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Genre: Drama/Prison
Premise: When a wealthy white family man accidentally kills a driver who nearly collided with his wife and child, he’s sent to prison for manslaughter. There, he’s taken under the wing of a black gang leader who plans to control him long after his sentence ends.
About: A big sale to Amazon of Don Winslow’s short story, “Collision,” that will be available in his short story collection, “The Final Score.” Jake Gyllenhaal will be starring. Stephen King says that Winslow’s book was “the best crime fiction I’ve read in twenty years.” The Final Score will be available September 17.
Writer: Don Winslow
Details: 92 pages
Collision was a weird story to read because the level of the author’s (Don Winslow) technical know-how is off the charts. You have to understand that I read scripts all day where the writer hasn’t even gotten to the point where they can introduce a character effectively.
With Don Winslow, this is a guy who’s mastered his craft – and I’ll give you an example.
This story starts off with a fair share of setup. Winslow is setting Brad McAlister up for us, Rachel up for us, Brad and Rachel’s marriage for us, their kid. He’s setting up Brad’s job and his overall approach to life.
If that’s all you do, that’s bad writing. It’s boring to read setup. So Winslow keeps hinting at this big meeting that McAlister’s bosses are bringing him in for. Brad can’t stop obsessing over what this meeting is for. The rarity of it implies something big is coming.
What this does is it CREATES SUSPENSE during the setup portion of the story. Which makes it more dramatic. Which makes us want to turn the pages.
You see this sort of technical writing mastery throughout the story.
So then why does the story never elevate above “solid?”
It’s a question I kept asking myself because I wanted to turn the pages in each and every section. I wanted to know what happened next during that opening portion. I wanted to know what happened next in the prison. I wanted to know what happened next when he got out of prison. And I wanted to know what happened when Blanton reentered his life.
But, I kept waiting for some BIG STORY POINT (aka ‘the inciting incident’) to arrive that would kick this novella into high gear. You may say, “But Carson, isn’t him going to prison the inciting incident?” It would be if the prison portion were the main story. But it isn’t. It’s just a passage of time he has to get through.
So when that inciting incident didn’t come, I found myself asking the question, “What is this story about?” It wasn’t until Mcalister’s old prison frenemy showed up and we entered “traditional movie territory” that an “official” inciting incident occurred (frenemy wants Mcalister to kill someone). But, by that point, we’re all the way at the end of the book! So the structure is all out of whack.
Maybe I should tell you what the story is about, huh?
Brad McAlister is a white-collar white dude who runs a hotel. He has the perfect wife in Rachel. And they have a perfect five-year-old boy named Willis.
Brad is excited because corporate is flying his whole family in for dinner. Which can only mean one thing. He’s being offered a promotion. Imagine McAlister’s surprise when he learns that he isn’t just getting to run a better hotel. He’ll be the operating manager for five hotels in the region! The promotion is way bigger than he assumed.
The family goes out to celebrate afterwards and McAlister has a few drinks. Later, when they’re walking to their car, Rachel and McAlister’s son walk first and a car comes out of nowhere. McAlister pushes them out of the way and the car stops inches from him. McAlister starts yelling at the driver for almost killing his family. The driver gets out and gets in his face. McAlister levels him with a punch and the man goes down awkwardly, hitting his head, killing him.
The activist judge for the case wants to make an example out of rich white guys who think they can do whatever they want and gives Mcalister the max – 11 years for manslaughter.
McAlister goes to prison where he quickly learns that it’s populated by three dangerous gangs – the Whites, the Blacks, and the Mexicans. The Whites come to him first but he doesn’t like them. The leader of the Blacks, Blanton, sees an opportunity. As he puts it, “White people can get into places black people can’t.” So he recruits Mcalister into his gang and protects him for five years, when Mcalister gets out on parole.
Once out, McAlister is the happiest man in the world. He can finally be with his family again. As luck would have it, someone at his old job is still a big fan and gives him his job back. So he’s still going to live just as nicely as he did before all this craziness began.
That is until Blanton is waiting for him outside his work one day. Blanton says there’s a guy who’s going to be staying at his hotel who’s a major drug dealer – one who encroaches on Black drug-trading. So he needs McAlister to kill him. McAlister vehemently rejects the proposal, until Blanton tells him if he doesn’t do it, he’ll kill both his wife and kid. Turns out you never truly leave prison.
Every time this story seemed to be leaning towards a “hook,” it would run away from it. Which was frustrating because I kept trying to figure out what the concept was. The closest we got was a white guy joining a black gang in prison. I thought, “Hmm, that could be interesting. We haven’t seen that before.” But McAlister does one thing for Blanton and then we get a quick montage of the next five years and McAlister is all of a sudden out of prison. And I guess we’re telling another story?
At a certain point, if you’re not going to choose a clear direction, then it becomes a character piece. The one constant is this character’s journey. So, the question becomes, is McAlister fascinating enough as a character for us to shoot by all the potential concepts we could’ve latched onto and, instead, watch him endure this?
The answer is: He’s just interesting enough that we care and nothing more. Again, Winslow is a pro. He knows how to make you like a character. So we like McAlister. But, this isn’t Arthur Dent in “Joker.” This isn’t Louis Bloom in Nightcrawler. This isn’t even Richard Williams in King Richard.
It’s just a family man who had to go to prison and, once he gets out, in the last quarter of the story, he has to kill someone. It’s compelling in a low-key way and that’s it.
For me, I wanted a hook here. I literally wanted to hook my hands into a juicy fat concept. Everything here is too vanilla for my taste. But, it’s really well-packaged vanilla. Like the kind you get at Salt & Straw. So, for that, I’d say it’s worth checking out.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: In the last, I’d say, 20 scripts I’ve read that have involved crime, the antagonist threatens to kill the protagonist’s family to get him to do what he wants him to do in 75% of those scripts. It’s a strange motivator because it works so well – as soon as the reader reads it, they understand why the hero must do this. But it’s used so consistently in storytelling that there’s an unavoidable eye-rolling quality to the choice. I encourage writers to work harder and come up with far more creative motivators for bad guys to make the good guys do something.
What I learned 2: Whenever I read a script that has a late-arriving inciting incident, I assume that it’s an early draft and the writer is still figuring out the story. This is often how stories are written. You kind of figure them out along the way, and then in the rewrites, you keep pushing the main plot beats up earlier in the story until they align with traditional structure. If you’ve been writing for 50 years, like Winslow, you can probably get away with a late-arriving inciting incident. But, for the rest of us, I’d recommend rewriting and moving plot beats up earlier in the story.
