Tag Archives: promise

Suspense fix: Stack promises

11 February 2010 Jordan

This entry is part 23 of 26 in the series Tension, suspense and surprise

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Way back when, I recommended assessing your story’s suspense taking a look at the promises you were making and fulfilling. The example assessment I used (completely made up, of course) showed a list of promises made in various scenes, tracking their progress in subsequent scenes (whether they were fulfilled, delayed or denied). Just so you don’t have to click through again, here you go:

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

We have a number of simultaneous, conflicting promises building here—a great set up for suspense. But it’s the last scene here that got me thinking. In that scene, apparently, we’re fulfilling her promise of meeting him at dawn, and obviously not fulfilling his promise to kill her. Really, this shouldn’t say that there are no promises made here—we should use the fulfillment of a promise to introduce a new, bigger promise.

Those two promises kept us in suspense, and we’ve now released that anticipation if he just decides, “Oh, I won’t kill her after all. She seems kinda nice.” The suspense level (and probably tension, too) bottoms out.

Instead of just letting it go, we can use this opportunity to add a new promise—since both of those characters have fulfilled or lost their promises, they need a new one to keep us in suspense. It doesn’t always have to come in the same scene, but it had better come pretty quick.

I’m planning to use this myself in my next round of revisions. I spend a while foreshadowing (aka promising and creating anticipation) a meeting between two characters. If they met and were glad/mad/sad to see one another, that lowers the suspense level for their storyline. That release can damage the suspense in my story—or I can channel the previous suspense into a new, related promise. Now character Z has to get character Q to do something, or his whole plan—and maybe their lives—could be in jeopardy.

What do you think? How do you stack promises to create suspense? How have you seen this in other books?

Technique

Assessing your suspense with pacing and promises

27 January 2010 Jordan 3 Comments

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?

Photo credit: John Bounds

Jordan McCollum