Another quick tip while I’m buried in the middle of this novel:
Tropes and clichés are a great tool with which to surprise your reader. Wait, you might say, how can you possibly surprise the reader with a cliché? Well what exactly is a cliché? It is a situation that’s so familiar that the moment the audience picks up on the typical signposts, they already know how it will turn out. (i.e. any cop buddy film or spy thriller will almost always have the protagonist’s friend, ally, or boss turn out to be in league with the bad guys, and there will be a big reveal near the climax after everybody’s figured it out.)
Thing is, while clichéd plots are generally frowned upon, the fact that a certain set of circumstances leads the reader to a particular expectation can be used as misdirection to lead the reader to make the wrong conclusions without cheating or feeding them any misinformation. Take the deathtrap trope with the villain spilling all his plots to the soon to be dead hero. Typical stupid genre villain. But, what if he isn’t stupid, and put the hero in a stupidly escapeable deathtrap specifically to unload a whole mess of BS on the dude so he’d escape and lead all the good guys to Trinidad so the not so stupid villain can go to Madagascar and fire up his mega-death ray in peace.
You want to see this idea in practice, I have a rather pure form of the concept here.
