Book Coach Corner: They Both Die at the End

Background: What Is Book Coach Corner?

I am a certified book coach via Author Accelerator. The goal of a coach is to help writers get their best story into the world. This covers support in every part of the writing process: planning, drafting, editing, polishing, and publishing.

A big part of the job, though, is helping writers create their best stories. This means strengthening character motivation, tightening cause and effect threads, assisting with plotting, and much more.

In this blog series, I thought it would be fun to look at popular and classic books, TV shows, and movies with the eye of a coach. What would I suggest to the artist to help make the narrative stronger? What are the strengths and opportunities in the piece?

A couple more details to see if this tantalizes your blog-reading taste buds:

• The reviews will go in-depth on the subject, so it may not make sense if you haven’t read/viewed it
• It will spoil everything if you haven’t read/viewed the blog’s subject
• At the beginning, I’ll give a quick synopsis and my “gut” reaction to the work. This is the subjective stuff, so that I can then get into the work’s architecture with more of an objective eye to story, improvement, and praise

Those are the details. This entry takes a look at They Both Die at the End, a book I really enjoyed.

Synopsis

They Both Die at the End is an excellent YA/New Adult novel that explores what two boys will do when faced with their own mortality. Mateo and Rufus are both notified by Death-Cast that their days will be their last. The novel follows the two boys as they live their last days and attempt to embrace life fully.

My Brief Thoughts

I usually am disappointed by books that receive a lot of public praise and attention. I don’t know if it’s my natural tendency to defy authority or jealousy at other authors’ successes, but, generally, I don’t enjoy much on bestseller lists.

That being said, I thought this book was wonderful, especially for its targeted audience of YA/teen/New Adult. Can I say what a relief it is to see complex, thoughtful, non-stereotypical LGBTQ+ teens?! It’s a super-duper-mega-ultra relief!

I thought Silvera does a wonderful job of capturing the urgency and wonder of a person’s last day on earth. The conceit of the Last Friend app is amazing, and I love that the two boys develop a romance based on their serendipitous friendship and the dire circumstances they find themselves in. I also thought the supporting cast was diverse and complex and strengthened the narrative.

Appreciation

There was a lot to enjoy in this book, but I think from a writer’s perspective, one of the most powerful takeaways was Silvera’s mashup of genres.

I’ve read many articles about how one should “bend the rules of genre” or “do something creative in an existing genre” which is fantastic advice, but… I think it’s useless without a general grounding in how that happens.

If you sit at your writer’s desk and draw competing genres out of a hat (or even multiple hats), you’ll end up writing something bizarre that you have no emotional connection to. Silvera writes both romance and fantasy. Based on that, I can guarantee that he also reads a lot of romance and fantasy. Two of his other books — Infinity Son and What If It’s Us — are examples of his exploration of these two genres. Guess what They Both Die at the End is?! It’s a mashup of romance and fantasy!

Writing a book with elements of multiple genres is a brilliant way to catch attention, especially from publishers and agents. As a culture, we experienced an entire moment of vampire romance novels because of Stephenie Meyer's work fusing YA, Romance, and the undead in the 2000s.

From Silvera’s great work in this book, I think there are a few key things to keep in mind when you are trying to bend genre conventions:

• Lean into the genres you love (like Silvera has done here). If you’re straight science-fiction book isn’t selling, don’t shoehorn in a gothic vampire narrative or a mystery element unless you love those genres and can fuse them with all the writerly love in your heart.
• If you’re a one genre person and looking to expand, read more. I mean literally read everything: mysteries, self-help, business books, fantasy, fiction, YA. Can you imagine how a book called Count Dracula’s Guide to Management which fuses Bram Stoker’s novel with management tips would sell? People would be enthralled. That’s an extreme example, but the more creative inputs you have, the more your brain will naturally start to fuse them. If you already love a couple of genres, dive into them!
• Don’t force it. I think the surest way to kill any creativity is to make yourself fuse genres. I am revising a novella that combines YA, Sci-Fi, and detective fiction. I didn’t sit down with that plan in mind. I started with a scene in my head of a young receptionist meeting a strange-looking woman one day at work. I followed my curiosity and ended up with space vampires in Idaho. It could be a mess, but it’s been a lot of fun putting it together, and I love all three genres that I’m working in. My most recent reading list includes They Both Die at the End (YA), The Left Hand of Darkness (Sci-Fi), and my own novel-in-progress (detective fiction). We write best what we are inspired by as readers!

Opportunities

I will say that the biggest opportunity to strengthen Silvera’s text was in Part Two. I’ve identified two specific things with regard to character and conflict which caused this problem for me as a coach.

Mateo’s Character

The character of Mateo is inconsistent, which makes his arc less dramatic. In the beginning, Mateo is introduced to us as a kid who is afraid of the world. He chooses to watch others live their last days rather than enjoy his own life. This is a marvelous setup, but it doesn’t play out narratively. The moment that Rufus gets to the apartment, Mateo starts driving all the action: he dictates where they go, he is the most open and vulnerable, and he acts as their “leader.” For me the disconnect between a shy kid with no friends and a kid on his last day who takes all the initiative didn’t make sense — I wanted to see his journey to get to that point. How does a kid afraid of the world learn how to live? This question is answered in the second section of the book with the response: He leaves his house.

Throughout the text he does take chances — he rides the bike with Rufus, he jumps off the waterfall, he punches Peck — but after he leaves home and begins dictating what they do in Part One, I didn’t feel like these victories were as rewarding as I wanted them to be.

This also ties into my second opportunity.

Part Two Resolves Too Many Major Conflicts

That isn’t to say there isn’t any conflict in Part Two. Rufus and Mateo discovering truths about each other and learning to trust each other was a major part of their growth in this section, but in terms of the major character conflicts from Part One, these items are quickly resolved. As a reader, I was expecting the tension to linger and build. To get specific:

Mateo: His internal conflict is being afraid to live. In Part Two he visits his father, mother, and best friend and makes peace with leaving them. He also goes fake skydiving and pushes his boundaries. For me, this is a resolution of all his core conflicts. If someone has been afraid to live and goes skydiving… Well, I feel like they got through it. After Part Two, I honestly wondered what else could happen to Mateo. I didn’t see anywhere for his arc to go.

Rufus: His internal conflict is getting back to the old Rufus — fighting Peck broke his internal understanding of himself. In Part Two, Mateo opens him back up — by the time Rufus is buying Mateo Legos, I’m pretty sure his conflict is resolved as well. Once again, by the end of Part Two, I’m wondering what more they can learn from each other.

Silvera does do a masterful job getting the conflict moving again in Part Three by bringing in the parallel story of Peck and his gang. Even though Rufus and Mateo don’t have much space to grow, we have the tension of them and Peck intersecting in a (possibly fatal) conflict.

Key Takeaway

Make sure that your character has room to grow throughout the narrative. If all their issues are resolved in the first third of the book, the climax, no matter how dramatic, won’t provide the highest level of catharsis. At the climax of a novel, the main characters should be forced to overcome their major flaws. In this case, a more delayed flowering for Mateo may mean that in the final scene he is left alone and has to risk something for Rufus. He must act to save his friend. In the present text, he does act and attacks Peck, but by the time we get to that point, it’s not a surprise in terms of his character.

One great example is Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy. In Return of the Jedi, he faces the greatest choice of his life at the climax of the film: does he choose to support his master or save his son? That’s the kind of nail-biting, intense decision you want your characters to make in the story’s final moments. In the case of Star Wars, we get three movies of Darth Vader evolving from a fiend to a more contemplative baddy. The big payoff is seeing him make his final evolution into a loving father and choosing his son over his villanous master. In the biz we call that a character arc de triomphe (not really, but it sounds cool).

Conclusion

They Both Die at the End is a great book. You should read it, and if you have a young person in your life, you should definitely give it to them to read. While I do think there are opportunities to create more tension and dynamism in the story, that’s because I’m a book coach, and it is my job to see all the opportunities (obnoxious as it may be). Overall, this book is an excellent example that offers opportunities to think about:

• Combining genres to generate exciting stories
• Keeping a character’s internal conflict as a primary mover of story

Special thanks to Adam Silvera for writing an amazing book for me to take a book coach’s lense to.

Tedd Hawks is a writer, trainer, and book coach from Chicago. You can follow his Instagram and humor blog. If you’re interested in book coaching services check out his offerings here.