by Jodie Renner
So build the suspense gradually, teasing the reader with possibilities, and keep it escalating, with the occasional short breather, then throw in setbacks or new challenges. Repeat as needed throughout the book, always providing a brief reprieve between these tense, nerve-wracking scenes.
SOME “BIG-PICTURE” TECHNIQUES FOR ADDING SUSPENSE:
~ First, make your readers care about your protagonist.
Create a likeable, appealing, strong, smart and resourceful but vulnerable character readers will want to identify with. If readers haven’t bonded with your main character, they won’t become emotionally invested in what happens to him or her. As William Bernhardt says, “If people don’t care about your characters, nothing else matters.”
~ Create a cunning, frightening villain.
Your villain needs to be as clever, determined and resourceful as your protagonist – or even more so. Make him a serious force to be reckoned with!
~ Threaten your protagonist.
Now that your readers care about your main character, insert a major threat or dilemma within the first chapter. Create an over-riding sentence about this to keep in mind as you’re writing your story: Will (name) survive/stop/find/overcome (difficulty/threat)? This is your main story question that sets up the macro suspense of your whole novel, and isn’t answered until the end.
~ But don’t pull out all of the stops on the first page.
When writing suspense, start slowly and subtly – give yourself somewhere to build. As Hallie Ephron says, “If you pull out all the stops at the beginning, you’ll have nowhere to go; worse still, your reader will turn numb to the nuance you are trying to create.”
~ Establish a sense of urgency, a tense mood, and a faster pace.
Unlike cozy mysteries and other more leisurely genres, thrillers and other suspense fiction generally need a tense mood and fast pacing throughout most of the novel, with short “breathers” in between the tensest scenes.
~ Use multiple viewpoints, especially that of the villain.
For increased anxiety and suspense, get us into the head of your antagonist from time to time. This way the readers find out critical information the heroine doesn’t know, things we want to warn her about! And getting into the head of the bad guy always enriches the story, even if we don’t know his identity yet – he’s just a scary shadowy character with diabolical thoughts and plans.
~ Keep the story momentum moving forward.
Don’t get bogged down in backstory or exposition. Keep the action moving ahead, especially in the first chapter. Then add in background and other info little by little, on an “as-needed” basis only.
~ Create a mood of unease.
Keep the readers on edge by showing the main character feeling apprehensive about something or someone or by revealing some of the bad guy’s thoughts and intentions. Or maybe, instead of anxious, your heroine is oblivious, but because we’ve just been in the viewpoint of the villain, we know the danger that’s about to threaten her. Create anxiety in the reader and keep ratcheting it up.
~ Add in tough choices and moral dilemmas.
Devise ongoing difficult decisions and inner conflict for your lead character. These will not only make your plot more suspenseful, they will also make your protagonist more complex, vulnerable, and interesting.
~ Withhold information. Don’t tell your readers too much too soon.
Dole out information little by little, to tantalize readers and keep them wondering. Keep details of the past of both your protagonist and antagonist hidden, and hint at critical, life-altering experiences they’ve had that are impacting their present goals, desires, fears, etc. Add one significant detail after another as you go along.
~ Delay answers to critical plot questions.
Look for places in your story where you’ve answered readers’ questions too soon, so have missed a prime spot to increase tension and suspense. Draw out the time before answering that question. In the meantime, hint at it from time to time to remind readers of its importance.
~ Use dramatic irony.
This is where your readers know something critical and scary that the protagonist is not aware of. For example, your heroine is relaxing after a stressful day, unaware that the killer is prying open her basement window. Or your hero is approaching his vehicle, unaware that it’s been rigged with a bomb that is set to go off when he turns the key in the ignition.
~ Add a ticking clock.
Adding time pressure is another excellent way to increase suspense. Lee Child is a master at this, a great example being his thriller 61 Hours. Or how about those great MacGyver shows, where he had to devise ways to defuse the bomb before it exploded and killed all kinds of innocent people? Or the TV series 24, with agent Jack Bauer?
~ Use the setting to establish the mood and create suspense.
This is the equivalent of ominous music, harsh lighting, strange camera angles, or nasty weather in a scary movie. To describe the surroundings of the character in jeopardy, use strong descriptors, vivid details, and evocative sensory imagery that reflect or add to his angst or fears and bring to life the dangerous situations he’s confronting. This applies to both indoor and outdoor settings, of course.
~ Use compelling, vivid sensory imagery.
Take us right there, with the protagonist, vividly experiencing and reacting to whoever/whatever is challenging or threatening her.
~ Appeal to all five senses, not just the visual.
Show breaking glass, a dripping faucet, footsteps on the stairs, a crash in the basement, rumbling of thunder, a sudden cold draft, an animal brushing the skin in the dark, a freezing cold, blinding blizzard, a putrid smell coming from the basement…
~ Show, don’t tell.
Show all your critical scenes in real time, with action, reaction, and dialogue. Show your character’s inner feelings and physical and emotional reactions. Don’t have one character tell another about an important event or scene.
~ What the reader desperately wants to happen isn’t happening – yet.
Promise change but delay it.
~ Put some suspense in every scene.
There should be something unresolved in every scene. Your character enters the scene with an objective and encounters obstacles in the scene, so she is unable to reach her goals.
~ Vary the tension.
But of course, you can’t keep up tension nonstop, as it’s tiring for readers and will eventually numb them. It’s best to intersperse tense, nail-biting scenes with a few more leisurely, relaxed scenes that provide a bit of reprieve before the next tense, harrowing scene starts.
~ Use brief flashbacks at key moments
Use this device to reveal your main character’s childhood traumas, unpleasant events, secrets, emotional baggage, hangups, dysfunctional family, etc.
~ Keep raising the stakes.
Keep asking yourself, “How can I make things worse for the protagonist?” As the challenges get more difficult and the obstacles more insurmountable, readers worry more and more about whether he can beat the ever-increasing odds against him, and suspense grows. And as a bonus, as William Bernhardt says, “increasing pressure leads to increasing insight into the character.” Which leads to increased reader engagement.
~ Plan a few plot twists.
Readers are surprised and delighted when the events take a turn they never expected. Don’t let your readers become complacent, thinking it’s easy to figure out the ending, or they may stop reading.
~ Vary your sentence structure to mirror the action and mood.
Longer sentences suit a more leisurely pace and shorter sentences and sentence fragments are usually better at times of high tension.
Resources:
James Scott Bell, Conflict & Suspense
William Bernhardt, Thrillerfest workshop
Jack M. Bickham, The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes
Hallie Ephron, The Everything Guide to Writing Your First Novel
I
an Irvine, ian-irvine.com
Steven James, Workshop, Craftfest, 2011
Jessica Page Morrell, Between the Lines
Back to TOC
Chapter 14
USE FORESHADOWING FOR MAXIMUM READER INVOLVEMENT
DEVICES FOR AMPING UP THE TENSION AND SUSPENSE:
Throughout your novel, you want to continually provoke reader curiosity and apprehension, so they keep anxiously turning the pages. Here are some specific devices that add tension, suspense, and intrigue to your story:
~ Foreshadowing
~ Withholding information, delaying
~ Secrets
~ Stretching out the tension
~ Epiphanies and revelations
In this chapter, we’ll cover foreshadowing, an indispensable literary device for adding suspense, and one that requires planning, implementation, and a bit of expertise to really be effective.
FORESHADOWING
Foreshadowing is about dropping little clues about possible secrets, revelations, complications, and trouble to come. To pique the reader’s interest and keep her reading, hint at dangers lurking ahead. Foreshadowing incites curiosity, anticipation, and worry in the readers, and also prepares them somewhat for the possibility of later occurrences, so lends some credibility when the hinted-at event does occur.
For example, in the opening of The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy’s still in Kansas, the transformation of Miss Gulch into a witch on a broomstick foreshadows her reappearance as Dorothy’s enemy in Oz.
But be subtle about it. If you make it obvious, it takes away the suspense and intrigue, along with the reader’s pleasure at trying to figure everything out.
As Lynn Franklin says, “This does not mean that you are going to give away the ending. Think of foreshadowing as setup. The best foreshadowing is subtle and is woven into the story – often in multiple ways. In this fashion, foreshadowing helps build tension and gives resonance and power to the story.”
Why is foreshadowing important?
Foreshadowing is a way of alerting readers to the possibility of upcoming critical events, of telling them to keep reading because some exciting developments are ahead.
Foreshadowing creates suspense. According to the dictionary, suspense is “a quality in a work of fiction that arouses excited expectation about what may happen.”
If you don’t foreshadow events and developments to come, readers will have no expectations, so no anticipation. Foreshadowing stimulates curiosity and provides intrigue, increasing tension and suspense.
Also, if events and changes are foreshadowed, when they do occur, they seem more credible, not just a random act or something you suddenly decided to stick in there, especially if they’re unexpected. For example, if your forty-something, somewhat bumbling detective suddenly starts using Taekwondo to defeat his opponent, you’d better have mentioned at some point earlier that he takes or has taken Taekwondo lessons, or else the readers are going to say, “Oh, come on! Give me a break.”
Well-known nineteenth-century Russian author Anton Chekhov once said in a letter to another author, “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” (Letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev, November 1889.) So, according to Chekhov, if you drop hints or create a subtle “alert” to an object or a piece of information, you must, at some point, follow up by delivering the payoff – the gun that we were made aware of earlier eventually gets fired. Of course, you could always put a spin on it, creating a great twist. For example, the gun gets used, but not in the way you expected it to be used. Perhaps, instead of the character shooting someone or getting shot with it, he uses it to commit suicide, or someone steals it and uses it elsewhere. You’re still keeping your promise to the readers and maintaining their trust, but you’ve also added the bonus of a surprise twist.
Dropping little hints ahead of your critical, high-tension scenes increases their plausibility, impact, and potency by providing some necessary build-up to them.
How to use foreshadowing:
Use foreshadowing to lay the groundwork for future tension, to tantalize readers about upcoming critical scenes, confrontations or developments, major changes or reversals, character transformations, or secrets to be revealed.
Foreshadowing to add worry and reader engagement
Early thoughts, reactions, and actions in a character, as well as revelations about them, build characterization and give us clues to their vulnerabilities, fears, and secrets, so this kind of foreshadowing lays the groundwork for other events and makes readers anxious about them. Early hints or indications of character flaws, phobias, or weaknesses make the readers concerned about how they’ll deal with adversity later. If we find out early on that your character has a fear of heights, then when she has to scale a cliff, we’ll really worry about her. And worried readers are emotionally engaged readers, which is exactly what you want. For example, in Andrew E. Kaufman’s psychological thriller The Lion, The Lamb, The Hunted, we find out fairly early on that Patrick, the protagonist, is a bleeder. So of course whenever he’s in any kind of physical confrontation or danger, especially if he’s nowhere near a hospital or clinic, we worry about him bleeding to death. So what happens partway through the story? He gets bitten by a dog – in an isolated area!
Foreshadowing to reveal character traits and build character motivations
Foreshadowing is a great way to show and build character motivations so their later decisions and actions seem plausible. For example, a teenager who jumps in to help an accident victim by calmly assuring the patient, stopping the blood flow with a tourniquet, and splinting a fracture with a branch and a torn shirt may seem very unlikely, but if you reveal earlier that she wants to be a doctor and has taken First Aid courses, her actions are now quite believable.
And foreshadowing is also very effective in revealing the motivations of your antagonist. A typical way to reveal characteristics and motivation of your villain is, when you’re in their point of view, having them recall moments of their youth when they were treated unfairly or abused or when they picked on younger children or tortured birds or animals.
Some ideas for foreshadowing:
Here are some of the ways you can foreshadow events or revelations in your story:
– Show a pre-scene or mini-example of what happens in a big way later:
The roads are icy and the car starts to skid but the driver manages to get it under control and continues driving, a little shaken and nervous. This initial near-miss plants worry in the reader’s mind. Then later a truck comes barreling toward him and... (or the icy road causes some other kind of accident).
– The protagonist overhears snippets of conversation or gossip and tries to piece it all together, but it doesn’t all make sense until later.
– Hint at shameful secrets or bad memories your protagonist has been hiding, trying to forget about.
– Something on the news warns of possible danger – a storm brewing, a convict who’s escaped from prison, a killer on the loose, a series of bank robberies, etc.
– Your main character notices and wonders about other characters’ unusual or suspicious actions, reactions, tone of voice, facial expressions, or body language. Another character, perhaps a spouse or loved one, acts evasive or looks preoccupied, nervous, apprehensive, or tense.
– Show us the protagonist’s inner fears or suspicions. Then the readers start worrying that what the character is anxious about may happen.
– Use setting details and word choices to create an ominous mood. A storm is brewing, or fog or a snowstorm makes it impossible to see any distance ahead, or...?
– The protagonist or a loved one has a disturbing dream or premonition.
– A fortune teller or horoscope foretells trouble ahead.
– Based on past experiences, the character forms an opinion about something that could happen.
– Use objects: your character is looking for something in a drawer and pushes aside a loaded gun. Or a
knife, scissors, or other dangerous object or poisonous substance is lying around within reach of children or an assailant.
– Make the ordinary seem ominous, or plant something out of place in a scene. Zoom in on an otherwise benign object, like that bicycle lying in the sidewalk, the half-empty glass on the previously spotless kitchen counter, or the single child’s shoe in the alley, to create a sense of unease. Or something is slightly off, just enough to create a niggling doubt in the mind of the reader. A phone off the hook, an open window, wet footprints on the floor, a book or notepad on the floor, a half-eaten breakfast, etc.
– Use symbolism, like a broken mirror, a dead bird, a lost kitten, or, as in Hemingway’s foreshadowing of an early death in the opening line of his A Farewell to Arms:
The leaves fell early that year.
A no-no about foreshadowing:
But don’t step in as the author giving an aside to the readers, like “When she woke up that morning, she had no idea it would turn out to be the worst day of her life.” The author should stay out of the book, not jump in and address the readers. We’re in the heroine’s head at that moment, and since she has no idea how the day is going to turn out, it’s breaking the spell, the fictive dream for us to pass out of her body and her time frame to jump ahead and read the future.
Write your story, then work backward and foreshadow later.
The great thing about foreshadowing is that you can do it at any stage of your writing process. So for you writers who hate to outline and just want to start writing and see where the characters and story take you, you can always go back through your manuscript later and plant clues and indications here and there to hint at major reversals and critical events. Doing this will not only increase the suspense and intrigue but will also improve the overall credibility and unity of your story.
So decide on the events you want to foreshadow and then work backward, planting hints about each event in earlier chapters. A small event might require only one subtle indication in the preceding chapter or at the start of the chapter in which it occurs. A major event occurring near the end of the novel can be hinted at and alluded to several times in the course of the novel.
