How to rite Killer Fiction

by Carolyn Wheat

  Everything that could go to the max went to the max.

  And that's what makes a thriller.

  Sting in the Tail Endings_

  Just as the mystery has its tradition of "double" endings, so does the suspense genre. Some of these are two-tiered, like the two-solution mystery endings, and some just put a little sting in the tail to let us know it isn't entirely over.

  The famous Hannibal Lecter line in Silence of the Lambs about "having an old friend for dinner" is one of those stinger endings. The ostensible Bad Guy, the serial killer known as Buffalo Bill, has been caught, but Lecter escaped from prison and is still at large. He calls Clarice Starling to gloat and remind her that he's still a menace to society. He's also promising to come back in a sequel, which isn't always the point of the stinger.

  Often the stinger sets an ironic tone, telling the reader that while the hero has succeeded in one aspect of his quest, he's still got a long way to go. Other stinger endings, such as the ones in Jeffery Deaver's A Maiden's Grave and Michael Connelly's The Poet, add an extra layer to the story and bring in new dimensions.

  Whether or not you use a sting in the tail ending has a lot to do with your overall worldview. The stinger is an ironic twist, a not-quite-happy ending that undercuts the traditional heroic victory over evil. So if you want that pure victory, go for all-out goodness at the end and leave out the stinger. Let everyone live happily ever after without a cloud of disillusion.

  Me, I like clouds. Which is why Michael Connelly's City of Bones has my vote for Sting in the Tail of 2002.

  What Can You Do for an Encore?_

  Not so long ago, I firmly believed that series suspense was impossible. Dick Francis, who introduced new protagonists with each title, felt the same. Once you'd taken your main character to hell and back, where could you go in a sequel that's worse than hell? How many times can one person confront a fate worse than death without the writer falling into a Perils of Pauline disaster-of-the-month trap?

  Francis wrote his second book about a character he'd already used with Whip Hand. Sid Halley, first introduced in Odds Against, had lost his hand in an accident. Odds Against showed him coming to terms with his disability, and when the story finished, Francis said he had no plans for a second book about Halley.

  Television producers thought otherwise. They saw a series in the character and they begged for a second adventure with him.

  What do you do with a character who lost his hand and his career in book one and who in the same book started a second career and overcame his feelings of uselessness? Where could Francis go from there?

  When a man has lost one hand, what's the worst thing that could happen to him?

  Losing the other hand, of course.

  And that's what Francis did: he put Sid Halley in a position where Very Bad Dudes threatened to destroy his good hand if he didn't play ball with them.

  That's what an author trying for a meta-novel has to do: figure out where to take the character after the first resolution of his story. Yes, our detective has solved this crime, but has he learned more about his own identity? (That's Anne Perry's William Monk series, starring a Victorian police officer with amnesia. The meta-challenge for him is figuring out who he is—or who he used to be.)

  Yes, Molly Cates saved this busload of children from fanatical kidnappers, but will she ever get to the truth about her father's death? (Under the Beetle's Cellar, and yes, Molly does find the truth in All the Dead Lie Down, the third book in the series. The questions about the death, however, began in the first book, Mary Willis Walker's The Red Scream.)

  Or, thinking of the late great John D. MacDonald, how many of the hero's girlfriends can you kill off before readers refuse to invest their emotions in your stories?

  In John D.'s case, it didn't seem to matter. Travis McGee met a new woman in every book, and if they didn't all die, a goodly number of them did, and Travis mourned for a while, but we readers were willing to follow him on his next outing just the same. One reason it didn't matter is that the books were action-adventure reads with mystery overtones. Travis McGee was a knight-errant, and knights always have fair ladies whom they don't marry and settle down with.

  Dave Robicheaux, James Lee Burke's bayou detective, does get married and acquire a child, and that means that his emotional connections must be treated with more seriousness than McGee's. If one significant other dies, there must be mourning and regrouping before another can enter Robicheaux's life. Women and children are threatened in this series, but there's never a sense that they could be injured or killed without a devastating psychological impact on the hero.

  Story arcs in this series involve Dave's first wife, his mourning for her and romance with a second woman, the growth and development of his adopted child. Each of these strands spans more than one book and each brings him closer to a family life, the loss of which would destroy him completely.

  Burke takes us into the past as well, dealing in the eleventh book of the series (Purple Cane Road) with the death of Robicheaux's mother, which was mentioned in the first book, The Neon Rain. At the same time, Dave's daughter Alafair, named for his dead mother, is growing up and becomes a part of the story in a way she couldn't have done earlier. By waiting until book eleven to delve deeply into the mother's death, Burke adds another level to the resonance by involving the next generation.

  The more you care, the more you have to lose. So one of the uses of the meta-novel is to show the character's deepening connections, his intense caring, for another person, someone who can't be replaced in the next book.

  The death of significant others is becoming almost a standard plot point in the meta-novel. It's a way of taking the character to new depths and creating sympathy, while at the same time clearing the way for another relationship that will spark up a series in danger of sagging in the meta-middle. The death alone will not be enough to do this; the death must provoke change in the main character. The danger is that since the reader, presumably, already liked the main character, how can the author change her without losing what the readers liked?

  As the meta-novel evolves, taking on some of the qualities of a long-running television drama series, it will be interesting to see how much suffering and loss readers can absorb without becoming saturated.

  THE FOUR ARCS represent divisions of the Big Picture, and they make a great planning template and a wonderful revision tool. But a novel isn't written in the Big Picture, it's made up of a series of small pictures we call scenes.

  What's the difference between a scene and a chapter?

  Scenes are organic; chapters are artificial.

  What Makes a Scene?_

  In the first place, scenes happen in real time. It's as if the reader is a fly on the wall, watching and listening as characters talk and move. We hear the characters speak in their own voices, we observe their body language, and we do it at the pace of real life, with no authorial summing-up tricks to make it go faster.

  Second, scenes involve conflict. Not necessarily shove-a-gun-in-someone's-face conflict, but at the very least a sense of the characters being at odds in some way, out of sync, one wanting something the other can't or won't give.

  Why conflict? Because two people agreeing about absolutely everything would be amazingly boring, would fail to move the story, and we readers would wonder why that scene was in the book at all.

  Unless, of course, it's part of the setup. Oh, that's it, we think as we read about the happy couple. They're in total agreement now, but just wait—the big breakup is coining.

  Because at bottom all stories are about change (or, in a very few cases, failure to change, which is in itself a form of change because opportunity is offered and declined, which means our protagonist doesn't just go back to where he was at the beginning, he's worse off because he could have changed but didn't.) That's the inexorable math of Story: no character can possibly come through Story unscathed. (See The Remains of the Day for wonderfully evocative proof of this fiction maxim.)


  So if change is at the root of Story, how does it manifest itself in the small picture, the scene?

  A Scene Driver Named Desire

  Our protagonist wants something. If he's a detective, he wants to know whodunit. If she's a suspense heroine, she wants to go back to the peaceful life she had before some wacko started sending her dead flowers. If he's a spy, he wants to save the free world; if she's in a legal thriller she wants to get the Pelican Brief to the right people before the wrong people whack her.

  Well, they can't get those things, can they? Not in Arc One, that's for sure.

  So for scene purposes, they need to want something else, something lesser but still connected to the big goal, something that, ideally, pushes them harder into the plot point that climaxes whichever arc they're in.

  This is vital. Every single scene in the book must start from a position of wanting.

  "I want to have a good time at this party"—but it's going to be hard now that the host is dead on the floor. My amateur detective's nice simple want has turned into a situation that will force her to turn detective and start asking questions.

  "I want to get the people who killed my girlfriend"—and in order to do that, I'll volunteer as a spy so I can go after Mr. Big Bad Guy, but right this minute my want is to pass all the tests so the spies will take me on as a recruit.

  The small scene-level wants are like acorns from which spring giant oaks. They are the tiny pieces of colored glass that will, when put together, shine forth from the stained glass window of your plot.

  Just as in the overarching plotline, just as in the arc, the scene contains a goal, a complication, tension, and resolution. At the end of every scene in the book, bar none, the protagonist must experience some change, for better or worse.

  Worse is better. Change for the better, in the first three arcs, should turn into worse as soon as possible, or should contain the seeds of later getting worse-ness. Why?

  Because when things get worse, when the protagonist fails to get what he wants, he is forced to do something else. Something that propels him into more dangerous waters.

  So every single scene must end with a "No, and furthermore"?

  Not necessarily. Sometimes a "Yes, but" is more interesting than a straight No and sometimes a Yes brings a lot more headaches than a No would have done. It's all a matter of pushing the protagonist out of her comfort zone and into territory where she will be tested to the max.

  But none of that can happen unless she wants something at the beginning of the scene—a scene goal that the reader understands from the outset. That's one of the beauties of the mystery form; we readily accept the detective's need to know as a perfectly clear, perfectly reasonable scene goal, and everything follows from that.

  What does the suspense hero want as a scene goal?

  To understand what's happening to him. To enlist official help in tracking down the bad guys. To have someone believe her. To get a passport or a ticket to Hong Kong or the key to the safety deposit box. To find that old photo album or grandfather's will, anything that will help unravel the tangled secrets of the past. To get Aunt Maisie out of her Alzheimer's fog just long enough to tell our heroine the truth about that long-ago phone call the night Daddy died.

  It doesn't matter exactly what she wants so long as the reader understands what she wants and why she wants it and it relates in some way to the novel's big goal.

  Surprises and Complications

  If every single witness sits down with the detective and tells a straightforward narrative, no lies, no mistakes, no secrets, just a factual account of exactly what he knows and how he knows it, we'll have a short and intensely boring mystery novel.

  If every suspense heroine sits down with Grandfather and receives a full, frank, open account of every single family secret, all the family skeletons, and the precise reason why Uncle Frank seems to want her dead, we'll have a short and intensely boring suspense novel.

  In fact, we'll have a mystery novel without mystery and a suspense

  novel without suspense. Both genres depend rather heavily on secrets and lies, surprises and complications. And those must be introduced at the scene level.

  When it comes to the big scenes, most writers get this. It's the small scenes that give us trouble. It's the scene where our detective sits over coffee with her best friend and bounces ideas about the murder around, only they both agree on absolutely everything and are really just committing exposition on one another. It's the scene where the spy gets his orders from MI5 and just stands there as we readers try to absorb a huge chunk of geopolitical backstory that is essential for our understanding of later events but bores us silly.

  All scenes must involve some level of conflict and tension. All scenes must produce change.

  The Night Manager, John Le Carre

  Bureaucratic infighting among British intelligence agencies sounds like exactly the kind of dry, dull, arcane exposition I'm talking about. Who'd sit still to read page after page about what this cabinet officer said to that one at a Whitehall cocktail party?

  Le Carre has us reading every word because:

  • He puts human faces on every character he shows us (yes, even bureaucrats have faces).

  • Every person represents a particular political viewpoint and has compelling personal reasons for fighting for that viewpoint.

  • What's at stake is spelled out very clearly from the outset and is repeated in different ways at the start of every scene so we don't lose track of who stands for what.

  • He shows us that bureaucratic infighting risks lives—most notably, the life of our hero, who's undercover and very vulnerable.

  • The major players in this drama are in their own life-and-death struggle and there will be no survivors on the losing side.

  • He creates a giant chess match between the forces of good and the forces of evil and sets up every move so that we know who's winning and who's losing at every single stage.

  • Or at least we think we do. Once in a while the chess piece we thought was a lowly pawn gets queened and acquires more sinister power than we expected.

  • The clashes among bureaucrats escalate along with the danger to our hero, so that we're racing toward two climaxes, not just one.

  • As in any good team story, there are Rifts Within the Team in the bureaucratic storyline; there will be betrayals and traitors on both sides of the issue.

  It's good to throw in a complete surprise every so often. That helpful police officer who turns out to be on the Big Bad Guy's payroll, that kind friend in The Fugitive who gives Dr. Kimball some money and then turns him in to the cops, that key to the bus station locker that contains a suitcase filled with money. Let the protagonist get a result he couldn't possibly have anticipated and see what he does with it.

  How To Scene_

  Movie people use something called a storyboard, which actually shows pictures not unlike comic strips that indicate what the scenes will look like.

  Writing storyboards is a way of putting down on paper some of the things you'll use in your finished scene. It helps focus the scene. The writer needs to know exactly what the character's scene goal is and convey that to the reader. Everything in the scene is subordinate to that goal, yet you'll need to put in things like physical description, interior monologue, all kinds of extras that can get lost if the writer's in too much of a hurry.

  So you plan the scene beforehand, or you read the draft you've already written and look for places to go deeper, or things to cut because they don't move the goal. You ask yourself the journalism questions: who, what, where, when, why, and how.

  Who are these people? How do they talk, what are they wearing, what are they doing as they talk? If they're walking along the beach, have you given the reader enough salt spray, smacking breeze, waves crashing on the beach, toes sinking into wet sand? How do they move their bodies? Does one talk with her hands? Is the other gazing out over the waves instead of looking at his companion?
<
br />   Whose viewpoint is it? Are we inside the head of one character, or are we essentially watching both through a camera lens, unable to read any thoughts they don't express in some way?

  Most important: how does this scene change things for one or both characters?

  And what will he do next because of that change?

  Action Produces Reaction

  Once the scene has wrought change of some kind and degree, our character must react. Sometimes the reaction is swift and practically invisible to the naked eye. Other times the character stops and reflects upon the change, taking it in emotionally and intellectually before making a conscious decision about his next move.

  Let's say our hard-boiled private eye talks to the nightclub singer about the murder of her saxophone-player boyfriend. He gets a lot of sarcasm and not much information, but he knows she's hiding something and she bites her lip and turns away when he mentions the Fat Man.

  That's the scene. The sequel is that the detective reflects upon that behavior and comes to the conclusion that the Fat Man knows something.

  So our detective goes into a bar, orders two shots of rye, and drops the whole case.

  What?

  No, of course, he doesn't. He drives his '56 Chevy to the Fat Man's penthouse apartment and tries to question him, only the Fat Man's hired goons rough him up and that's when he knows the Fat Man's up to his fat eyeballs in this case.

  The reaction, the part where the character thinks about what happened at the end of the scene and absorbs its emotional impact, must lead to a new scene.