Writing Popular Fiction

by Dean Koontz

  Stanley Cohen's fine novel, Taking Gary Feldman, deals with the kidnapping of a rich man's son. When the boy and one of his abductors begin to take a strong liking to each other, and when the abductor finds out that the child's parents do not give him much love or respect, it becomes clear that Gary Feldman would be better off if he were not returned to his family. This slant, marvelously developed by Cohen, makes for a suspense novel as fresh and innovative as the reader could wish.

  When murder, not kidnapping, is the subject of a suspense detective story, the chase and capture of the killer is more important than learning his identity. Usually, he is a psychotic, for such a man does not need intricate reasons for murder and does not provide grist for a mystery-type plot.

  CRIME STORIES

  When your protagonist is a criminal, he may "be either admirable or evil. The evil protagonist is usually mentally unstable rather than rationally motivated, because his crimes can be made more horrifying and suspenseful that way than if the reader can sympathize with his reasons: one of the most frightening villains is the utterly unpredictable man. Perhaps the best suspense novel using a madman as its lead character is Stephen Geller's phenomenal She Let Him Continue, also published under the title of the movie version, Pretty Poison. In this masterpiece of horror, the protagonist is an extremely unbalanced young man who has convinced himself that he is employed by the CIA and that it is his duty to investigate and kill those "subversives" working around him. He enlists a young, sexually precocious but utterly vicious girl in his campaign, and their activities lead the reader rapidly to as spectacular and gruesome a climax as anything ever written in the genre. Because readers tend to identify more readily with fictional characters they can like, the evil protagonist should be used only rarely. When a story demands him, he should get his just rewards in the end.

  If your hero is an admirable criminal, in the vein of Donald E. Westlake's Parker or Dan Marlowe's Drake (in Marlowe's Operation Breakthrough, Operation Flashpoint, Operation Fireball, and Four for the Money), he will not kill unless forced to do so to save his own life. Usually, he does not kill innocent bystanders or policemen (those he simply outwits), but he will use bullets on other criminals and crooked cops who have him marked. After killing, he will evidence either overt or covert remorse for what he has had to do, though he will always be too pragmatic to moan and weep about death.

  If you choose to use a protagonist who is an admirable crook, do not fall into the moralistic trap of using the cliché ending in which, after all his trials and tribulations, the lead loses the stolen loot either through a quirk of fate, the machinations of an even more crooked partner, or the cunning of the police. If you have established your crook as a sympathetic character and have gotten your reader to root for him throughout the bank robbery (or whatever), your audience will only be frustrated when he loses everything simply because you feel that you must prove "crime doesn't pay."

  Do not confuse your reader by trying to establish a sympathetic criminal protagonist who commits a crime that is grossly unpleasant-stealing from hardworking folks, stealing from invalids, rape, murder of innocent bystanders -and at odds with what is expected of a hero.

  SUDDEN TERROR STORIES

  In these tales, the protagonists are ordinary, everyday people, going about average jobs, minding their own business-but are suddenly thrown into a violent confrontation that shatters their complacency. The appeal in this kind of story lies in its verisimilitude, the readers' certainty that this kind of thing might happen to anyone. Few of us ever meet spies or know professional crooks, but any one of us might become the victim of a psychotic killer.

  John D. MacDonald's The Executioners is a sudden terror story of formidable proportions. Sam Bowden is the protagonist, fourteen years out of the service after having testified against a shipmate who criminally assaulted a young girl. The rapist, Max Cady, was sentenced to life at hard labor; in the intervening years, Bowden has married and fathered children including a lovely teen-age daughter. When Cady gains his freedom, he has only one desire: revenge on Bowden for testifying against him. Cady is a dangerous man, clever enough to work clandestinely and keep the police out of the picture, unsettled enough to want to kill Bowden's entire family and rape his young daughter. As the story unfolds, Bowden can find no help from organized authority and must learn to overcome his natural decency in order to fight for the lives of his loved ones. The heightening suspense and hard, reasonable climax are unforgettable.

  The most famous suspense novel in this form is Joseph Hayes' The Desperate Hours, which has sold nearly four million copies, world-wide. The story deals with a fine, happy family whose home is taken over, without warning, by a desperate group of sadistic escaped convicts who have nothing to lose by murder and much to gain if they can use the Milliard family to prepare and accomplish their own escape from the search area.

  In all of these sudden terror tales, the main theme is that, in this less-than-perfect world, the completely civilized man cannot survive unless, in times of peril, he can reject his civilized veneer and act with the cunning and the sense of self-preservation that for most of the tale has made the villain superior to him. The protagonist should triumph. The writer who lets him die is, in effect, saying that the civilized man never stands a chance against the savages in society, and the reader will rarely tolerate such a frighteningly pessimistic attitude.

  WAR STORIES

  Here, the heroes are soldiers, and the values portrayed are nearly always pure black and white, good and evil. The Second World War is the most popular background for novels of this nature, perhaps because the Nazis were so inexcusably evil that the reader can easily draw lines between the protagonists and antagonists. This simplicity of moral judgment is necessary, because a war story requires so much killing: if the reader is not comfortable with the clear-cut assignments of guilt and virtue, from the very start, he may be revolted rather than entertained.

  By leaving your villains somewhat shrouded in mystery and giving only your heroes well-rounded personalities, you can contribute towards this black-and-white situation. Your heroes should be intricately detailed, with faults and virtues, hopes and fears, so the reader sympathizes with them and wishes them well; at the same time, your villains, in the war story, should not be shown to have a good side, but should be powered by an overwhelmingly evil motivation; greed for money or power, revenge, or even sheer insanity. If you show the villain with his family, or in a moment of deep personal torment, he is instantly a "gray," not a "black," and his death becomes more complicated than it otherwise might be; he begins, at that point, to retard the progress of the war story.

  In the war novel, the protagonists are sent as a commando unit into occupied territory, there to accomplish some objective such as the destruction of an enemy gun implacement not vulnerable to air bombardment (The Guns of Navarone by Alistair MacLean), a dam (Force 10 From Navarone by Alistair MacLean), a bridge, or a command headquarters hidden from aerial attack. Their every movement is an invitation to discovery, and their survival owes as much to wits as to skill with weapons.

  Ideally, the war story should have one chief protagonist surrounded by as many as four or five accomplices who are only slightly less important in the reader's eye. In the deadly atmosphere of a war, it is only reasonable to expect that some of the protagonists will die. By beginning with a large enough group, the author can whittle them down with effective death scenes and still allow the main hero and two or three others to survive.

  (If you will recall our discussion, earlier, of the sword and sorcery fantasy novel, you will see two evident parallels between that form and the war story. In both the war novel and the sword and sorcery novel, the forces which generate the plot are perfectly black and white, good and evil. And, in both, the hero's suffering is often shown, not from his own wounds, but from his reaction to the loss of close friends and comrades.)

  Warning: In the war story, it is rare that all of the heroes are killed off, and it i
s also undesirable. Because the reader does see the values in black and white, he wants to see the rewards properly issued, as well. If you absolutely must let your heroes die, all of them, you should make certain that their deaths are heroic and that they have accomplished all of their objectives. If they die and fail their mission, too, the reader will be ready to begin his own war on you!

  SCIENTIFIC CRISIS STORIES

  These tales revolve around an impending disaster which can only be solved by, or is a direct result of, modern scientific methods. The crisis is often generated by mishandled or stolen bacteria cultures which are being developed in the United States germ warfare program, as in Henry Sutton's Vector. Or the crisis may be a biological attack on the U.S., as in James Henderson's fast-moving Copperhead. Or the threat may come from some bizarre source, such as outer space, as in Michael Crichton's best-selling The Andromeda Strain.

  Usually, your hero will be a research scientist or a medical doctor. The suspense comes from his continuing attempts to neutralize the crisis and the continual worsening of the situation despite all that is being done. To make your hero seem real and his efforts believable, you will need to study, carefully, whatever scientific background the crisis and the plot require.

  Because a layman is usually not acquainted with the basic facts of any particular science, the research for such a novel may require months, or more time than you are willing to put into it. If that is the case with your novel, but you feel the idea is still valid, reconsider the way your story was originally to be told and see if the scientist or doctor protagonist can be replaced by either an average citizen caught up in the disaster, or by an FBI or CIA agent who is trying to discover the roots of the crisis. In either case, you will need to know quite a bit of science to write the tale-but less than you would to create a believable scientist or doctor hero whose intimacy with laboratory methods and theory is difficult for a layman to properly reconstruct.

  ADVENTURE STORIES

  At one time, the adventure story could be classified as a vital genre in its own right. Its material was the exploits of adventurers and explorers, men who lived at the edges of civilization and who fearlessly faced scorching deserts, high mountains, hostile natives, impenetrable jungles, savage seas, and frozen arctic wastelands. The adventure plot consisted, primarily, of how the characters got from Point A to Point B, and though the story people might be differently motivated and squared off into groups of protagonists and antagonists, the chief villain was always the environment, Nature herself.

  Today, few straight adventure novels are written and published. The non-fiction lists have begun to supply adventure tales that have few fictional equals. Henri Charrier's best-selling Papillon, concerning the author's real-life ordeal on Devil's Island, his repeated escapes from the police, his hazardous ocean voyages in leaky boats never meant to brave the fury of the open sea, his months with a primitive South American tribe and his acquisition of a native wife, has the authority of detail that fiction rarely achieves. Likewise, Maurice Herzog's Annapurna, which concerns the French Himalayan Expedition's heroic climb to the top of the world, contains more high drama than any man could spin in a fantasy. Readers are willing, even eager, to put down the money for a real-life adventure story, but are only rarely interested in an adventure novel.

  Adventure stories are still being written, published, and sold, though they are no longer a pure form. They have acquired bits-of-business from other suspense forms, borrowing most often from spy and war stories. Though Nature remains as the primary villain, a secondary plot bolsters the Man-Against-the-Elements theme.

  For example, in Alistair MacLean's adventure novel, Night Without End, the victims of a plane crash on an arctic icefield and the staff of an isolated scientific outpost must struggle towards rescue across hundreds of miles of hostile terrain, through snow and ice storms, hurricane winds, and sub-zero temperatures. The bulk of the novel concerns this challenge, though a secondary plot, always in the reader's eye, deals with the espionage agents among the passengers of the downed plane who were responsible for the pilot's death and the crash itself. The protagonist, a doctor, must not only keep them alive despite Nature's worst treatment, but he must identify the agents and keep them from killing whomever Nature doesn't dispose of.

  Or, in MacLean's H.M.S. Ulysses, a British supply ship is making the Murmansk Run along the Arctic Circle, during the Second World War. The heavy seas, ice, wind, and cold present a challenge that makes for plenty of narrative excitement, but the secondary plot, concerning the attacks on the convoy by German ships, planes, and submarines, gives the piece that final touch that makes it a thriller readers will pay for. The writer does not always need to characterize the enemy in a war-adventure story because, if they fight from planes and ships and submarines, they may never make person-to-person contact with the heroes; they become, in some ways, the same kind of omni-present but mindless threat that Nature herself is.

  Once you have familiarized yourself with suspense fiction, have settled upon a sub-type that interests you, have read heavily in the field to learn what other writers are doing, and have chosen a background, thoroughly researched it, and developed a plot against it, you are almost ready to begin writing. Almost.

  People greatly enjoy being unsettled, frightened, and even terrified out of their minds-by art. The movie industry goes through periodic slumps, but horror films are perpetual breadwinners, as are movies crammed with wild chase scenes (Bullit, The French Connection, Vanishing Point, Dollars). In a carnival, the most popular rides are those which threaten, however superficially, injury or death: the rollicking, giant roller coaster, the plummeting "dive-bomber," the spindly-looking Ferris wheel. Also in carnivals, the funhouse is always well patronized, and its express purpose is to terrify its paying customers. Alistair MacLean, Hammond Innes, Donald E. Westlake, and dozens of other suspense novelists have made careers out of frightening the public. Most any suspense writer can earn a good living if he can learn to supply these vicarious thrills.

  Basically, narrative tension is achieved through a combination of three techniques: the chase, the race against time, and the anticipation of a violent event. The suspense writer must understand how to use all three methods to keep his reader on the proverbial edge of the seat. Let's look, first, at the chase scene.

  THE CHASE SCENE

  The antagonists will pursue the hero for only one reason: he has something which they want. This "something" may be vital information, or a commodity of more immediate value such as jewels or money, or it may be knowledge which would incriminate them if he were to release it to the proper authorities. If the last is the case, their only reason for giving chase is to catch and kill him. Even though the hero's death is not implicit in the first two circumstances, the threat of death is desirable, for it will strengthen his motivation for flight and put an edge to the tension that will make the reader more concerned for his welfare than he otherwise might be.

  Occasionally the protagonist will be the pursuer, usually in those cases where the protagonist is some form of sanctioned public official, like a spy or a policeman. However, in this sort of story, the writer must match his antagonist and protagonist evenly, so that the possibility always exists that the villain will turn the tables and start pursuing the hero. In Brian Garfield's Relentless, the hero is a policeman with Indian heritage, forced to track government-trained mercenaries-now civilians, gone bad and become bankrobbers-through Western wildlands in order to retrieve their loot and hostage. Throughout the story, one expects the villains to turn, unexpectedly, and take the initiative. Indeed, at certain points in the story, they do. In short, even if your hero is doing the chasing, the threat of a reversal must be there, so tension can be generated concerning his own personal safety.

  Depending on the suspense plot-type, the chase may be established between these factions: A spy will be pursued by enemy agents or by members of his own bureau, depending on the nature of his trespasses-and he may do the chasing
of these same people, depending on your story. A detective will be pursued, if at all, by the killer he seeks-usually, he will pursue. A criminal may be pursued by the police, by other free-lance criminals anxious to relieve him of his loot, or by the Mafia, which frowns on individual effort within its territory-or he may pursue a crooked cop or another criminal. An ordinary citizen may find himself the subject of a chase by police who have wrongly accused him of a crime, by a psychotic killer from whom the police cannot or will not protect him, or by enemy agents he stumbles into by accident. A soldier will be chased by other soldiers in enemy uniforms. The scientist-while rarely pursuing anyone himself-may be chased by an enemy who seeks his secrets, or by his own people who want a secret that he doesn't believe any nation should possess. (The scientist, though, is the one type of suspense hero who is rarely involved in a chase story, of any kind.)

  The hero should usually be the subject of the chase, for he is the one the reader least wants to see suffer or lose his life. Also, he should be pursued by more than one man; otherwise, if he were a true hero, he would not run but would turn about, confront his lone opponent and deal with him at the first opportunity. The use of several implacable villains not only strengthens the protagonist's motivations for flight, but makes his situation all the more perilous. (How will he foil six determined men? He hasn't got a chance against those odds!)

  Each step of the chase should build suspense by making the hero's hopes for escape grow dimmer. Every time a new ploy fails to lose the chasers, the hero's options should be narrowed until, at last, it seems that each thing he tries is his only hope, each momentary reprieve from death looking more like his last gasp than the reprieve before it. This narrowing of options can be created in two ways in the chase story. First of all, the distance between the hero and villains should constantly narrow. When he stops to rest, the villains should go on; every trick he tries to throw them off the trail should only slow him down and give them a chance to get nearer; when he thinks he has lost them and stops to rest a few hours, they should pop up unexpectedly, nearer than ever. Second, options may be narrowed if the villains drive him out of places where he moves with relative alacrity, into landscapes he is unfamiliar with and where he becomes further alienated from hope. For example, a tough city hero might be less formidable in wild country. Likewise, a country man might be forced to flee into the city where everything seems hostile and dangerous to him. A rich man may be driven from the halls of power and wealth into the city's slums where he can find no succor and make no friends.