Tag Archives: promises

News & Contests

Book Spotlight: Promises by Caroline Twede Frank

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My friend Carolyn Twede Frank is publishing her first novel today! Hooray! Promises is about a young girl named Hattie who has to move to a tiny town:

Hattie is barely twelve when her pa’s “business adventures” disrupt her family and move them to the new town of Tropic, nestled in the shadows of old Ebenezer Bryce’s Canyon. Her pa views the town as opportunity. Hattie is hopelessly shy and views it with apprehension; she dreads the task of making new friends. More than anything else, Hattie wants to be like her father—not afraid of meeting new people, talking to strangers, and standing up for herself. So it is with trepidation that she accepts her pa’s challenge and promises to make new friends.

Hattie forms more promises as she struggles to make friends, finding companionship in places she wouldn’t have expected and learning that there is a difference between complaining and standing up for oneself.

Drawn from the memoirs of early Utah settlers, Promises is a heartwarming story of friendship with a touch of mystery and adventure set in the days before Bryce Canyon became a national park.

Carolyn has a great idea to tie the entries in her blog tour together: having us write about promises, too! After reading about her book, I keep thinking about the promises one of my ancestors made. Along with his family, Christian Emil Nielsen joined a new faith in Denmark in the 1850s, when he was about the same age as Hattie. Their family soon decided to immigrate to Utah to join other members of the church, so they would better be able to keep the promises they made when they were baptized.

During the journey, Christian’s father Rasmus kept a journal recording their delays and setbacks. After spending what seemed like months just getting from Denmark to Britain, they finally crossed the Atlantic, and into the Gulf of Mexico. They transferred to a steamship to sail up the Mississippi River. Just past New Orleans, a serious illness swept through the passengers (cholera, if you’d like to know). Rasmus wrote that his wife had begun to show the symptoms.

The next day, Christian took over keeping the journal: both of his parents had died. But with the help of a family friend, Christian and his surviving siblings crossed the plains and arrived in Utah. Christian spent the rest of his life living true to the promises he’d made to God, serving him by helping to tame the wilderness wherever he was assigned.

Read more personal stories about promises on each day of her blog tour!

You can also enter to win a full-sized puppet stage and puppets, value of $290 by participating in Carolyn’s blog tour giveaway. Check out her website or blog for more details.

Carolyn is co-launching her book, Promises, along with Cindy M. Hogan’s Protected, a sequel to Watched. This is one I’m looking forward to, too! A little about Protected:

Christy has the guy. The terrorists have been taken care of, and she has a shot at becoming popular. Life is GREAT! Until they find her. Now she must run and leave behind everything she knows, including herself.

You can follow Cindy’s full blog tour here.

Good luck and happy book birthday, Carolyn & Cindy!

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Technique

Suspense fix: Stack promises

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

Ready to jump on your writing goals? Sign up for the Pen Olympics at Edittorrent to set a goal for yourself to complete during the real Winter Olympics (ending Feb 28)!

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?

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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?

Photo credit: John Bounds

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