Writing Lessons From Grave Peril

Grave Peril fulfilled the promise its beginning made by ending in exemplary fashion. Butcher pulled off an incredibly clever and unforeseen ending that wrapped up the storyline and saved the day neat as you please. That's the focus of the writing lesson for today, or perhaps it is just a writing question whose answer will sound like a writing lesson and I'm good with that, too.

The question is this: How smart do you have to be to be a writer? All of us have read a book and thought, Any idiot could have written that. Perhaps we were correct. Perhaps an idiot did write it. The really clever, really smart and fascinating plot twists are what we all like to discover when we read. We hope that the author is smarter than us because we sure can't figure out how to get the hero out of this mess. This maxim would suggest that you have to be pretty intelligent to be a successful writer. Unless you write chick lit. Don't get me started.

So the actual lesson part of this post is: Agent 86