The Fire in Fiction (22 page)

Now, hold on. This is all backstory and setup. Stuff like that bogs down most openings. It's unnecessary junk that the author thinks we need to know to understand his characters, but actually is for the author's benefit not ours. So how does Doetsch get away with it? He does so by making each scene genuinely narrative; that is, by presenting a problem
(bridging conflict
in my terminology) and keeping us constantly wondering what will happen with line-by-line micro-tension. (We'll discuss that in depth in chapter eight.)

After fifty pages of Michael's bridging conflict—
fifty pages!—
Doetsch finally puts the main problem in place: Michael and Mary don't have health insurance. She's briefly between jobs; he's starting out. They decide to save money for the three months before Mary's new benefits kick in. Unfortunately, during this window they learn that Mary has aggressive ovarian cancer. Treating it will cost $250,000. To pay for it, Michael has no choice but to break his solemn vow to Mary, and the conditions of his parole, by thieving. Enter Finster, who wants Michael to steal a pair of keys from the Vatican.

Fifty pages of setup is excessive—or is it? In the hands of a lesser writer those fifty pages would be dull and obstructive. Agents and editors would reject with comments like
slow to get underway.
What is meant by
slow,
however, is really lack of tension. Tension is the technique that makes any action necessary and riveting, even ordinarily slack passages such as travel, mulling over prior events, drinking tea or coffee, or relaxing in a nice hot bath.

Allow me to digress for a moment on this business of thriller openings. It's highly important and too little understood.

Beginners' beginnings indulge in scenery descriptions, arrival, setup, backstory, and all manner of low-tension material, but unintentionally. More experienced writers know better. They get the plot going. A frequent choice, especially in thrillers, is a grabber prologue in which an anonymous killer slaughters a hapless victim.
Seize their attention and don't let it go!
Right?

The problem with slamming a killer on stage and hitting the readers with immediate violence is that we have no reason to care. We know nothing about these characters and, worse, are inured to violence. Real life violence is unforgettable and life changing. Violence in movies, on TV, or in novels is ho-hum. Even if visually fresh, we're still not emotionally invested.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not recommending fifty pages of backstory and setup for most novelists. But for thriller writers who grasp
the methods of micro-tension and are committed to using them all the time (trust me, that is less than one percent of all fiction writers), there is enormous benefit in getting readers deeply involved with characters before trying to put over a premise that they will resist.

Okay, thanks. Back to
The Thieves of Heaven.

Does Doetsch succeed? I'd say so. The middle third of his novel is a highly researched and effectively detailed account of Michael's theft of the keys to Heaven. (It turns out he must steal them not once but three times.) Doetsch also effectively weaves in Michael's atheism, which stands in for any reader skepticism. Michael's motive is to save his wife, who does believe, so no matter what your own orientation you have a way to enjoy the story without having to accept an unwelcome postulate. The conflicts of the secondary character Paul Busch are also developed, as are Mary's cancer struggle and her faith in Michael. A secondary villain also gets page time: the serial killer who was the cause of Michael's arrest.

Talk about packing a plot! Doetsch makes sure there's plenty to occupy readers who may not be willing to buy that Satan is a German billionaire. Michael doesn't either, or at least not for a long while. Finally, though, deep into the novel he realizes what Finster really is and the horrible mistakes he's made. He even persuades his buddy Paul.

Does Michael, or more properly Doetsch, persuade us? By then it doesn't matter. We're afraid because Michael is afraid.

Are you willing to commit to the same level of character building, constant tension, research, and multiple-point-of-view plotting? You are? I accept your willingness but pardon my cocked eyebrow. The proof is on the page.

FOCUS ON VILLAINS

As I mentioned earlier, there's another way to overcome reader skepticism about scenarios that, in reality, are unlikely if not impossible. It involves convincing a reader to fear not what's happening but who is doing it.

Again, this is not as easy as it sounds. Cardboard villains are a staple of the slush pile. Such baddies go about their mean-spirited business for no other reason than that they are evil. Uh, right. I am willing to believe that pure evil exists, I guess, but most of the time bad actions have a comprehensible basis no matter how hard they may be to discern. In any event, villains whose motives we can understand are much scarier than those whose motive is merely
Mwoo-ha-ha-ha!

One of our most reliable thriller writers is Greg Iles. In his novel
The Footprints of God
(2003) he took a detour from his usual story patterns to spin a chiller about a supercomputer poised to take over the world, maybe even
wipe out humanity!
Yeah, I know. Give me a break. I can't even get Wi-Fi to work at Starbucks and you're telling me an electronic super-brain is going to take over the world and eradicate human life?

Again, the challenge for Iles is to overcome reader skepticism. He does this in several ways. First, he begins his action
in medias res
—in the middle of the action. As
The Footprints of God
opens, Andrew Fielding, a senior scientist on a secret NSA research project called Trinity, has died apparently of heart failure. One of his colleagues, the novel's hero David Tennant, doesn't buy that. He thinks it was murder. And he's right.

Let's back up. Trinity is an effort to use a new supercomputing technology to create a computer that cannot just think like a human but do so millions of times faster. Building a brain from the ground up is too difficult, though, so the plan is to scan the brains of the senior scientists on the project with an incredibly powerful new MRI technology and thus install an
existing
brain in the computer's memory banks. You can see where this is going? Yep, conflict: whose brain is going to live forever? That is the multibillion-dollar question that drives much of the plot.

Iles has anticipated our skepticism, luckily, and makes sure that we have little time to reflect. His hero, an ethicist assigned to the project by the President, is on the run as the novel opens. (The President, unfortunately, is in China and cannot be reached.) Right from page one, David Tennant fears for his life. Why? Not because of the big brain that even now is stretching tentacles into all the world's databases. No, the threat to David's life is far scarier: It's human.

Now, I'll bet you didn't know that some scientific projects are so secret and sensitive that researchers not only are sworn to secrecy but work under threat of physical termination. This happens right here in the United States. Amazing, huh? Well okay, only in thrillers and Iles is experienced enough to know he's got to sell us on this premise. That is why he lavishes considerable page time on Trinity's security enforcer, Geli Bauer. Geli was hired under a contract that requires her to follow all orders without question, including killing anyone that she is instructed to whack.

Are you buying that? Iles doesn't expect you to, which is why he takes seven chapters, a total of sixty-one pages, to build up Geli as the perfect instrument to enforce the wishes of Trinity's mastermind, Peter Godin
(God
-in, get it?). We learn the scope of Geli's authority, her Army background, her kill-on-command contract, her facial scar, her father (a hawkish general out of
Dr. Strangelove),
and more. We see her in action. She is single-minded and unstoppable.

All that would make Geli no more than a cardboard baddie, so Iles goes further. Midway through the novel Geli gets a double dose of additional motivation courtesy of her nominal superior, John Skow. Skow reveals to her the full extent ofTrinity's ambitions. Peter Godin is dying. If he expires before the Trinty computer is up and running, billions of dollars will have been wasted and Geli will be blamed. (She killed Andrew Fielding, you see, the only computer genius able to make Trinity work.) In case that is not enough to keep her going, Skow also informs Geli that Trinity's security is actually being supervised by her own father. Their hostile relationship insures that Geli will stay involved if only to keep battling with her heartless dad.

Did you follow all that? Never mind. The point is, Iles doesn't assume that we'll accept Geli Bauer's actions without question. He continues to humanize and reinforce her throughout the story. Her dynamic planning scenes take the place of the limp, low-tension aftermath scenes that a less experienced thriller writer would use to
fill out the manuscript. Iles keeps his onstage villain active, motivated, and understandable.

What if you are writing a hybrid mystery-thriller, a story in which the identity of the villain is hidden? How do you plumb the depths of your bad guy if the most you've got to work with is an anonymous point of view? How can you get your readers involved with your villain without giving him away?

David Baldacci faced this challenge in his thriller
The Collectors
(2006), a sequel to
The Camel Club
mentioned in chapter two. The novel opens with two acts of violence: the assassination of the Speaker of the House and the locked-room murder of the director of the Rare Books Room at the Library of Congress. That archivist, though, leaves behind an astonishing rarity in his private collection: a hitherto unknown copy of the first book printed in America, the
Bay Psalm Book.
We are also quickly introduced to an Aldrich Ames-type traitor who is selling America's most sensitive secrets to the highest bidders.

This traitor, Roger Seagraves, is the novel's onstage villain, and accordingly, Baldacci spends many pages making sure that we see Seagraves meticulously at work as well as the reasons for his perfidious actions. But behind Roger Seagraves is a mastermind. This Mr. Big's identity is a mystery. Fine, but that presents Baldacci with a problem: How to make this mastermind powerful and frightening when we never meet him?

Indeed, no one's even sure there
is
a mastermind, or even anything awful afoot. Enter Baldacci's team of eccentric protagonists. The Camel Club is made up of four average-yet-extraordinary guys who have no particular mandate to act except that they are unusually perceptive and alert to trouble in the shadowy realms of politics and power in America.

As mentioned earlier, the leader of the Camel Club is a quirky-but-highly-committed man who calls himself Oliver Stone. He sometimes lives in a tent opposite the White House marked by a sign that proclaims simply
I want the truth.
The other members of the Camel Club are a loading dockworker, an obsessive-compulsive

computer genius, and conveniently, a clerk at the Library of Congress. The clerk, Caleb Shaw, faints upon finding his dead director and winds up in a hospital. In Shaw's hospital room Oliver Stone debates with the dockworker, Reuben Rhodes, whether the archivist's death is significant or even suspicious:

"The guy died from a coronary, Oliver. It happens every day."

"But probably not for someone who'd just been given a clean bill of health by Johns Hopkins."

"Okay, so he popped a blood vessel or fell and cracked his skull. You heard Caleb: The guy was all alone in there."

"As far as Caleb knows, he was, but he couldn't possibly know for sure."

"But the security camera and the pass card," Reuben protested.

"All good points, and they may very well confirm that Jonathan DeHaven was alone when he died. But that still doesn't prove he wasn't killed."

"Come on, who'd have a grudge against a librarian?" Reuben asked.

"Everyone has enemies. The only difference is for some people you just have to look harder to find them."

It is nothing more than Stone's suspicion, then, that sets the Camel Club onto an investigation. What they will dig up, of course, is a nasty conspiracy that ties together the assassination of the Speaker, the death of the Rare Books Room director, and the forged (sorry)
Bay Psalm Book.

Because Mr. Big's identity remains a secret until the novel's final pages, Baldacci doesn't try to build up his ultimate bad guy. Instead he builds up the Camel Club. Their incremental success, dangerous scrapes, and growing convictions convince us step-by-step that evil is at work. The villain becomes stronger, in other words, because the heroes prove him so.

We've now examined two methods for overcoming reader resistance to improbable premises, both involving buildup of characters instead of building up the scary scenario. There is also a third way.

VERISIMILITUDE: PSEUDOSCIENCE, GENUINE FACTS

If you have ever argued with a dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy nut, you know they cannot be budged. For your every doubt they have an answer. Facts and figures are massed in their favor. Never mind that what they believe is nonsense; it's
true.