WRITING KILLER SUSPENSE
By Simon Wood
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© 2005 Simon Wood. All rights reserved.
For more information about the author and his work, please visit www.simonwood.net
Cover art: Julie Wood © 2009
KILLER SUSPENSE
Your heart is slamming against your ribcage, your fingertips are moist and you turn another page. The protagonist’s back is up against the wall and the antagonist is setting up a trap. You wish you could do something to prevent the protagonist from walking into it, but you can’t. You are helpless, totally at the mercy of the writer. You turn another page.
If you’ve ever felt this way reading a book then the writer has done a great job at creating suspense—and if you continue to read all the way to the end, the writer has also done a great job maintaining it. So how do you, the writer, go about creating the same for your readers?
First, you need to understand how the suspense genre is different from the mystery genre. These two genres are family, but more like cousins than brother and sister. The key difference between these two blood relatives is perspective. Both genres deal with a crisis event to hook the reader and keep the story going, but the storytelling approach is completely different. Let’s say the crisis is the assassination of the president of the United States. In a mystery, the president would die in the first chapter and the rest of the book would focus on the government agents charged with the task of identifying and bringing the killer to justice. In a suspense story, an intercepted communiqué or a bungled weapons drop would to take place in the first chapter alerting the White House of an imminent presidential assassination threat. This time, the government agents would be charged with the task of protecting the president while tracking down the would-be assassin. The story would climax at the point where the assassination attempt is thwarted. In a nutshell, suspense creates drama before the crisis event while mystery starts its thrill ride after the crisis event.
Therefore, for a good suspense story to work, it requires that what’s at stake be stated at the beginning of the story. Think of Ian Fleming’s James Bond. At the beginning of each story, the reader knows who 007 is up against and what deadly plan he has to stop. By establishing what’s at stake early, it can be argued that some of the story’s sense of drama is lost because the reader knows the who, why, when, etc. and that’s true. A suspense writer plays his cards open for all to see while the mystery writer plays their cards close to their chest giving little away to tease the reader. This is what makes suspense writing a challenge. Playing with an open hand, the suspense writer must create tension by inserting a strong protagonist and developing inventive story developments that avert a certain outcome.
While some might think suspense writing is tough to pull off, it’s worth noting that the genre allows the writer a number of freedoms not afforded to the mystery writer. Suspense writers can employ multiple point-of-view characters. They can present the bad guy and his motivations to give the reader insight into his character. This allows the writer to perfectly pit his antagonist and protagonist against each other. Mystery writers can’t do this. They can write books employing multiple point-of-view characters, but never that of the antagonist. They must purposely keep the antagonist’s identity hidden to maintain the mystery.
Suspense is a hard discipline to pull off, but here are my suspenseful tips for thrilling the reader:
Give the reader a lofty viewpoint. The reader should have foresight. Let the reader see the viewpoints of both the protagonists and the antagonists. The antagonists' viewpoints can be exposed in suspense. By giving the reader a ringside seat to the story’s developments, they get to see the trouble before the protagonist does. They see the lines of convergence between the protagonist and antagonist and feel the consequences of the perils ahead. Also, by handing the reader a lofty viewpoint and cutting them in on what’s going to happen, the writer places the emotional weight on the reader. The tension will build from the reader’s self-imposed fears of knowing that the hero is on a collision course with disaster.
Use time constraints. Another key way to build suspense is through the use of time. The protagonist should be working against the clock and the clock should be working for the bad guys. In Robert Ludlum and Gayle Lynds’ The Altman Code, Covert One agent, Jon Smith, has only days to prove the Chinese are sending chemical weapon materials to Iraq. In Greg Iles’ 24 Hours, Will and Karen Jennings have one day to escape their captors to rescue their child from a kidnapper. Every minute you shortchange the protagonist is another notch up on the burner under the reader’s seat.