Elements of Fiction Writing - Conflict and Suspense (22 page)

Disco Freddy is a bit irrational, wouldn’t you say? He provides a momentary bit of
What is this all about?
in the reader. The nice thing is, I used this character later on. Nothing went to waste.

This was a Raymond Chandler idea. If you’re writing along and the going gets dull, he said, just bring in a guy with a gun.

Justify it later.

It’s a great trick (yes, it’s okay to call these things “tricks of the trade.” If you’re angling for a position on the Yale faculty, you can call them “advanced literary operandi”). It brings instant conflict, and juices up your story.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be a literal gun. It can be almost anything:

• An unexpected guest
  
• Someone from the past
  
• An upsetting phone call
  
• An accident
  
• A process server
  
• A cop
  
• A nun
  
• A con artist
  
• An animal
  
• Geraldo Rivera
  
• A news item
  
• A death
  
• A sudden shock (“You’re fired!” or “Will you marry me?”)
  

And so on. It’s up to you, as always. Try stuff. See what happens. Let the justification come later.

Just continue to think
trouble, trouble, trouble. Make it worse. Turn up the heat.

Let conflict come out and play.

T
he greatest storytelling experience of my life occurred when I was in high school. A friend of mine ran the film club and arranged a showing of Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho
. I’d never seen the movie before. Not on television or anywhere else.

For the screening, he booked the auditorium and showed the film at night.

The place was packed.

And when the lights went down and the movie started, the place was electric with anticipation.

Some who had seen the movie before knew when to scream.

They screamed when Janet Leigh first arrives at the Bates Motel.

Of course, when she takes her infamous shower, the screams were all over the place. Maybe even I screamed. I couldn’t hear myself. But I was so caught up in the movie by that point I didn’t really notice anything else but my own pulse. I was gripped by the power of Hitchcockian suspense. I was in a dream.

When Martin Balsam started walking toward the house, the screams were intense. When Vera Miles started toward that same house, the screams could have cracked plaster. And they didn’t stop till the end of the movie.

I’m telling you, that’s the way to see
Psycho
for the first time. Not on television. Not alone. See it at night, in a crowded theater. If there is thunder and lightning outside, so much the better.

That’s the feeling you should be going for. Not scream-out-loud suspense necessarily but the kind that holds you in its grip and won’t let go.

The kind that has the readers asking,
What happens next?

That’s suspense. And every novel needs it.

In an interview, best-selling author Sandra Brown said, “Suspense is another essential. That doesn’t necessarily mean the ‘Boo!’ kind of suspense. Every novel should have suspense. It’s the element that keeps the reader turning the pages. I try and pose a question, subliminally, to my reader on the first page if possible, and I withhold the answer to that question until the very final pages. New questions arise along the way, and they’re gradually answered as the story unfolds. But that main, overriding question, the one that makes a story out of a mere idea, is the last one to be answered.”

Suspense in fiction creates a feeling of pleasurable uncertainty. The reader doesn’t know what’s going to happen, but is compelled to keep reading to find out. That feeling must, of course, permeate a genre thriller; but it is just as essential for a character-driven or literary novel. Unless readers feel pleasurable uncertainty, the story will drag.

Suspense is
the delay of resolution.
It’s from the French, meaning to “cause to hang.” You are letting the answer hang out there, and readers keep going to find out when the hanging thing will finally be resolved.

The more emotionally involved the reader is with the hanging question, the more worry generated about the characters and therefore the greater the degree of suspense.

A character might be looking for his pajamas. Where are they? That question is hanging in the air, but it’s unlikely to generate a whole lot of reader concern.

Unless, of course, his pajamas are where he has the note that is the key to the mystery, and some cleaning service took them while he was asleep.

That’s the goal: to create such a bond with the characters in a plot of high stakes that the reader has to know how the whole thing shakes out—and to do it for the whole length of the book.

In this section, we will take suspense apart and look at it from all angles.

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:

There is a lot of crossover here. A thriller can have a central mystery, as in
The Da Vinci Code.
And a mystery can have plenty of suspense, as in
The Big Sleep.
A deft handling of both elements makes for a hugely pleasurable reading experience.

In
chapter four
, I talked about the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. You know those giant cables that drape over pylons? Those super-heavy-duty cables are actually made up of many smaller ones, twisted together.

And that’s a good way to think of suspense, too. Different strands working together to support the whole.

I like to think of suspense in the following ways:

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.

You might have written the best chase scenes in the history of literature, but if there is no sense that the POV character is in real trouble, the chase is of little moment.

In
Velocity
, Dean Koontz sets up a dizzying dilemma for the ordinary guy Lead, Billy Wiles. Coming out to his car after a bartending stint, he finds this note:

What kind of sick joke is this? Billy, rattled by it, takes the note to his policeman friend, who says it’s a prank. Forget about it. Billy tries, but when six hours has passed, Billy wonders, has someone been murdered? Surely not.

And we wonder, too. But Koontz doesn’t give the answer. Billy goes into work the next day, and as he goes about his routine we can’t help wondering if there has indeed been a murder.

Koontz can make us wait now, string us along as he will, because he has set up a hugely suspenseful premise.

Can you formulate a macro suspense sentence, one that sums up all the stakes for the Lead throughout the novel? If you’ve done your work on
death
as the stake, you should be able to do it.

Will Scarlett survive the Civil War, save her home, and find true love at last? (
Gone With the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell)

Will Dr. David Beck find his wife, thought to be dead for eight long years? (
Tell No One
by Harlan Coben)

Will Prince Albert be able to overcome his stutter in time to rally his people against the Nazi menace? (
The King’s Speech,
screenplay by David Seidler)

Try it for your novel now and keep that sentence handy as a reminder.

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 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.

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:

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:

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.

T
he term
cliff-hanger
comes from the old movie serials that used to play in theaters. Back in the silent era, and up through the 1950s, movie going was usually an event. You didn’t go out to see a movie. You went
to the movies,
which meant your local movie house. You’d go see whatever they were showing that week.

Many times it was a double feature. You’d have the B picture and the A picture. The B was the shorter, cheaper film. Then, before the main feature, the theater would have other small items, like a cartoon or a newsreel.

But the theater’s main concern was to get you to come back next week. Every week. So the studios supplied the serial. This was a high adventure of some sort that would be shown in weekly installments between the features.

Perhaps the most famous of these was the silent serial
The Perils of Pauline.
Featuring actress Pearl White, it was the ultimate “damsel in distress” series. Pauline would be the prey of all manner of dastardly men who sought her demise. At the end of each installment, Pauline was usually in some form of mortal danger so the audience would
have to
come back the following week.

One such danger was Pauline hanging off a cliff, looking down at the vast crevasse below.

Thus cliff-hanger, which we will define as any moment of unresolved danger, either outside or inside the character. It can come at the end of a scene, but almost never at the end of a book. The latter is too frustrating for a reader who has invested so much emotion in a character.

The concept of a cliff-hanger in literature goes back at least to Charles Dickens, who wrote many works as serials. In this way, more readers could afford the installments and the publisher reached a wider audience. It was Dickens’s job to create a hunger for the next installment by ending the present one with a need to read on. (This installment idea was famously mimicked by Stephen King in the original release of
The Green Mile.
)

The value of the cliff-hanger was picked up by writers in the old pulp fiction days. Back then there was a never-ending need for “novelettes,” works of 20,000 to 30,000 words to fill up the pages of fiction magazines printed on cheap pulp paper. Americans gobbled these up, and many a fine writer cut his teeth on these entertainment vehicles.

One such writer was Dwight V. Swain, who went on to teach the craft of commercial fiction for many years at the University of Oklahoma. In his classic tome,
Techniques of the Selling Writer,
Swain quotes from a letter he received from the editor of one of these pulp magazines:

That is the value of the cliff-hanger.

Does that mean every novel has to have scenes, back and forth, of characters in physical danger? Of course not.

But it does mean that when you reach the end of a chapter you want to have something there that compels the reader to turn the page.

The art and craft of using a cliff-hanger is in “hiding” the technique from the reader. You don’t want the reader to stop reading and mutter, “Hey, this writer is trying to manipulate me!”

How do you hide cliff-hangers?

1. You get the reader fully bonded with the Lead character and his death struggle
   first.
   This way, you have the reader thinking about the character and not about your technique.
   
2. You vary the type and intensity of the cliff-hanger.
   

Let’s take a look at the different types of 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:

• A bad thing happens.
  
• A bad thing is about to happen.
  
• A bad thing might happen soon.
  

You can end a scene with something bad happening to your character. If you stop there, you have readers wondering just how bad it was. They read on to find out.

Or, in some cases, it can end with the worst possible thing: the death of a character. If that’s so, you want the reader reading on to find out who killed her, or why she was killed, or what the consequences of her death are going to be.

Take the scene in Raymond Chandler’s
Farewell, My Lovely,
where private detective Philip Marlowe is driven to a remote location by a couple of toughs. They tell Marlowe to get out and start walking:

So Marlowe has been knocked into unconsciousness. A bad thing.

Or the prologue of
Final Seconds
by John Lutz and David August. Will Harper, a NYPD bomb expert, is dispatched to defuse a bomb at a high school, along with his partner Jimmy Fahey. At the end of the prologue:

Chapter one begins two and a half years later. How, we want to know, is Harper dealing with the bad thing that happened?

This is perhaps the truest form of cliff-hanger, for it we leave our character hanging on a cliff, a very bad thing is about to happen—he’ll fall!

In the aptly titled
Bad Things Happen
by Harry Dolan, David Loogan, who is a suspect in a murder, is renting a college professor’s home. One night he is awakened from a nightmare. He thinks someone might be downstairs. He makes his way to the kitchen where he gets a knife.

Bad thing about to happen? Dolan makes us wait, for the scene ends right there.

This is where you end with something like a premonition. Often a description of setting can do that for you, as it does here, in this excerpt from
Strangers
by Dean Koontz:

Koontz does not always hit us with the
bad things
. But quite often he will leave the impression that they are just around the corner.

And so should you at various points. Feelings, moods, thoughts, premonitions, dialogue, and the way the setting looks to the characters are all tools for this type of 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:

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

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 …

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
:

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?

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 may find that leaving a scene in the middle of things gives the feel of forward momentum. For example:

Nothing wrong with that. It’s an emotional cliff-hanger. But what if the scene ended this way:

This gives an entirely different impetus for the reader. The scene hasn’t really ended yet. There’s got to be more coming. Eve’s reaction. Charlie’s next move.

You, the writer, can answer that early or late. You could begin the
next chapter
at the very same spot:

Or you could jump to another POV scene and make the reader wait. The point is, you have lots of choices and ways to put your friend Suspense to good use.

Cliff-hangers are one of the best suspense techniques you have. Every chapter in your novel can end with a little bit of “hang time” for readers. And why not do that? Don’t leave them comfortable. Give them that pleasurable uncertainty that makes them need to flip the page.