Tag Archives: suspense

Technique

Upping your tension, scene-by-scene

In my presentation on structural self-editing, I mention that one column of the scene chart in particular helped to make my story better: the tension column. So when I stumbled across a post on how to use that tension column in my archives, I knew I had to share!

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?

Photo credit: Samuraijohnny

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Technique

Varying the tension level to keep your readers’ interest

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This entry is part 25 of 26 in the series Tension, suspense and surprise

Or, How writing is like spicy mac

A couple weeks ago, my family went out to lunch. We got a side of macaroni and cheese that was advertised, correctly, as having a little kick to it. The spice was too much for the kids, so my husband and I ended up eating almost all of the macaroni and cheese.

Macaroni and Cheese @ Seersucker RestaurantThe first few bites were really tasty (and I’m really picky about mac’n’cheese). Within a few bites, the spice began to set in. It wasn’t too spicy—no tears, no runny noses—but I could see why my kids needed water.

But once we were halfway through our meal, my husband and I both realized that we weren’t really tasting the mac or the cheese. After a while, all you could taste was the spice.

Early on in our writing, we usually learn early on that we need tension and conflict in our scenes. Tension, suspense and conflict are vital, and few people will read fiction without that “spice.”

However, sometimes it’s easy to go overboard on this vital element. At the climax, we’ll probably have a long passage of high-tension scenes, but if every scene of the book features world! threatening! consequences!, all you can taste is the spice—and the book feels just as one-note as if every scene had no tension at all.

Spice isn’t the spice of life—it’s variety. So change up the tension levels in your scenes.

Ten ways to change up the tension in your scenes

Flatline1. Use humor. A joke can reduce the tension in a scene, or just give the readers a break from unremitting THE WHOLE PLANET WILL DIE!!! drama.

2. Switch storylines. Changing to another group of characters doing something else often helps to vary the tension level. This also works in reverse—if the tension gets too low in one storyline, switch to another, then change back to a point where something more interesting is happening.

3. Bump up your character’s proactivity. Maybe your characters aren’t facing chase scene after chase scene, but they’ve been kidnapped and they’re being dragged around the country, and they’re freaking out the whole time. That level of tension, that helpless response, makes the tension (and the characters!) seem one-note. Don’t let your characters just wring their hands and whine. Do something!

4. Change your character’s goal. If we’ve had five scenes in a row of your characters trying to do the exact same thing, and encountering the same problem, or the same level of problems, something’s got to change. (You know what they say about the definition of insanity?)

5. Change the source of the threat. Maybe your last eight scenes have been at a 7 on the tension scale. You might be able to bump some of them up

6. Use dramatic irony. Dramatic irony is when the audience knows something the characters don’t, usually something that will pull the rug from under the characters. If you have scenes from the antagonist’s POV, for example, you can set up dramatic irony (and switch to that storyline to intercut the tension).

7. Have your characters reach a goal. Throughout the book, we mostly try to frustrate our characters’ goals because it increases the suspense and tension. To change things up, have them accomplish something—it could be something small, like retrieving an important artifact, or it could be something major, like defeating the bad guy (who turns out to be only a minor villain).

8. Give us a campfire scene. Let the characters celebrate and relax, if only for a minute. Especially good after a victory that turns out to be false.

9. Use a sequel. You may not have the time or place to have a celebration scene right now, but if your character has a minute, he or she might be able to go through the stages of an emotional reaction to the action, naturally a bit lower in tension.

10. Show the recovery. You’ve got hearts racing, stomachs clenching and palms sweating (dude, gesture clichés). But do your characters ever stop doing those things? Do they strive to (or just naturally) get their visceral responses under control? Take a deep breath, take a look around, take a minute to reorient your goals before you plunge in again.

Again, tension is absolutely vital to a novel—but having all your scenes with equally high tension is just as stultifying as all scenes with low tension. We don’t want every bite of our meal to taste like plain noodle or like plain spice. Vary the tension of your stories to create a truly engaging taste reading experience.

How else can you vary the tension in your scenes?

Photo credits
Macaroni and cheese by David Berkowitz
Flatline by Myles Grant
both via Flickr/CC

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Technique

Which is better: suspense or surprise?

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I’ve been blogging about writing for almost four years (!), so I probably have some gems lurking in the archives. I picked the most popular post from January 2010 to share today. This post was originally part of the series on Tension, Suspense and Surprise, which I recently released 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? Come join the conversation!

Photo by Jeremy Stanley

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Technique

Focusing your fiction

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I recently read a friend’s manuscript and realized that she had good scenes and themes, but somehow I was still left feeling like the manuscript wasn’t very focused. That might’ve just been me, but it’s something I want to think about as I work on my current manuscript, where the “BIG” theme is something the narrator isn’t aware of consciously until the end, and a smaller theme is something she does notice and talk about.

Here are a couple things you can do to hone a book’s focus (shared with my friend’s permission, but all details changed to protect her):

  • A scene chart, with special focus on scene goals. This makes sure that each scene drives the story forward. I always do this: make a spreadsheet of all the scenes in my book, whose POV they’re in, what information is conveyed, but most importantly what the POV character’s goal is going into the scene. Most of the time, the character will pretty much state the goal outright at the beginning of the scene.
  • Tension check! This is something I have to do with every book, and I usually do it as part of the scene chart. One of the columns is dedicated to writing out the source of the tension in that scene. If I don’t know, I look for an antagonist or a disaster. Typically most scenes end in disaster, at least from the perspective of the POV character who came into the scene with a stated goal. Then, when I go through and edit the scene based on that, I make sure that tension is there in every page.
  • Stakes check! Again, this can be done in the scene chart, or on a higher level, like chapter or section. Ask what is at stake–what happens if the character doesn’t achieve his or her goal? What are the consequences? Do they know that? Can we be reminded of that? (This can also be a subtype of the tension check.)
  • Think long and hard about the theme (Note that this is post-first draft work most of the time!). I feel like there are two competing themes in the book: one of ignorance being bliss, and one of loving someone being a strength rather than a weakness. This makes it feel like we’re telling almost two different stories. Can you make the themes relate to one another? Make one subordinate to the other? Rephrase/rethink/reframe/re-present one so that they are corollaries? Or maybe pick one and focus on it, and make sure the other stays a subplot?
  • Once you’ve pinned down the theme, look at each scene and each character and each character’s journey. How do they support the theme? (If you’re having trouble with the last point, maybe do this first, writing out what each character’s journey and purpose in the story are currently, and looking at trends before you decide which theme to go with or how to correlate them.) How does that character/scene/journey express or support the theme?Does it serve as a counterexample, and if so, is it presented in a negative light or with negative conclusions? (This is sort of inspired by Holly Lisle’s one-pass revision technique.)
  • Look at the language itself. Is the language specific, concrete and vivid? Can we really see a vivid picture of people (visual and characterization) and settings and emotions and experiences?

What do you think? How else can you help to focus an unfocused theme or story?

Photo by Riccardo Bandiera

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Technique

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Surprise

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A portion of this post was originally part of the Tension, Suspense and Surprise series.

In science, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states, basically, that if you know an object’s momentum, you cannot know its precise location at the exact same time. And to apply this principle in writing . . . okay, I’m pretty much just stealing the name because of the word “Uncertainty.”

Uncertainty doesn’t sound like something we want in our fiction, unless we’re going for experimental or highly literary works. But I think that uncertainty—and its cousin, surprise—are a vital part of a work in any genre.

Uncertainty is what keeps people reading. We have to know if the hero and heroine will get together, or if they’ll defeat the bad guys, etc. The principle actually comes straight from real life (and neuroscience):

Livia Blackburne posted a fascinating study on uncertainty in romance: when college-aged women were shown profiles of men who’d seen and rated the women’s profiles, the women were most attracted to the men when they were not told whether the men had rated them average or highly.

The uncertainty made all the difference—the women who were told the men (imaginary, by the way) rated them highly were interested, but not as much as the uncertain women. The uncertain women also reported thinking about the men more often.

For a writer, uncertainty is a powerful tool, and not just in romance. The uncertainty in any story question is a major factor in keeping people reading, and the question of a developing relationship is the biggest draw in a romance (which, it should be noted, is heavily read by women, of course).

I think part of the reason why that uncertainty is so appealing is that the outcome is something we might not expect. While it’s definitely possible to build the uncertainty around something we’re pretty sure will happen (romance and mysteries generally only have one option for a successful ending, and there’s uncertainty throughout), it’s important to remember that a jolt of something unpredictable is vital for a fresh read.

Or, as Arthur Plotnik says in Spunk & Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style:

Scientists have identified a patch of the forebrain called the nucleus accumbens as a center of pleasure in humans. Imaging shows heightened activity in this area of the brain when people receive a reward—whether sugar treats, money, or drugs. . . .

Unpredictable stimuli excite the nucleus accumbens, while expected stimuli elicit no response. In the experiment that led to this conclusion, researchers Gregory Bruns (Emory University) and E. Read Montague (Baylor College of Medicine) administered squirts of Kool-Aid and plain water to human test subjects in either predictable (alternating) or random patterns. Pleasure-wise, random squirts won it all.

A fresh locution may not be quite the same as Kool-Aid, but writers can extrapolate from the experiment’s conclusion: Brains love that little squirt of surprise. (12)

Uncertainty, and the tension and suspense that come from it, and unexpectedness are both really important in a novel. When you’ve got a huge event coming in your novel you have two choices. You can lead up to it with a lot of anticipation, promises, foreshadowing and/or dramatic irony—building suspense, making it uncertain whether it will happen, generally getting readers anxious. 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?

Photo by Invizible Man

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Technique

Personal, timely stakes for suspense and immediacy

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

One of my writing friends, Marnee, is working on digging deeper and raising the stakes on her WIP. I loved the way she described this:

I wanted all my characters to have a stake in the outcome of their actions. And, I wanted that “stake” to be something immediate. It couldn’t be something without a timeframe. My hero only has a certain time to catch the villain because once the villain realizes he’s on to him, he’ll disappear and my hero will lose his chance. My heroine needs to take the “job” my hero has offered because she needs the money—fast. My villain can’t run and hide even when he’s foiled because of . . . well, something I haven’t figured out yet.

Their needs have to be immediate and volatile and in complete opposition. And they have to be completely invested. No turning back.

I like the combination of personal stakes and a deadline—a great way to create suspense and immediacy, as Marnee points out.

I also like that she’s taking the time to do this for the villain (even if she hasn’t gotten the answer yet). “To be evil” is not a sufficient motivation for the villain’s heinous action. We want our villains to be rounded characters with believable motivations, not just amorphous evil that our hero’s got to defeat. They have to have a dog in this fight or they’ll cash in their chips and go home. So why this person? Why this (despicable) action? It could be something as simple as money—but there are lots of ways to make money. Why this way?

What do you think? How do you do this in your works?

Photo by Dayna Mason

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News & Contests

Guest posting today

I have a guest post today at Jagi Lamplighter’s blog. I’m writing about using something that doesn’t even matter to increase the suspense in your story.

Suspense on a story level and tension on a scene level are both vital to creating a readable story. Tension compels readers to read a scene, while suspense keeps them hooked until the next scene. There are many things we can do to heighten and highlight the tension in our writing. One technique that has been used to great effect is to use something that doesn’t matter at all, something that the reader doesn’t care about.

Click on over to read more!

And welcome to any visitors clicking through from Jagi’s blog! To read more about tension and suspense, check out the blog series. And tomorrow, we’ll be back to our current blog series on backstory.

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Technique

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?

Photo credit: Aart von Bezooyen

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