Suspense is more than a shot ringing out at midnight

Richard and I ran a Writers’ Group last night at which one of our members read us a piece of her writing. She hoped it might form the start of a memoir; a story of the things she’s been facing in her life.

It began with her waking in the night and experiencing a sense of depletion.

“Could it be my unhappy marriage of 15 years, and my inability to escape? Or perhaps my teenage daughter who has dropped out and will no longer speak to me? Could it be my niece’s struggle with cancer, followed by her painful death, or my desperate attempts to help my sister through this terrible time?” (And so on.)

We explained that she had actually told us the entire book in a couple of paragraphs – too much at once. If you read those, there’s almost no need to read further. We now know what she’s been facing in her life.

For some reason, beginning writers have great difficulty with this. It’s such a temptation to spew everything out the minute it occurs to us. It’s forced us to give a lot of thought to suspense, and how to work with it.

First of all, let’s have a bash at some sort of definition. Suspense is what moves the reader forward. When we think of suspense, we tend to think of shots ringing out at midnight, or a showdown at noon.

We forget that suspense can be forged from the minute changes of attitude between two people. In a romance, we are drawn forward by wondering if they’ll ever be together.

For this to be successful, we must care for the characters, and perhaps recognise ourselves just a little bit.

Tension is always a good method of introducing suspense. Tension can come in the form of person against person, person against the environment or inner conflict. But the reader needs to see it and feel it.

Richard and I like to talk about hooks and promises. Hook your reader and promise them more to come. You can do this anywhere in the text – set it up in one paragraph, pay it off (or explain it) in another, or in the next chapter, or even at the end of your book.

Hooks can be uncertainties that demand completions, or imbalances that demand balancing. The promise lies in the pact between writer and reader that you’ll eventually explain; you’ll bring them back to completion at some stage.

Suspense also derives from good writing. Every scene has a job to do. It develops characters or drives the story forward (or both). If you have a scene that is there merely to describe the pretty scenery, your suspense will be lost.

It stems from a quality of set-up and expectation in the writing, which impels the reader forward. This means not telling them everything at once.

We’re not just talking about information that is crucial to the plot. Give scraps and hints about the background and motivation of your characters – don’t explain it in a great whack of information.

Drop us right into the middle of things, without explaining too much. We’ll catch up with you.

If you start a book: “It was through Martie that I eventually got to meet Susan” it will be more intriguing than if you begin: “I met my wife of 20 years, Susan, through my cousin, Martie, who had known her at school. I’d wanted to meet her for some time, having seen her in the street several times and been intrigued by her air of purpose. After I had pointed her out to Martie, he arranged a party at which I could finally meet her.”

Similarly, our writing student would have been much more intriguing had she said: “Could it be Karen’s struggle to live, through that long, awful year?” rather than explaining so much about her niece’s illness in her first paragraph.