How to Write Killer Prose (10)

Flat characters

Writing instruction can get over-technical. All those inciting incidents, all those three and five-act structures, all those wants and needs. It's like wiring up a circuit board. Fiction writers should note this stuff, but not be bound by it. We're not screenwriters, and we're not part of a team. We're authors, flying solo, and we can do what the hell we want.

Good stories are everywhere in real life, and they're rarely improved by forcing them to take on a standard, Hollywood shape. The supermarket and airport bookshelves (like the streamer channels) are rammed with schematic, pulpy stories, and some are OK but most, to be honest, are terrible. Clichéd characters, exposition thinly disguised as dialogue, clunky structure...

Step back. Every so often life offers us human stories of such immediacy that we (or at least I) devour them and pick over the bones obsessively. Such a story was that of Jeffrey Epstein and his chums. It's a rivetingly squalid tale, but for the fiction writer it also offers up endless lessons in human behaviour, sexual realpolitik and the application of power.

What are the key elements of the Epstein story? What can they teach us, as writers, that no how-to manual can?