twist in the tales

sadhuji

Twists and turns make life enjoyable – let your imagination run wild and you will be astounded at the number of twists and turns that you can conjure up. Just to think about them makes one feel so much younger – TV soap producers obsessed with the 11th letter of the alphabet (‘K’ to the uninitiated!) will pale into insignificance. It is these minor strokes of the masters that make you want more and more – exactly on the dot, they leave you stranded in the middle of nowhere and you are kept on tenterhooks to foretell the outcome mentally and then wait for the next episode to be aired to compare – that way you discover how far away from the target you really are! If you expected the villain to be shot dead, you find that the villain is, in fact, no villain at all - he is an honest person who has taken the disguise of a villain to fool Lady Macbeth.

In college, when we studied the mystery of how to excel in the art of writing short stories that hold the reader spellbound, we were taught that the ending (or the dénouement, as it is better known as) must be as close to the climax as possible. In other words, lead the unsuspecting reader up the garden path and, when he expects to walk into the embrace of beautiful flowers, throw him into the thorns!

A twist in the tale is the magic potion that makes writers of crime and thriller stories rake in the moolah – the finger of suspicion keeps pointing to different characters and the reader is totally confused. That is when the imagination of the creator comes into play. The creator keeps introducing twists in the tale and the reader just cannot keep the book aside. The survival of such authors depends on their ability to weave the simplest of situations into the most complex of webs from which readers cannot extricate themselves.

Oliver Twist was an exception but the days of Fagin and Oliver are not figments of the imagination – we still have any number of Fagins in our midst who exploit the Olivers. Arm twisting tactics of the Fagins are as old as tongue twisters – remember masterpieces like ‘Shelly sells sea shells on the sea shore?’

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mooning over a moon journey