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sUSPENSE nOTES

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MYSTERY AND SUSPENSE

Both mystery and suspense are tools of compelling fiction. It’s helpful to know the difference so you can better judge your strategy. Here’s a start:

Mystery = who did it?

Suspense = will it happen again?

Mystery is like a hedge maze as you go from clue to clue.

Suspense is like the trash masher in Star Wars, closing in.

Mystery is about “figuring it out.”

Suspense is about “keeping safe.”

Mystery is a puzzle.

Suspense is a nightmare.

Mysteries ask, What will the lead character find next?

Suspense asks, What will happen next to the Lead character?

There is a lot of crossover here. A thriller can have a central mystery, as in The Da Vinci

Macro Suspense

Since suspense is the withholding of resolution, your novel must hold a sense of suspense from beginning to end. The readers must be turning the pages because they need to find out what happens. If you have set up the story with the right stakes—death on the line—the big question is, Will the character make it out of this alive?

Without macro suspense, nothing else you do in your individual scenes will matter. The readers will simply not care.

Scene Suspense

Each individual scene should have suspense, and each can if you build upon the character’s fears and worries. There is something unresolved in the scene, namely the outcome. The character has entered the scene with an objective (and this, in turn, is related to his overall objective in the novel). He encounters obstacles in the scene, so we wonder if he will come out of the scene successfully or unsuccessfully.

In the film The Graduate, based on the novel by Charles Webb, Benjamin Braddock has called Mrs. Robinson to meet him at a hotel. He has made the fateful decision to accept her offer—of herself.

In the scene at the hotel, Ben’s objective is to meet with Mrs. Robinson without being noticed. But he has obstacles. Like the suspicious desk clerk who asks him if he’s here “for an affair.” Ben is aghast. “The Singleman party?” the clerk offers. Ben is relieved. But only for a moment.

Later, when he goes to the same clerk to get a room, there is more suspicion, such as Ben’s only luggage being a toothbrush.

Here Ben knows what the obstacles are, and his fear factor is whether he’ll be exposed as having an illicit tryst with an older woman, the wife of his father’s partner, no less.

In Gone With the Wind there’s a terrifying escape from the burning of Atlanta. The suspense comes from the questions, Will Scarlett get out of there with the pregnant Melanie? Get out before the mob steals her horse? Get out before fire falls on her and kills her? The suspense of this scene matters because we know the stakes for Scarlett in the overall story. This is her world coming apart, and she is the only one in her family who seems to have the strength to salvage some of it.

Hypersuspense

Hypersuspense happens when the character does not know what the forces are that oppose him—and neither does the reader.

You are part of the story along with the Lead, looking to figure out what’s going on. When you write in first-person POV, it’s almost automatic if you withhold answers from the Lead.

In du Maurier’s Rebecca, the narrator recounts the story as it happened, not giving us the benefit of her knowledge right away (since she’s the one telling it, she could have come right out and said, “Here’s the deal on Rebecca …” but where is the fun in that?).

Contrast that with one of the best-selling novels of the 1970s, Love Story. It begins with the first-person narrator telling readers that this is the story of a girl who died.

Does that dissipate the hypersuspense? No, it just shifts the focus. How did she die? We get the love story first, before we get to the death.

But you can also accomplish the same thing in third-person POV, just by keeping it close and limited. Follow one Lead throughout. Don’t reveal anything else to the reader from another POV.

If you do use multiple POVs that clue the reader in, you can always keep the Lead in the dark as he tries to figure out who is opposing him.

Paragraph Suspense

The smallest unit for suspense purposes is the paragraph. Think of each one as having the possibility of withholding information or ramping up tension. For example:

Roger turned the corner onto Spring Street. The day was bright and clear and he could see City Hall in the distance. The tower, with its pyramid-shaped cap, reminded him of something. Yes, that was it. The hood ornament he’d seen on Crandall’s car. That night at the beach. What did it mean? Crandall was there all along!

Maybe that works for you and maybe it doesn’t. But upon reflection you might decide you want to stretch out the suspense even further:

Roger turned the corner onto Spring Street. The day was cloudy and dark. He could barely see City Hall. The pyramid-shaped cap, visible in the muck, reminded him of something. What was it? What? It was there, on the edge of his mind. Reel it in, bring it closer. It was something. Something important. But he couldn’t get it.

Dialogue exchanges are also made up of paragraphs, and offer further opportunity for suspense and stretching tension. We’ll cover that in chapter 18.

Every novel, of every genre, offers increasing possibilities for suspense. If you keep in mind the various strands available, it will soon become second nature for you to exploit them skillfully. You’ll be writing page turners.

PHYSICAL CLIFF-HANGERS

In a physical cliff-hanger, some circumstance happens on the page that we can see. There are three basic types of physical cliff-hangers:

THE DIALOGUE CLIFF-HANGER

A line of dialogue can operate as a cliff-hanger, too. In fact, in the scene in Bad Things Happen directly after the passage quoted earlier, Ann Arbor police detective Elizabeth Waishkey gets a call from her partner:

“You’re calling me on the wrong phone,” she said.

“I tried your cell and got kicked to your voice mail,” said Carter Shan.

She picked up her cell phone from the coffee table and flipped it open. “The ring tone’s off. I shut it off for the funeral.”

“I’m glad we got that settled,” Shan said. “I’m taking a drive to the country. North Territorial Road. Thought you might want to come.”

“What is it?”

“Body in a car. White male. Gunshot wound to the head. I think you’ll be interested.”

Now, that last line would have worked out all right. A murder report. The hint that Elizabeth might be interested. But the dialogue continues:

“Who is it, Carter?”

“Can’t be sure yet, but the car belongs to someone we know.”

That’s where it ends. Now the stakes are higher. Who is this someone? How do they know him or her? It’s a bad thing all right, and we want to find out.

Of course, Dolan now cuts back to the scene with David Loogan and the man in the doorway …

EMOTIONAL CLIFF-HANGERS

Leaving a character at the height of an emotion is another way to hang them off a cliff. You leave the reader wondering how the character’s inner life will be brought back to some equilibrium, as Stephen King does in this scene from The Stand:

Surfacing briefly in the three o’clock darkness of the living room, her body floating on a foam of dread, the dream already tattering and unraveling, leaving behind it only a sense of doom like the rancid aftertaste of some rotten meal. She thought, in that moment of half-sleeping and half-waking: Him, it’s him, the Walking Dude, the man with no face.

Then she slept again, this time dreamlessly, and when she woke the next morning she didn’t remember the dream at all. But when she thought of the baby in her belly, a feeling of fierce protectiveness swept over her all at once, a feeling that perplexed her and frightened her a little with its depth and strength.

It’s the height of emotion here, with an expectant mother in the midst of the world-shattering events. How can we not read on?

IN MEDIAS RES CLIFF-HANGERS

Writers often talk about in medias res (Latin for “into the middle of things”) as a way of opening a scene. That is, the closer you are to the action and the central point of the scene, the faster things take off.

But you can also use the principle at the end of scenes simply by cutting the last paragraph or two. Try it and see. It doesn’t always work, but you

STRETCHING THE ACTION

The point is that Lee Child squeezes an amazing amount of tension out of a few seconds because he’s not at all afraid to make us wait.

And that’s the key to tension. It is waiting. The longer the better.

Can you write a whole book like this? Of course not. You pick your spots, and you don’t do it the same way all the time.

  1. Find a scene in your novel where you have the moment of highest tension.
  2. Refer back to the material in “Action” on page 203.
  3. Now, stretch your scene out another 25 percent. You can do it. Use all the techniques we’ve discussed: slow motion, inner thoughts, dialogue, description (which does double duty), and so on.
  4. Analyze the scene for readability, trimming or adding as you see fit.
  5. Find the next most intense scene. Repeat steps 2 through 4.
  6. Repeat the process with yet another scene in your novel

STRETCHING EMOTIONAL TENSION

The same principle holds for tension within a character. When there is a strong emotion to be portrayed, take your time.

Jennifer Weiner’s Good in Bed is the story of Cannie Shapiro, a “plus size” woman who finds out that her ex-boyfriend has written about his love life with her in a woman’s magazine for all to see.

Weiner slows the action and ups the physical reaction. She even cleverly slips in a cliché by having the narrator make reference to it:

You know how in scary books a character will say, “I felt my heart stop?” Well, I did. Really. Then I felt it start to pound again, in my wrists, my throat, my fingertips. The hair at the back of my neck stood up. My hands felt icy. I could hear the blood roaring in my ears as I read the first line of the article: “I’ll never forget the day I found out my girlfriend weighed more than I did.”

Samantha’s voice sounded like it was coming from far, far away. “Cannie? Cannie, are you there?”

“I’ll kill him!” I choked.

“Take deep breaths,” Samantha counseled. “In through the nose, out through the mouth.”

Betsy, my editor, cast a puzzled look across the partition that separated our desks. “Are you all right?” she mouthed. I squeezed my eyes shut. My headset had somehow landed on the carpet. “Breathe!” I could hear Samantha say, her voice a tinny echo from the floor. I was wheezing, gasping. I could feel chocolate and bits of candy shell on my teeth. I could see the quote they’d lifted, in bold-faced pink letters that screamed out from the center of the page.

Study the word choices in that excerpt. The forward momentum is slowed in order to enhance the singularity and emotion of the moment.

SLOWING DOWN THE TERROR

Do This:

  1. Find a moment of terror in your novel. If it’s a character-driven novel, you can find an inner terror that is meaningful to the Lead: terror of being exposed, of losing a love, of being ostracized, etc.
  2. Write a page-long paragraph, stretching this tension out.
  3. Now write a page of short sentences, one after the other, doing the same thing.

You will now have plenty of material to work with to the benefit of your scene.

Can you stretch the tension too far? Will it snap like a rubber band?

Yes, but the length of the stretch is farther than you think. Go for it. You can always cut it back later.

When in doubt, stretch it out.

Setting, DIALOGUE AND SUSPENSE

SPARE DIALOGUE

Do This:

  1. Find a high-tension section of your novel that is dialogue heavy.
  2. Make a copy of the scene and open it in as a new document.
  3. Compress as much of the dialogue as you can. Cut away at words, use fewer complete sentences.
  4. Compare the two scenes and rewrite your master scene utilizing as much of the new material as you deem appropriate.

STRETCHED DIALOGUE

Do This:

  1. Find a dialogue exchange in which information is being revealed.
  2. Can you stretch this section out so the information comes later, even in another scene?
  3. Try adding an interruption to the scene so the information is held up.

Setting

Do This:

  1. Look over the settings of each of your scenes. Have you selected the obvious or the overdone?
  2. Consider changing it to the opposite. If it’s a daylight scene, change it to night. If it’s a scene in a desolate place, move the characters to where there’s a crowd.
  3. Test locations. The nice thing is you can travel anywhere you want in your mind and scope out places on your computer.
  4. Try rewriting a couple of scenes in a new locale. Practice creating suspense where you least expect to find it.
    1. What sort of person might be part of or show up in this place? How can that person be opposed to the POV character?
    2. What sorts of physical items exist in this setting? Look deeply at each one and ask how someone could use it for menace.
    3. When all else fails, do a variation on Chandler’s guy with a gun trick. Bring in a normal, everyday thing (like Hitchcock’s crop duster) and make it do something unexpected.

Micro Obstacles

For the next two or three minutes, with camera shots of the tat thrown in every now and then, we wonder Will Claire see the tattoo? If she does, she’ll know Doug has been lying to her, that he’s part of the crew, and so on.

Even as the dialogue gets pointed, with Jim slyly trying to find out what’s going on and signal his displeasure to Doug, we keep wondering about what Claire will see.

A small obstacle thrown into the mix, but one that carries the potential of blowing up.

Do This:

  1. Look for scenes where you have more than two pages of low suspense. It might be two people talking in a restaurant, or allies conversing in the workplace.
  2. Make a list of potential obstacles that could be introduced, from large to Keep going until you have nine or ten. Don’t edit yourself. These can be other characters, sounds, weather, accidents (large or small), annoyances, and so on.
  3. Choose one to insert into the middle of the scene.

After you do this a few times, your writer’s brain will work on automatic and sense places to put a microobstacle. It’s well worth the exercise.

Plot Stakes

When the main action gets ratcheted up, you are dealing with plot stakes. The outer circumstances take on more danger and importance. Ask:

In William P. McGivern’s classic noir tale, The Big Heat, a cop named Bannion is driven to get at the heart of the syndicate in his city. His superiors, who are part of the corruption, demand his badge and gun. He refuses to give the gun because he paid for it. Now his superiors have a reason to keep an eye on him, and he’s lost his job.

Character Stakes

What happens inside the character to make the stakes more personal? What sends the Lead’s emotions reeling?

In The Big Heat, a murder case for Officer Bannion becomes a personal vendetta when a car bomb kills his wife. Revenge becomes the personal stake.

Consider:

Societal Stakes

Here you ask what are the consequences to the larger community? In The Big Heat, if Bannion doesn’t bring down the syndicate boss, the town will suffer. The corruption that is going all the way to the top will remain. The citizens will be denied true justice.

So ask:

How does my Lead character’s problem extend outward to the larger community?

What characters in that community can be brought into the plot to illustrate the societal stakes?

Time ticking and Time Lock

The noted TV writer and novelist Stephen J. Cannell put it this way: “Often, usually early in the story, a clever writer plants a time lock, a structural device requiring some specific event to occur, or some particular problem to be resolved, within a certain period of time. This serves to compress the story’s tension. Of course, not all stories lend themselves to a ‘ticking clock,’ but the resourceful writer digs deep to locate a method and a place for integrating a meaningful one into the story.”

Examples:

ONE MOMENT CAN CHANGE EVERYTHING: A man needs to get to the one he loves to tell her he realizes she’s the one, but she’s about to leave town to get on a plane. In Manhattan, Woody Allen runs through the streets of New York to get to Mariel Hemingway just as she’s coming through the doors to get into a cab.

PILING IT ON: In Back to the Future, the ability of Marty McFly to get home to his own time zone is dependent on Dr. Emmett Brown hooking a conduit for lightning that will strike the town clock tower at precisely 10:04 p.m. and Marty driving the DeLorean into the wiring at the split second it happens.

  1. A) But a tree branch dislodges the connection with only a few minutes to go! Brown has to climb the tower to connect it.
  2. B) Marty positions the car and is ready to start at the right time, but it stalls.
  3. C) Brown almost falls off the tower.
  4. D) Brown connects the wires on the tower, but in doing so dislodges the wires on the ground. And Marty is coming!
  5. E) Brown slides down a cable and lands flat on his back.
  6. F) He has to disentangle the wire from the tree branch. Marty is almost there.
  7. G) The lightning strikes just as Brown makes the connection and Marty hits the wire.

Do This:

  1. Set up something of importance and attach a time limit to it. It can be as simple as an appointment or as dire as a bomb.
  2. Brainstorm obstacles that will prevent the character from relief within the time frame.
  3. Relieve the tension at the last possible moment. Sometimes the most important ticking clock will happen in the climax, but don’t overlook smaller time pressures in other parts of your story.

Removing or Enhancing Capacity

Can you take something physically away from your character, either before the story or in the middle of it?

Or can you take away some device or person that is necessary for the Lead to solve his problems?

What occurrences can you think up to make your Lead’s desperate plight drag on? Continue to make lists throughout the writing of your book.

INCREASING THE STRENGTH OF THE OPPOSITION

You can also give the opponent greater strength as the story moves along.

What if:

Consider the plot from the opponent’s POV, and what tactical plans he would come up with to gain the victory. Make a list of possibilities, like a general planning a battle, and use these for scene possibilities

PUTTING it ALL TOGETHER

Robert Heinlein said there are two rules for writers:

  1. You must write.
  2. You must finish what you write.

Not bad. I would only add that you should keep learning how to write better and apply what you learn, book after book.

You learn a lot by finishing your novel.

And you learn a lot by studying the craft.

Ultimately that’s what “putting it all together” means. Everything you know, everything you feel, your passion and imagination, your craft and your discipline—all in the service of writing a novel that is conflict and suspense from cover to cover.

To help you along on this quest, let me offer you an approach that can be used whether you are an OP or a NOP, an outline person or a no outline person. At the very least, think through the following steps. They will save you a lot of frustration in the writing.

STEP ONE: GET YOUR STORY LOCKED DOWN

At the very least you need to know your LOCK elements before you start writing in earnest. You may say that you will “discover” these as you go along. That’s fine if you see the “going along” as part of the planning process.

But a little thought up front can save you time better spent writing the actual story.

So, using the principles in chapter three, create:

A Lead worth following

An Objective with death on the line

A Confrontation where the opposition is stronger than the lead

A potential Knockout ending

The last element, the ending, is likely going to change by the time you get there. But having an ending point in mind helps with the actual writing process. It’s a destination to aim for.

Brainstorm these elements for at least a couple of hours. Break those hours up over the course of two days. Let your writer’s mind work on them overnight.

STEP TWO: A DISTURBANCE AND A DOORWAY

See chapter four and come up with an opening scene of disturbance. Work that disturbance into the first page.

Then plan your first Doorway of No Return. This is the incident that thrusts your lead into the confrontation of Act Two.

STEP THREE: TEN KILLER SCENES

The great film director John Huston (The Maltese Falcon; The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; The African Queen) once said that the secret to a successful film was three great scenes, and no weak ones. Well, the same can be said for fiction, only I want you to come up with ten killer scenes. Here’s how:

  1. Mary goes to a bar and gets hit on by a biker.
  2. Joe is caught in the middle of a bank heist.
  3. Mary discovers her mother has been lying to her.
  4. Joe finds out Mary doesn’t outline her novels.

And so on. Keep going until you have at least twenty scene ideas.

Here is where you pack in the conflict and suspense. Brainstorm especially on the Obstacles. Come up with lists of possibilities and choose the ones you like best. And one more thing: Stive for something surprising in each scene. A line of dialogue, a character action, an event. Any small thing that a reader would not anticipate.

Whether you outline or fly by the seat of your pants, these scenes are writer’s gold. You can start writing knowing you have a solid foundation and plenty of great material for your book.

Once you’ve written your first draft, take a break. Then revise. Take out those parts people tend to skip. The dull parts.

As you read every page, ask: Could a tired agent or editor put this thing down?

If the answer is Yes, look at conflict and suspense, the two page-turning keys.

REPEAT THE PROCESS. Getting the words down is what makes a disciplined writer. Getting them down with the craft working for you is what makes a professional writer. This ten-step process can help you get there. Because, you see, we haven’t come all that far from the days of Og and the fireside tale.

A great story has been, and always will be, about a character facing conflict and the suspense of not knowing what’s going to happen next.

If you don’t have conflict, you don’t have readers who care.

If you don’t have suspense, you don’t have readers who finish.

If your story is dull and predictable, people will not want to buy it.

But if your story is packed with confrontation and tension and complications and surprises and twists and cliff-hangers and emotions, you just may have a shot at a writing career.

That’s why, when all is said, done and written—trouble is your business.

So go make some.

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