I came to the end the graph looked somewhat lopsided, there were too many people dying in the first, fifth and tenth chapters so I had to rewrite it, giving an even dying space throughout. I suppose it sounds cold blooded and calculated, but that's the way I did it."
~ Alistair Maclean's approach to plotting
Where did you find this? I'd love to see more of Maclean's reflections on his own method. AM's thrillers have always been an easy fall-back read nicely on the balance of the formulaic and the original - rather like Cornwall's first 10 Sharpe books. I've felt for some time that there's a real missed opportunity in not using an author's own structural plotting as a critical lens, since most series and thriller writers talk about their 'method' somewhere. And the cold blood of planning deaths and demises is crucial! Dahl has some good lines about how he planned the shocks in his short stories somewhere I should dig out.
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