Writing Popular Fiction

by Dean Koontz

  Those are the differences between the mystery and suspense forms. While the mystery is, fundamentally, a rather exhausted vein and is closed in by a number of strictures which we will mention in the next chapter, creatively speaking the suspense novel offers a wider latitude for serious work than any other genre, primarily because it requires only the five basic elements of category fiction and no other special considerations or limits. Science fiction, while wildly imaginative and capable of encompassing the most important themes, generally demands that substantial wordage be given to the carefully considered development of an exotic background and to explanations of the science on which the story is based. Gothics require a certain kind of theme and a relatively rigid plot formula. The Western, by its nature a bastard offspring of the historical novel and thereby limited in scope, also requires a certain type of plot and action and characterization that restricts the author's freedom. Erotic novels demand a quantity and quality of sex scenes around which the main story is built. In suspense, however, no peculiar strictures exist, no plot or thematic or background or character considerations that apply only to it and no other genre. This makes for a vigorous category and explains why some of the cleanest, sparest prose has always been turned out by professional "thriller" writers. Now, for the remainder of this chapter, we will be concerned solely with suspense.

  You should look at the negative first and learn, at the outset, what to avoid as a suspense writer. Several things which will mark your work as less than professional in the eyes of the modern suspense editor are:

  CLICHÉ PLOTS

  Avoid the cliché or corny plots that were hardly acceptable when they were first used, and which are now the stuff of bad television shows and comic books. Do not, for example, propose "secret organizations" who are out to overthrow some government and destroy the world. Only governments themselves have the power to destroy the world. And organizations out to overthrow governments are usually not secret, though their machinations may be. Consider the factions who have talked most loudly, in the last few decades, about overthrowing the United States' system: the Minutemen, a right-wing group of fanatical gun-toters; the SDS, paramilitary left-wing publicity mongers, and other similar and equally vocal organizations. None are in the least bit secret. Never propose a villain who, single-handedly, sets out to destroy the world, no matter how wealthy or resourceful he may be. The modern world is simply too complex for any such schemer to obtain even minimal success; he will appear to be a buffoon and not a real character.

  On the other hand, you may use the theme of pending holocaust if your antagonist is a high government or military official (President, influential General) who would have access to terrifying weaponry and the authority-or perverted authority-to use them. An excellent example of such a novel is James Hall Roberts' The February Plan, which deals with nuclear brinksmanship. Roberts' detailed military-governmental background is a good model for the writer who would like to know how to make this sort of plot perfectly plausible.

  TOUGH GUY CHARACTERIZATION

  The Mickey Spillane hero, one who has few scruples and kills indiscriminately, is no longer terribly popular with the average reader. If a hero kills, he must have ample justification, must feel some remorse, or-as in the case of Parker, in Donald E. Westlake's novels-must kill only when his own life is threatened and with an unspoken but moodily evident distaste for the necessity. The tough guy is always making moral judgments and justifying his own murderous impulses through those judgments, as in the following little scene:

  I shot him twice, in the chest. He looked surprised, tried to stop the stream of his own blood, then fell flat on his face. He was dead. Very dead. I turned away from him and holstered my gun. I didn't feel the least guilty for having killed him. He was a hood, a punk. He'd been asking for it all along.

  The modern-day suspense hero makes no such judgments, but he does what is necessary and forgets the rationalization, knowing that he will pay emotionally and mentally for any pain or death he causes. In the first book of a suspense series I have just begun for Bobbs-Merrill-Blood Risk by Brian Coffey-I followed a violent scene, in which my hero shot a villain, with this:

  Despite the high risk associated with his profession [thief], Tucker had only twice been pressed into a position where he had no choice but to kill a man: once, it had been a crooked cop who tried to force his point with a handgun; the second time, it was a man who'd been working with Tucker on a job and who'd decided there was really no sense in splitting the proceeds when one shot from his miniature, pearl-handled revolver would eliminate that economic unpleasantry and make him twice as rich. The cop was fat and slow. The partner with the pearl-handled revolver was as affected in every habit as he was in his choice of handguns. He didn't choose to shoot Tucker in the back, as would have been the smartest move, but wanted, instead, to explain to Tucker, in the course of a melodramatic scene, in very theatrical terms, what he intended to do. He wanted to see Tucker's face as death approached. He'd been very surprised when Tucker took the revolver away from him and even more surprised when, during the brief struggle, he was shot.

  Both kills had been clean and quick, on the surface; both of them had left an ugly residue long after the bodies had been buried and begun to rot. For months after each murder, Tucker was bothered by hideous nightmares in which the dead men appeared to him in a wide variety of guises, sometimes in funeral shrouds, sometimes cloaked in the rot of the grave, sometimes as part animal-goat, bull, horse, vulture, always with a human head-sometimes as they looked when they were alive, sometimes as children with the heads of adults, sometimes as voluptuous women with the heads of men, and as balls of light and clouds of vapor and nameless things that he was nonetheless able to identify as the men he had killed. In the few months immediately following each kill, he woke nearly every night, a scream caught in the back of his throat, his hands full of damp sheets.

  Elise was always there to comfort him.

  He couldn't tell her what had caused the dreams, and he would pretend that he didn't understand them or, sometimes, that he didn't even remember what they had been.

  She didn't believe him.

  He was sure of her disbelief, though she never showed it in her manner or in her face and never probed with the traditional questions. She could not know and could hardly suspect the real cause of them, but she simply didn't care about that. All she was interested in was helping him get over them.

  Some nights, when she cradled him against her breasts, he would take one of her nipples in his mouth as a child might, and he would be, in time, pacified in the manner of a child. He wasn't ashamed of this, only welcomed it as a source of relief, and he did not feel any less like a man for having clung to her in this manner. Often, when the fear had subsided, his lips would rove outward from the nipple, changing the form of comfort she offered, now offering her a comfort of his own.

  He wondered how other people, who had killed, handled the aftermath, the residue of shame and guilt, the deep down sickness in the soul…

  There, in less than 500 words of narrative flashback and character study, is a facet of the hero that makes him more human, more sympathetic and his violence against another person more moving and acceptable.

  RESOLUTION BY FATE

  When you have spent 200 pages piling one suspenseful incident atop another, making your hero's plight unbearably tense, do not solve his predicament by ushering in the cavalry or its present-day equivalent. If the hero is going to be saved, it must be by his own hand or by events he has initiated himself. Likewise, do not solve the plot problem by having the protagonist-antagonist clash turn out to be "one big mistake." A reader who has breathlessly followed the growing terror of your hero's condition is hardly going to be pleased when the villain opens the dungeon door, smiles, shakes hands with the man he has been persecuting, and explains that the entire affair has been a ghastly case of mistaken identity or misinterpreted motivations.

  INADEQUATE RESOLUTION

&nbs
p; You must be especially careful to provide believable and interesting solutions to each of the hero's plot problems and, finally, to his major predicament. If you don't choose to work from a point-by-point outline (see Chapter Nine for a discussion of the pros and cons of outlining your plot), you can easily write your lead into a corner from which you can only extricate him by the most silly and artificial means.

  Edgar Wallace, one of the most famous adventure writers of the twenties and thirties, was once writing an adventure serial for a leading magazine in that field. The magazine rushed each installment into print almost as soon as they got it, before Wallace had finished the next part. Each installment ended on a moment of high suspense, in order to keep the reader coming back for more. At the conclusion of one installment, the hero was trapped in a smooth-sided pit out of which he could not climb. He was threatened above by the enemy, pressed at both sides by spikes that were slowly closing in from the walls, and endangered by a pipe spewing molten lead into his hole. The readers were all but salivating for the final installment to learn how the hero escaped this situation. In truth, the editors were salivating as well-for fear the author wouldn't be able to rescue his man in time. Evidently, the author himself was stuck for a while, but when he delivered the last part of the serial, he had overcome the problem handily in the first sentence: With a mighty leap [he] sprang out of the pit.

  Today, no magazine publishes story installments before the author has finished the entire piece. And no book editor will be satisfied with rabbit-from-the-hat solutions. Your hero must be clever and bold enough to deal with obstructions you've placed before him, and he must deal with them in an interesting, original manner.

  There are seven different types of suspense stories, categorized by the occupation of the lead character. Each type has its own requirements and its own clichés to avoid. Let's examine each:

  SPY STORIES

  Stories of secret agents, counter-espionage, international intrigue, secret formulas, political prisoners, passwords, and dagger-carrying assassins are perennially popular, though the audience for the form does peak and ebb. The heroes here are spies-usually for the United States or for Great Britain-and are developed in one of two ways: (1) as another James Bond superhero who has access to fantastic gadgets and whose physical stamina and moral resources are without limit, or (2) as a realistic character with his own personal problems, doubts, ambitions, fears, and talents, like the lead in John Le Carre's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Unquestionably, the second approach is more desirable.

  When building a lead character for your spy story, you must consider the subculture in which he exists and understand what character traits that strange milieu demands and forbids. For example, a successful spy could not be scrupulously honest, nor could he be a committed pacifist; in the line of duty, he will be called upon to steal, cheat, lie, and kill. Because espionage agents travel all around the world and are familiar with many other cultures which they often respect, they are not so opinionated, racially or religiously, as the average United States citizen. Sexual and social relationships that cross racial barriers would not be thought "abnormal" or even unusual by a spy. Furthermore, the spy has seen, in his job, that "moral" behavior is relative and that it rarely accomplishes anything, while Machiavellian techniques usually lead to the desired results. For this reason, he is not likely to subscribe to any formal religion. Unrestricted by religious taboos, and his sense of pleasure sharpened by the constant possibility of sudden death, the spy will usually be sexually liberated. If not, he may be the type of man who finds a sexual outlet in risking his life and in committing acts of violence. This type rarely makes a satisfactory protagonist, for the average reader has trouble identifying with him. Whatever the hero's sexual proclivities, he will never be a moralist who criticizes extramarital and pre-marital relationships, for such a hidebound attitude would be ludicrously antithetical to everything else he must be in order to survive.

  Understand, all of the above are not restrictions of spy story characterizations, so much as fundamental, common sense requirements. If you are writing about a spy, he must be as much like a spy as you can make him. When writing about a great musician, you would not say that he had a tin ear. If your lead was a world-famous surgeon, you wouldn't inform the reader that he was terrified of the sight of blood. Likewise, a spy's personality must be true to his profession.

  Once you've established your characters, you must give long consideration to the background. In a spy novel, the story will usually be set in a foreign country. You need not have visited Turkey to write of it, but you should be prepared to think Turkey before writing a word. Study travel and history books, learn the country's geography, customs, traditions, history, governmental system, family structure, and major religions. Only when you can name streets and create the mood of a foreign land are you ready to begin.

  One of the most common background errors made by the new spy story writer is the misplacement of a hero in the bureaucracy of counter-intelligence. An FBI agent, for instance, doesn't work in other countries: he's limited to the borders of the U.S. Similarly, a CIA agent rarely works in the States, for his duties are more within the sphere of international intrigue. The British agent in another country will not be from Scotland Yard, but from M.I.6, British equivalent of our Central Intelligence Agency. The Russian version is the KGB. The famed United States Secret Service is only a branch of the Treasury Department and is not concerned with espionage, as many new writers think: its sole concern is the protection of the President, Vice-President, their families, and Presidential candidates/hopefuls. A few novels (Michael Mason's 71 Hours, Le Carre's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and almost any of Philip Atlee's Joe Gaul stories) and a few non-fiction titles (The Game of the Foxes by Ladislas Farago, most notably) should give the new spy story writer sufficient background data on which to proceed.

  Once you've settled on the spy story sub-type of suspense fiction, you will want to decide what sort of plot you'll develop. Most every spy novel can be fitted into one of the following six plot groups:

  Rescuing someone from enemy territory. The protagonist must cross into Russia, East Germany, China, or some other unfriendly country to rescue a fellow countryman or spy being held by the enemy. In some cases, the man to be rescued is a leading foreign scientist or political figure who has requested U.S. aid in leaving his own country and finding political asylum.

  Stopping someone from reaching enemy territory. The protagonist must keep a defecting scientist or fellow spy from reaching his contacts and being whisked into enemy hands.

  Stopping the enemy from obtaining vital data. The protagonist must foil enemy plans to obtain information which will improve their international position-usually, information that will increase their power to wage chemical, biological, nuclear, or psychological warfare.

  Stealing data from the enemy. This is a reverse of the third type of plot: the protagonist is assigned to retrieve scientific data from the enemy. This form is seldom used, for two reasons: first, American readers don't like to think of their own spies initiating international trouble by stealing from the enemy, though, in reality, this is not uncommon; second, the reader likes to think that we have no need to steal data, because we are more advanced than they are-an abysmal misunderstanding of the world, but a common one.

  Stopping the enemy from taking over another country. Again, the average reader doesn't like to think we would attempt to overthrow some other government or meddle in the internal affairs of a foreign power, despite historical evidence to prove that we have often done that and sometimes had considerable success.

  Stopping the enemy from overthrowing our government. In this kind of story, the antagonists are usually domestic right- or left-wingers and most often a part of the government itself.

  No matter which of the six kinds of spy plots you employ, you may either paint the world of international espionage as thrilling, glamorous, and desirable-or as a necessary but sordid environmen
t where the souls of its inhabitants wither early. Any of Ian Fleming's novels about the

  Suspense glamorous counter-intelligence operative James Bond would serve as an example of the first method, while John Le Carre's justly famous The Spy Who Came in from the Cold would make a fine model for the moody spy story.

  DETECTIVE STORIES

  In the suspense novel, a detective hero is usually a member of some public police force; private investigators are reserved for use in mystery novels where there is a puzzle to solve and an identity to uncover. These stories deal almost exclusively with violent murder or kidnapping; in either case, remember that the unveiling of the criminal, to the suspense reader, is less important than how to stop him.

  When a suspense novel centers on a kidnapping, the child is rarely murdered. If you kill off an innocent child, your reasons must be more complex and artistically justifiable than "for the shock value."

  If you are thinking of tackling a kidnapping story, you should understand that the form has been used many times and that the basic plot progression-child kidnapped, child threatened, child traced, child rescued-is so familiar to suspense readers that a new novel of the type can only be successful if it contains a fresh slant or gimmick.

  Evan Hunter's 87th Precinct novel, King's Ransom (under the pseudonym Ed McBain), is a kidnapping story that works. King, the wealthy man of whom ransom is demanded for the return of his son, is on the edge of making a business deal that will make or break him financially. He can't afford to put up the cash for the ransom without missing out on the deal and losing most of his fortune. When it turns out the kidnappers have accidentally taken a servant's child, and not his own, King's moral dilemma is knottier rather than more simple: just because the child isn't his own, is he now free of all responsibility, even though the kidnappers were after his son? King's conflict of values gives the novel a dimension without which it would have been far less successful.