Convergence

I’ve long been a fan of genetics. I studied it in my high-school’s gifted program for four years and then in college. For obvious reasons, evolution (the poor cousin of genetics) also holds a fascination for me.

One element of evolution I find most fascinating is a thing called convergence. This is where two very different life forms come to the same solution for the same problem without there being any direct link between them. For example, flight: pterodactyls flew and archeopteryx flew. Same solution, but these species are not related. They came to the solution from different paths.

Convergence was an important element to me and my journalism career. It’s essentially the “two sides to every story” thing. For example: you find a body on the ground at the base of a tall building. How did it get there? Did the person fall from a window? Was he shot and fell? Did he just finish lunch down the street and have a heart attack at this spot?

I was surprised to realize that convergence remains important to me now that I write novels. As the author, I can create any solution to a mystery that I want. The fun part for me is sending clues to the reader to make him think the solution is coming along one path even though those same clues can be read to come to the solution through a different path. A surprise plot twist, as it were. I never started out any of my novels with this in mind, yet they nearly all have this element. It’s not a twist for the sake of a twist; rather, a twist that has been slowly crafted from the first page for the reader’s ultimate enjoyment .