Spies Look At Things Differently

My favorite thing about good writers that I study over and over is their wonderful talent in twisting the truth. Take Tom Stoppard's play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, for instance. R and G are two minor characters in Shakespeare's Hamlet and Stoppard made them his heroes and told the story of Hamlet through their eyes/POV.

That's a cool twist--but the coolest Stoppard move was to make their POV very tragi-absurd because the two poor characters never quite got what was happening, even till the moment of their deaths. Yet the retelling of the old Hamlet tragedy remained refreshing for me because Stoppard never stopped twisting the story.

A recent play I saw in New York City has such a fabulous and clever twist. It's WICKED, a Broadway play based on a book (which I plan to read). If you want to see what a good writer can do to a storyline in the most delicious way, check out this play when it comes to your city. I'm not sure whether the book is the same (it looks darker in tone when I read the back blurb).

Wicked tells the Wizard of Oz story from the two witches' POV. The bonus is the backstory, just before Dorothy's momentous drop into their world. I cannot recommend this show enough! I'm now firmly in the wicked witch's corner, by the way! ;-)

So that's what I love to do when I write too--look for that minor character who will give me that magical twist to an old storyline. Maybe you've seen it in Facing Fear's Harden ;-). Or, maybe not. Spies shouldn't tell too much.

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