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Why suspense?

This entry is part 9 of 26 in the series Tension, suspense and surprise

Why are suspense, tension and surprise all so important? We’ve established that suspense and tension draw the readers along through your story, and compel them to keep reading. But it’s more than just making readers read, and rewarding them (with surprise sometimes)—it’s making them want to read your book (and your next one).

tss series medJames Scott Bell highlights one reason why these elements are so important: “Modulating tension is one of the keys to writing fiction” (Revision And Self-Editing, 82). We started off our series with a quote from agent Noah Lukeman: “Suspense, more than any other element, affects the immediate, short term experience of the work” (The Plot Thickens, 119).

But Lukeman further explains why being conscious of tension and suspense are so important:

The presence of suspense is . . . a feat and shows promise, since it indicates that the writer is writing more for the reader than for himself. (120)

I think it’s easy—and for many of us, important—to draft for ourselves. I’m told Stephen King says you should write the first draft “with the door closed”—with little to no input or interference from others, so that you can get out the story you’re trying to tell. Remember the delight, the way you relish the scenes that you’ve been waiting for your whole book long?

But when we’re ready to open that door, to share your writing with an eye to improving it, it’s not about what you loved writing and what you still love reading anymore. It’s about what someone else—an agent, an editor, a customer in a bookstore—will love reading, what will suck them in and drag them on a relentless, compelling journey with your characters. Focusing on the experience of your readers shows that you’re not just in it to entertain yourself and a few friends—you’re here to tell a story, to get people reading—to entertain.

What do you think? Why are suspense, tension and surprise so important?

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Technique

Wrapping up the suspense: Act III

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This entry is part 10 of 26 in the series Tension, suspense and surprise

Eventually, all suspense and tension must be released—since anticipation is the source of suspense and tension, it’s probably not fair to readers not to eventually satisfy that anticipation. Naturally, this will happen to some extent throughout the story as we build up anticipation for events along the way. But the overarching suspense of the story reaches its ultimate payoff in the last part of the story, in the final act.

In fact, Raymond Obstfeld refers to Act III as The Payoff in Fiction First Aid. Here, we have to satisfy all that suspense we’ve worked so hard to build—and that payoff had better be commensurate with the anticipation, or our readers will feel cheated.

Obstfeld says, “The key to a good payoff is not to give the reader what you think they want” (55). That’s not to say that the hero and heroine shouldn’t get together in a romance (they should), or that the hero can’t catch the villain in a thriller (he should). It does mean that giving the reader exactly what you promised all along and only that is not enough to reward the suspense you’ve created for that goal.

This is a common reason why we don’t like the way a book ends. I read a book last year where the entire book was about the heroine learning about others and herself—but at the end, she went back and did the same thing she’d been planning to all along (and it was rushed). All along, I was promised some revelatory, life-changing experience, but in the end, the character didn’t change.

After spending hundreds of pages with these characters being thwarted in their quests, yes, they have to see some measure of success in the end (unless this is a tragedy, I guess). But that hard-won success probably shouldn’t just be the exact thing they’ve looked for all along. Take Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Indy is reluctantly dragged into looking for the Holy Grail, which he doesn’t really believe exists. What does he find in the end? (Yeah, he finds the grail—but is that all?)

A good payoff is both unexpected in some way and commensurate with the suspense the author has created.

What do you think? How else do we see suspense in Act III?

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Technique

Finding your weakness

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This entry is part 11 of 26 in the series Tension, suspense and surprise

When it comes to tension, suspense and surprise, it’s very hard to find your own weaknesses. Or, sometimes, to admit them.

Hi. I’m Jordan, and sometimes I write boring crap. And I leave it in. Even though people tell me it’s boring.

I’m trying to get better. (Hence this series.) But the more I work on specific areas in my writing, the more I realize I need help, and I may always need help. I think I’m probably not alone. Most of us allow at least a little indulgence as we’re drafting—words, lines, paragraphs or scenes that don’t necessarily move the story forward. And then sometimes we get a little too attached.

The fact is, when you’re still in love with your characters and your story, you’re more than willing to read the scenes that don’t really move the story along. One way to counteract this is to set the story aside. Yes, we’re always told to do this, and this is a big reason why. Set it aside for 6 months to a year and give yourself some distance from the work.

I am so not that patient. Once I’ve patched up the glaring holes and inconsistencies I know I’ve created, I’m willing to let my work go to one or two of my beta readers to make sure there aren’t any big structural/common sense/plot holes I missed. I’m okay with them taking a few months—but the minute I get their notes back, I’m ready to jump in again. That’s usually not long enough. (I also have a fairly good memory.)

Those beta readers and critique partners help in other ways, too. As far more impartial readers who want to help you make your story better (we hope), they have a vested interest in helping you eliminate all the weaknesses. They aren’t as attached to your story and your characters, so they are better at identifying places that don’t do much to move the story forward—the parts where their attention starts wandering. (Also helpful: the parts where they don’t know what you’re talking about.)

Tomorrow we’ll look at what you can do to find those weak tension points yourself—once you’re ready to let go of those things you love so much.

What do you think? How do you get help in identifying which parts drag?

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Technique

Putting the tension in your self-editing

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This entry is part 12 of 26 in the series Tension, suspense and surprise

When you’re editing yourself, it can be hard to see which of your scenes are low in tension. For tension, a scene-level edit is a definite must. For each scene, ask yourself:

  • Character’s goal: Is it clearly stated or irrefutably implied? (That scene goal in the scene chart thing? Yep. Plus, a scene chart and/or spreadsheet is a really convenient here.)
  • Bring on the conflict: Can/should I cut to where the conflict for that goal starts? Is that the worst conflict I could use here?
  • Bring out the conflict: Have I stated why this is a difficult/delicate situation?
  • Length: Is the scene an appropriate length for its significance? (That applies to both word count and the passage of time in the scene.)
  • Setting: Could another setting lend more tension to this scene?
  • Purpose: Does this move the story forward? Is my reason for having this scene good enough to justify this scene, or any scene at all?
  • Ending: Does the scene end with a disaster for my POV character’s goal? Do we cut away at the worst possible moment, something that will induce the reader to find out what happens next?
  • Finally, rating: as Noah Lukeman recommends in The Plot Thickens, rate the scene tension on a scale of 1 to 10.

Another method here is to read the story backwards, scene-by-scene. Or, I guess, you could jump around as long as you made sure you covered everything. That way, you know each scene will stand on its own—but if you change anything important, especially near the beginning, you’ll just have to go through and fix all that again. (Which can cut both ways, of course.)

Of course, this whole method requires brutal honesty. No rating a scene higher because your heroine gets off a few zingers, no keeping a scene that doesn’t serve any real purpose because it has that beautiful paragraph that it took you a month to write. Cut and paste your favorite parts (or the whole scene) into another document and you never have to actually “lose” anything.

Finding and fixing low tension scenes is just the beginning of making sure your story keeps your readers hooked. Tomorrow we’ll look at finding problems with the overarching suspense in your story. (Gulp!)

What do you think? What do you look for to find low-tension scenes?

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Technique

Assessing your suspense with pacing and promises

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This entry is part 13 of 26 in the series Tension, suspense and surprise

If assessing your own tension is hard, critiquing your own suspense level is even harder. But there are a few things we can try to look at objectively to help us find the places where our suspense gets weak. Examining the pacing, the promises and the parallels can point us to places where we need to punch up the suspense.

Pacing

The first place we can look is at the pacing. At Edittorrent, Alicia Rasley once defined pacing as “a measure of how frequently important plot events happen in your story, how closely occurring they are.”

To examine this, make a list of the 10-20 most important events in your story (things like Plot Point 1, the Climax, the Dark Moment, the Resolution, the Inciting Incident). Then go back to your scene chart and highlight those scenes (note that some of them may take more than one scene). Literally—select the whole row in the spreadsheet or draw a big, fat star on the card with a marker.

Then look at the whole—zoom out until you can see all the rows on the spreadsheet or layout the cards in order and stand back. Where are the big gaps between important events? That may be a point where the suspense is starting to wear thin—so take a careful look at those long stretches of unhighlightable scenes. Make sure they’re giving the reader something to look forward to, some reason to move on to the next scene—like a promise.

Promises

Promises are key to creating suspense. Suspense is all about anticipation—and when we promise the reader some event, we put them in suspense. You can add another column to your scene chart of promises made in a scene, and another for promises fulfilled. (In the example below, I used lettering to keep track of the promises, and rated the importance/tension of the promise on a scale of 1-10, to make things easier and keep track of the relative importance of the promise.)

Scene Promise Fulfilled
7 She’ll meet him at dawn (D)—6 A fulfilled
8 – C fulfilled
9 He’ll kill her (E)—10 B delayed
10 – D fulfilled; E denied

Note that not every promise we make must be fulfilled in the next scene, or the next time we come to it. In fact, delaying promises, while reiterating that they’re coming and how important they are, is a great way to increase the suspense. (Plus, this handy chart makes sure we don’t forget anything 😉 .)

Those in-between sections from the highlighting exercise can be a great place to look for these (since the important events are probably already setting up and fulfilling a number of promises). So has it been a long time since we’ve seen any promises made, fulfilled, delayed or denied?

Tomorrow, we’ll look at how parallels can show us places to punch up the suspense.

What do you think? How can we look at our pacing? What else can pacing and promises show us?

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Technique

Make sure parallels pack a punch for suspense

This entry is part 14 of 26 in the series Tension, suspense and surprise

I have a guest post up at LDS Publisher today on setting up an author website—you might recognize it if you’ve been around here for a while 😉 .

By parallels, I mean scenes that repeat something from the previous ones, or very recent scenes—the same character goal, level of tension, or even setting. Now, parallels can, of course, be used for good—but they can also be ignored for evil to our detriment.

Parallels for good

Within reason, parallels can show off recurring themes, symbols, and the importance of characters or settings. Well-chosen repetition draws attention to itself unobtrusively—it makes readers sit up and take notice without (“Hey, this is the third scene on the dock; what might that mean?”) without stopping the story.

Parallels to our detriment

On the other hand, parallels can be over done, or completely unintentional.

Scenes in the same setting can be repetitive, and may also be a sign that not enough is moving in the story. Maybe not, of course—you could have the whole thing take place inside a single room, but this may be one area to look at. As with the tension chart, we can look at whether there’s another possible setting that might enhance the conflict or add a new layer of meaning.

Scenes with the same character goal are often a sign that the character isn’t making enough progress. While we definitely don’t want to make things easy for our characters, watching a character fail repeatedly at the same thing wears down the suspense. We may begin not to care whether they’re going to succeed or not, unless each scene has high tension—or the character goal can be refined to relate to the specific events, conflict and disaster for that scene.

But probably most important are the sections where the tension level doesn’t change or varies only slightly for several scenes in a row. In Writing Mysteries, one writer shared some advice from an editor: “I must not try to keep everything at high pitch all the way through a story. Excitement, if too steady, can be as boring as having nothing at all happening” (109).

One way to look at this visually is to use the tension rating from your scene chart. In most spreadsheet software, you can create a line graph from that column of data—Kaye Dacus calls this an “EKG” for your story (you know, an electrocardiogram? Like a heartbeat chart?).

Naturally, at the climax of a book, the tension will be quite high, probably for several scenes. But is the tension flat in there? Are there other “plateaus” or “plains”? Does the tension start (or the promises from yesterday) out much higher than it ends?

If the end isn’t satisfying because it doesn’t match the tension of the rest of the book, don’t lower the suspense! Fix the end!! Change things up in plains and plateaus—if you can, add what looks like a reprieve, or a rest for a little bit before plunging them back into danger.

What do you think? How else can parallels point out problems with suspense?

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Technique

Tension fix: Cut to the chase

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This entry is part 15 of 26 in the series Tension, suspense and surprise

One of the ways that I’ve found to increase tension as I’ve read a bunch of craft books and reread my WIP is to pull readers into scenes and create tension quickly.

Our scene openings are really key in establishing tension early on. Many times, however, we spend the beginning of the scene “warming up”—rehashing the last scene or sequel, running through mundane events, working up to a conflict (or even to a scene goal). Even after I’d edited specifically focused on making scene goals clear, I still found many scenes meandering near the beginning, wandering around until we found a conflict.

The first step is to make our POV character’s scene goal clear. Often, that will be stated explicitly: she’s waiting for her mystery date or he headed into the office to check on the Q4 numbers. (Thrilling—though I actually do know someone shopping an MG financial thriller, so maybe it could work.) Sometimes it’ll be pretty darn clear from the way we ended the previous scene: the couple just had a fight, and now he’s at a florist.

If the character’s goal or purpose isn’t early in the scene, we can risk losing our readers. And if we don’t get those characters to work on those scene goals, we can risk losing our readers. And if those characters don’t do something interesting—find a source of tension—pretty quick, we can risk losing our readers. (They’re just fickle like that.)

I’ve said before that conflict is at the heart of tension—just as conflict is at the heart of any fully-imagined scene.

Once we’ve established the character’s goal, explicitly or implicitly, we should bring on the conflict. Maybe he’s headed to the florist but—the elevator’s broken—the stairs are being painted. He twists his ankle getting down from the fire escape—the nearest florist is closed—he can’t get a cab—he gets hit by the bus he’s trying to catch. Notice that the conflict doesn’t have to start huge—he doesn’t have to jump straight to the disaster.

It doesn’t even have to be big—maybe the florist doesn’t carry her favorite kind of flowers, or after he pays, he remembers she’s allergic. But don’t just leave him in there, pondering over whether to get daffodils or dianthus.

Along with this, we can look at the whole scene to see what we can tighten. Eliminate unnecessary or redundant words and use powerful, fast-paced language instead. Check out this tightening checklist at the Ruby-Slippered Sisterhood for help.

What do you think? Is there a time when we need long sections of thought between the goal and the conflict?

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Technique

Is it suspense or surprise?

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This entry is part 15 of 26 in the series Tension, suspense and surprise

This series on Tension, Suspense and Surprise is now available as a free PDF!

Surprise and suspense might seem like polar opposites to be included in the same series. After all, one is all about making promises and putting off their fulfillment, while the other comes out of nowhere. But really, I think they’re just two ways of handling all the new information you’ll give readers in a story—and in some ways, they’re just opposite ends of a spectrum.

You’ve got a huge event coming in your novel, and you have two choices. You can lead up to it with a lot of anticipation, promises, foreshadowing and/or dramatic irony—building suspense. Or you can throw your readers for a loop and just drop it on them (though at least a little foreshadowing is usually good here—hence the spectrum).

Alfred Hitchcock has famously explained the difference (emphasis added):

There is a distinct difference between ‘suspense’ and ‘surprise’, and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I’ll explain what I mean.

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, ‘Boom!’ There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table, and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the décor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene.

The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: ‘You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There’s a bomb underneath you and it’s about to explode!’

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second case we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.

—Hitchcock by François Truffaut, p 79-80, as quoted by senses of cinema

Not to disagree with my good friend Alfred, but both surprise and suspense are important. For major events and big promises, suspense is generally better. But for smaller events—especially things that don’t need the extra explaining and won’t live up to the level of suspense—surprise is a great thing.

If we lead up to all the events in a story, we run the risk of being too predictable. If we lead up to none of them, our readers are more likely to experience PTSD than suspense. One is probably better for your event and your story.

How do you determine whether your event should be a surprise or be used to create suspense? Hitchcock’s guideline is a starting place: if it’s a twist ending, surprise is pretty dang important. On the other hand, if that surprise would heighten the suspense throughout the book (without dragging it out too much) and if you can set it up for the audience to know without informing the characters, you could think about whether you could use the extra layer of suspense.

Conversely, consider whether you spend too long building up to minor events—what if you cut all the foreshadowing? Would the reader be slighted or delighted when the surprise is sprung?

What do you think? How do you decide whether an event will be used for suspense or surprise?

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