Tag: plot

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Bond in a Bind

NB: This entry explores plot points from the end of the James Bond film No Time to Die. If you'd rather not know, it's best to skip this entry.

As authors, I’m sure we’ve all written ourselves into a corner at some point.

I faced this problem a few years ago after I published what was intended be a one-part story on a writers’ website. There was an enthusiastic reaction from readers, so I felt compelled to write more chapters, but the characters were all scheduled to leave school and I couldn’t realistically take them all to the same college.

Fortunately, it was an ensemble cast, allowing me to pick a few main characters and introduce others, and the story went on to comprise 25 chapters altogether.

But what if you know millions of people are waiting for you to solve a plot problem? It’s been reported over the last few weeks that the writers of the James Bond franchise have a hit just such a stumbling block.

In all the stories from Dr. No to Spectre, our hero has been forced into some difficult corners, then has ultimately escaped in one piece. But at the end of No Time to Die from 2021, Bond is killed in a missile strike, so the question is how to bring his character into a new screenplay.

If there had been any ambiguity surrounding his death, this problem might already be solved, fudged, or even circumvented altogether. Fans, by contrast, clearly saw what happened in that film and won’t accept being told otherwise.

It’s worth noting here that most of the Bond films from the last 60 years were made by Eon Productions Limited before creative control passed to Amazon MGM Studios in February 2025. I’m conjecturing, but perhaps the former owners knew a sale was in the pipeline and deliberately deployed the fatal storyline with the intention of delaying or stopping future development. This would effectively end the James Bond series on a natural break.

And yet there’s a definite thirst from filmgoers to keep the franchise alive. While it might be difficult to see a way forward at the moment, there are a few options the new writers might consider. Here are a few, starting with the one I believe is least likely.

Write off the previous film as a dream

Because it’s been discussed and parodied so much, it’s not a spoiler to mention that in 1986, the 10th season of Dallas effectively wrote off the ninth season as a dream. While that show was a little over-the-top, as is the Bond franchise in its own way, I’m confident the new writers won’t lower themselves to this ridiculous premise.

Ignore the plot point

Many sitcoms and dramas reset the story each episode, knowing that TV channels sometimes air them out of order. There may be plot points that develop over the season, but these are unlikely to be necessary for understanding the plot of individual episodes.

The key here is that each new conflict tends to be resolved by the time the final credits roll, leaving the characters are in much the same position as where they started.

As such, the death of a main character may be too large of an issue to ignore, so I find it unlikely this will be the approach taken.

Reboot the series

Over the last two to three decades, there has been a trend to give series a reboot, borrowing a term from computing jargon.

We know another actor – yet to be announced – will take over from Daniel Craig. Also, rebooting isn’t unknown to the Bond franchise, with GoldenEye (1995) and Casino Royale (2006) forming fresh starts.

Perhaps this is the perfect time for a third such reboot, ushering in a much younger main character and having him go through the process of learning the ropes.

Show the succession of the identity

Since Bond works for MI6, audiences expect secrets to surface. To my mind, writers can use that to their advantage.

Supposing the code ‘007’ and the name ‘James Bond’ aren’t personal identities at all, but titles passed to each new agent. When one agent is lost, another steps into the role. The concept could easily conveyed through dialogue in an early scene. Besides, fans are already used to actors changing over time, so this wouldn’t feel too jarring.

In my view, the final resolution will be along these lines, while keeping within the established universe and canon.

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Writing Yourself Out of a Corner

If you were a fan of Friends back in 1998, you’ll remember the hype and speculation around what would happen during Ross and Emily’s wedding.

Coming at the end of Season 4, this had to be a climactic scene. These days, it’s hardly a spoiler to mention that Ross accidentally says Rachel’s name, which feeds into the entirety of Season 5. However, I’ve only learnt in the last week that the writers struggled to think of a proper ending until the actor who played Ross – David Schwimmer – accidentally switched the names during another scene.

This serves as a good example of how even professional writers are rarely bestowed with fully-formed ideas. A story often needs to be written out and figured out along the way, and that process can take years.

Larry Cohen pitched the idea for the film Phone Booth to Alfred Hitchcock in the 1960s, but neither of them could think of a reason to keep the main character in the booth. By the late 1990s, the public was becoming increasingly vigilant to the threat of terrorism, and Cohen played into that as he realised a sniper with a weapon could be a good reason. It was even a plot point that the main character was one of the few people still using a payphone by that point.

I even have a few examples of my own. One particular example was a three-line fragment of poetry I wrote at school before I ever routinely wrote poetry. In 2013, more than ten years after I left school, I finally found a way to work it into a fuller piece. It gained a sequel in 2018, taking a very different tone from the original, chiefly in recognition of how I’d changed in those five years.

But even professional writers miss the mark sometimes. The final episode of The Prisoner was broadcast in 1968. Although its writer Patrick McGoohan was pleased with the result, he was under pressure to deliver it quickly and many viewers were unhappy that it raised more questions than it answered.

And we must mention the ninth season of Dallas, which was entirely written off as a dream to bring back the character of Bobby Ewing.

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Where to Start?

I’m attempting to write the 22nd instalment of a short story series. It was supposed to be a one-off piece, so to reach this point is a tremendous achievement. But because of the existing body of work, this plot in this part has to be consistent with the rest. It therefore needs to include two particular elements:

  • A small piece of wrap-up from the previous story.
  • A scene where one of the characters makes amends with the rest of the group.

The trouble is that these elements need quite a bit of explanation. They’re slowing down the plot, even when I start in the middle of the action and refer back to them. At this stage, I might have to take the story in a different direction, as long as it fits with what’s gone before.

The good part is that there’s no particular deadline for this piece of work. It’s for a private group and I’m under no obligation to write anything. In this case, however, a deadline might be useful to focus my thoughts. Maybe I can impose one on myself and come up with a workable solution.

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A Last-Minute Change of Plans

In the first few minutes of the film Sliding Doors, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, the narrative branches off in two directions. This creates two separate realities.

In one of these, Helen Quilley catches her underground train and arrives home to find her partner cheating on her. In the other, she misses the train, giving enough time for the mistress to leave before she arrives. The rest of the film alternates between the two realities and explores how that starting point leads to two different outcomes.

The Sliding Doors screenplay is a great example of how a character’s last-minute change of plan – intentional or otherwise – can play a pivotal role in the plot. However, it’s unusual that the audience can compare and contrast both outcomes.

Another film that relies on chance is Titanic, starring Kate Winslet as Rose Calvert and Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson. In the story, Dawson wanted to return to America, and was only on board because he won tickets in a game of cards and managed to arrive in time.

As an audience, we’re left to assume that if he’d been unable to board, he would have tried to find another way to travel, and that Rose would be with her intended fiancé as the ship sank. Without them meeting, the plot would be substantially less exciting.

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And Yet the Pencil Moves

Four weeks ago, I mentioned that I’d been rewriting a novel I started in 2011. I’m pleased to report that I’ve had enough momentum to keep going until now.

I’m following a chapter-by-chapter breakdown with the key points and word counts. In my experience, planning is never a waste of time, even if the plan is eventually amended or abandoned. Indeed, I don’t know of any major novelist who doesn’t plan to some degree.

English: Signature of Charles Scrivener
English: Signature of Charles Scrivener (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In this case, the plot has been amended substantially, but I believe it’s for the better. In the first few drafts, the main character achieved his goals too easily, whereas now there are a number of obstacles in his way. My favourite tight corner so far is where he catches a taxi to pick up millions of pounds, but doesn’t have enough immediate cash to pay the fare.

Like many of my drafts, this one is written in pencil into a notebook; even my plan is written on the back of scrap paper. I find this method more satisfying than typing it. When it is finally entered into Scrivener, I’ll edit it, so that becomes the next draft.

Writing a novel is a time-consuming process, and even more so are the rewrites to produce a tighter story, but it can be a rewarding endeavour.

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A Structured Story

I’ve written several novels, all of which remain unfinished and unpublished. In 2011, I drafted my second one, about a man who takes part in a challenge to win millions of pounds. Since then, I’ve periodically revisited the manuscript, but it never quite shaped it into a form I like.

The most recent attempt was over the bank holiday weekend. I sat down and fitted the key events into a structure that resembles a Hollywood screenplay. There are five major turning points that occur at set intervals during the narrative.

Hollywood Sign
Hollywood Sign (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On the face of it, this sounds rather restricting, but for the first time in a long while, I’m actually excited about the project.

One stumbling block was a scene where the main character is taken to another country and left to find his way back to the UK. Having the structure to follow helped transform this rather long and dull trek into a series of shorter journeys, each part ending in a cliffhanger and raising the stakes a little higher.

Every so often, you’ll hear a novel or a film described as ‘formulaic’. This is usually caused by the writer making the structure too obvious. The turning points ought to be invisible to the casual reader or viewer, but they will be there, shaping the story into a form that audiences subconsciously expect.

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Further To…

As National Novel Writing Month draws to a close, I thought I might have run out of steam by now.

English: NWP teachers at work.
English: NWP teachers at work. This photo has little relation to the entry; I just like the guy’s hat. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On the contrary, I hit a turning point in my novel on Saturday, a remarkable 25 days into the contest. I now have a new structure that I’m pleased with, and I’m more excited than ever to commit it to paper. The downside is that the new structure incorporates little of the material I’ve already written, so what I have now is effectively a 40,000-word collection of character sketches.

It therefore looks like I’ll be continuing this project during December as I don’t want to let the momentum trail off.

What I actually planned to do in December was to turn a certain public-domain novel into a screenplay; as far as I can tell, nobody has done it before with this book. It’s waited more than one-and-a-third centuries, though, so a few more months of delay won’t make much difference.

Finally, you might remember I made an entry regarding my experience of understanding the Scots and Dundee dialects; it was called Fluent in 1½ Languages. Since then, some brainbox at the University of Abertay has shown that understanding the Dundee dialect is as good as knowing a second language.

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An Abundance of Apples (Part 5 of 5).

For the five Mondays in June, I’ve been taking a break from my usual subject to make one of my stories available free online. We’re now up to the final part of An Abundance of Apples.

In part one and part two, we meet an orchard owner who starts to trade items in alphabetical order. In part three and part four, he keeps moving up the alphabet. Can he still reach Z?

West Hollywood Hotel

Naturally, a lot of my e-mails were coming from the US, and one in particular caught my attention: a four-night stay at the West Hollywood Hotel in return for the Beetle.

We spent evenings on the phone negotiating delivery of the car. We’d read up thoroughly on international deliveries since the Australia incident and we had arranged to pack it off, when by chance, Kelly spotted a news article.

A group of criminals had been passing themselves off as representing prestigious hotel chains and airlines, and they would take payment for stays and flights that never happened.

We’d been so swept up in trying to find a swap that we’d failed even to check their quoted phone number against the one listed on the real hotel’s website.

We felt like prize idiots. I made an online post to that effect.

My parents talked to me like I was five years old and told me this was a wake-up call, that I’d had a good run and I needed to stop now. Kelly had supported me unwaveringly so far, but even she started to express her doubts. I remained as determined as ever to see this through to Z.

Only Daniel didn’t care one way or the other. He’d forgotten his football obsession thanks to his new girlfriend, some little brat from his class.

While the flood of messages had slowed sharply, I still had a number of contacts willing to swap. I learned my lesson and no longer considered foreign offers but I found someone who wanted to swap my Volkswagen.

Wurlitzer Organ

We only played it for five minutes before the sound really started to grate.

Xylophone

Jeez, do you know how much a new xylophone costs?

I thought a few hundred at most, but even a second hand one can go for over a grand. I know this because the instrument dealer who inspected the Wurlitzer through thick glasses talked me through the entire history of the organ and current market values.

Yngling

“Yngling? That’s not even a word,” exclaimed Kelly. “Don’t you mean yacht?”

“It’s not a yacht,” snapped the outdoorsy type as he unstrapped the thing from the trailer. “a yacht is a completely different class of boat. This beauty competed in the Beijing Olympics, you know.”

“All right,” I concluded. “Leave it here. I’m sure we’ll get it swapped somehow.”

“You mean leave her here?”

I made a You & We post that night, asking if anyone could swap us for something beginning with Z. One more push, just one more, and I would have completed the alphabet. We waited a whole week for something suitable.

Zurich holiday

A local travel firm called Sea the World came to our rescue, offering a holiday for two to Zurich. We checked it out, and it was genuine enough. They wouldn’t take the Yngling off my hands, but their staff had been following my swaps, and I was prepared to treat it as one.

With no further swaps scheduled, only one question remained: who would use it? Daniel and his bratty other half threw a strop when they found out they weren’t getting it. Mum and Dad hadn’t taken a holiday for years, yet wouldn’t consider it. I asked Kelly but she’d used up her annual leave until after the voucher’s expiry date.

I turned to You & We. I wrote a summary of how this whole project had started with a few apples, then blackberries, then carrots, and so on, and now we were stuck at stalemate with our Z.

I received an urgent reply from the dealer who had tried to swap me for the iPhone. He told me to come down to his shop at the double, and he would, “complete the circle.”

He looked at the value of the voucher, ran some figures through a calculator and I arrived home with my final swap.

Apples

Last year, we ended up with too many apples. This year, we ended up with two Apple iPads.

<<<>>>

The usual angst and introspection returns next week.

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An Abundance of Apples (Part 4 of 5).

For the five Mondays in June, I’m taking a break from my usual analysis to make one of my stories available free online. We’re now up to part four of An Abundance of Apples.

In part one, we meet an orchard owner who trades apples for other items, each one letter higher in the alphabet than the last. Part two sees him trade four more items beginning with F, G, H and I, while in part three, he trades a jigsaw. Now he has a power supply unit. Who will take it, and in exchange for what?

Qantas air tickets

“Well, mate,” said one of the DJs, “if you send us your power unit we’ll send you two hundred dollars’ worth of Quantas air tickets. What do you say to that?”
I had no idea what that equated to in pounds, but I stutteringly agreed. When our exchange ended, I checked the postal rates to the other side of the world.
You don’t expect the police to come and question you when you don’t know you’ve done something wrong, but I sharply learnt that it’s against the law to send certain types of battery though the post.

I told them that the Post Office assistant asked me what the package contained, wrote it on the Customs label, then sent it, no further questions asked. Fortunately, I’d kept the proof of postage and the receipt because the radio station promised to reimburse me for the cost of sending it.

The police accepted I’d posted it in good faith and returned the unit to me, but warned me, “Don’t do that again, son.”
I immediately informed the radio station. They arranged for me to go on air the following morning, when the DJ apologised for not realising the legal implications, and agreed to give me the Quantas tickets–actually a discount code to be used on their website–on condition that I gave the power supply to someone, “deserving.” I found a charity shop that accepted electrical goods, and the station sent me the code.

The publicity had generated dozens upon dozens of e-mails. Naturally, most of them originated from Down Under, but a few arrived from Britain and the rest of the world. I had my pick of the next item.

Rum

Kelly and I looked down the list of offers: a rowing boat, tickets to Riverdance, roast beef dinners for a year, even a rabbit hutch and occupant. But the case of vintage rum caught my attention.
I found out that 200 Australian dollars is about £118, and its value exceeded that of the Qantas tickets. Also, I reckoned it would be an easy thing to swap.
About the same time, I received an invitation to appear on the late-night Jerry Jakobson Show in New York. Not via video link; they wanted to fly me over there. They had a intriguing proposition for me. Naturally, I discussed it with my family before making any decisions.

It caused an argument. Mum encouraged me to go, while Dad said he needed me in the orchard. Daniel, meanwhile, went into another huff as he wasn’t going. Kelly gave me a shopping list of designer labels to buy in New York.

I went.

I had a hairy moment at Customs, when they kept me waiting to check it was all right to bring the case of rum into the country. Those two hours gave me the chance to contemplate how many people would be watching me. I got the jitters speaking to half a million Australians; the prospect of speaking to 4.2 million Americans made me want to step on a flight home.

Jerry helped me feel at ease off-air, then interviewed me on air for five minutes about the project, before pulling out the envelopes and explaining his proposition.

“We’re going to swap you for something beginning with S. One of these envelopes gets you a bespoke suit courtesy of one of New York’s finest tailors. A pretty good prize, huh? But one of them contains a subway ticket and the other one wins you a steak sandwich. I’m going to get a member of our audience to mix them up.”

I tried to keep my calm. A suit, a subway ticket, or a sandwich. Jerry held them out in front of me. “All right, buddy. Your choice.”

Suit

A camp man with a tape measure took every one of my measurements over the course of a morning, while a camera crew captured his comments, around the general theme of, “fabulous.”

Jerry had opened the other envelopes on camera. I genuinely could have walked away with a subway ticket. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to have another Dolce & Gabbana suit again, and it disappointed me that I’d eventually have to swap it.

But I’d officially gone stratospheric. I threw myself into my orchard work by day, but Kelly became my unofficial agent by night, ruthlessly sifting through my scores and scores of e-mails.

Listening to the TV one night, I found my story had even made it into a sketch show.

You can’t hurry quality tailoring. I waited weeks for it to be delivered, but I had enough time to arrange not just the next swap but to plan for the next three exchanges.

Thunderbird

Stage one involved the wealthy-looking man, who got back to me with a classic Ford Thunderbird.

Underground carriage

When Transport For London said they would give me an old Underground train carriage, I asked how I would take it home with me.

But the deal they had in mind for stage two wouldn’t involve it physically moving. If I could take the car to their depot, they would swap me for the paperwork to the carriage. I would then give that back to the Thunderbird owner.

Volkswagen Beetle

At stage three, I swapped the Underground paperwork for a Volkswagen Beetle.

I tried asking him some friendly but probing questions about how he could swap the Grand Prix programme, the film stills, and now two cars, all so casually. But he wouldn’t say anything, other than they were both rusting and needed a lot of work.

 

Next week: West Hollywood Hotel.

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An Abundance of Apples (Part 3 of 5).

For the five Mondays in June, I’m taking a break from my own angst and introspection to make one of my stories available free online. We’re now up to part three of An Abundance of Apples.

In part one, we meet an orchard owner who starts off with too many apples, and begins to trade them for other items, each one letter higher in the alphabet than the last. Part two sees him trade four more items beginning with F, G, H and I, while his bratty younger brother constantly stands in his way. In part three, below, he’s now in possession of a jigsaw.

Jigsaw

The publicity generated by the paper showed little sign of slowing down, so in quick succession, I received a jigsaw from another well-wisher.

Not a jigsaw puzzle, an actual saw that’s used to cut the pieces.

King Kong stills

The wealthy-looking man who offered me the Grand Prix programme wrote back, offering to swap the jigsaw for some rare stills from the classic film King Kong.

I decided to start photographing the items, starting with the saw, as they were becoming more interesting.

Around the same time, a woman called Kelly, around my age, requested to be mutual friends on You & We. We had three people in common and I recognised her face, although I couldn’t remember where I’d last seen it.

Laserdisc player and discs

The things people keep in their attic. Someone swapped me the King Kong stills for an obsolete laserdisc player and four Jean-Claude Van Damme films on discs the size of bicycle wheels. What’s more, it still worked, and we spent the evening watching Universal Soldier.

For the first time since being in the paper, I had a little trouble finding a trade. My inbox still filled up daily, but only with offers of cheap items, including a map, a family bag of M&Ms, and half-a-dozen marbles.

Mink coat

I finally traded my retro technology for a mink coat. A fake one, of course.

I stood back and took stock. I’d come so far in less than a month, and all after an off-the-cuff observation. All my life, I’d been a trader in one sense or another, and I still saw it as an achievable challenge.

The national British newspapers ignored me, except one rag who reported that Margaret Jeffrey had given me the idea. Then I received an e-mail from a researcher at an Australian radio station asking me to contact them. They wanted to speak to me live on air when I reached the letter P.

Necklace

Just as I celebrated reaching the halfway mark, the mysterious Kelly wanted to see the coat, and offered a sterling silver necklace in return. After a few minutes’ online conversation, I realised her true identity: Irene’s daughter.

I asked why she wished to get rid of the necklace. She told me her father had given it to her one birthday. I didn’t ask directly, but I came away with the distinct impression that she and Irene wanted nothing more to do with the man.

I couldn’t stay angry at Daniel forever and I brought him along when I went round to complete the exchange. She tried on the coat and it fitted her neatly. We chatted for ten minutes, which turned into an hour, which turned into a very bored little brother.

I’d driven nearly all the way home when he said from nowhere, “Did she ask you out?”

“No,” I replied.

“But she asked you if you wanted to have dinner with her some time.”

I’d dismissed it as a rhetorical question, but thinking back, I realised she’d been serious. For a selfish brat, he could be astoundingly perceptive. I rang up to accept when I got in the house.

I thought a necklace would be snapped up, especially as it bore a hallmark, but I hit a wall. The effect of the newspaper article had almost worn off. I began to doubt my ability to reach O, never mind Z.

Obsidian pig

It took nearly a week, but I arranged to swap it for a decorative pig made from obsidian.

The snag? Kelly and I had already booked a table at a popular restaurant for 6:30pm, but the swapper could only meet me at 7pm. Kelly understood the magnitude of my project, but the other diners thought I’d run out on her.

Another week passed, and another date, but nothing to swap for this pig. I sat down and wrote a plea on You & We. I read it back the next day, and it sounded quite desperate, but Kelly had passed it onto her friends.

Power supply unit

In less than six hours, a hire shop in town swapped my obsidian pig for an ex-rental industrial battery, designed to provide emergency power in the event of an electricity failure.

“That’s my mum’s birthday present sorted,” commented the manager, examining the pig.

I immediately notified the Australian radio station, who arranged to make a voice call to me over the Internet as it would be higher quality than a normal phone, and free of charge. Daniel set it all up the previous evening, and bored me stiff with the technical details.

Evening drive-time in New South Wales is breakfast time in Britain. I’m accustomed to getting up at that time, in fact I’d kept working in the orchard all through the project, but I was not accustomed to having my voice broadcast to half a million listeners from my kitchen.

I honestly can’t remember a large chunk of our conversation, and wouldn’t let anyone play me the recording, but I gave out the You & We address and they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

 

Next week: Qantas air tickets.