Stein on Writing (14 page)

Suspense: Keeping the Reader Reading

Your predecessor, a storyteller of many centuries ago, recited his stories around a fire. If he failed to arouse his listeners’ anticipation and droned on, or if his audience guessed what happened next, they either fell asleep or killed him.

You are lucky! If you fail to arouse your reader’s interest, the worst that will happen is that is you won’t get published. However, if your goal is publication, whatever the nature of your story please pay close attention to what follows because suspense is the most essential ingredient of plotting.

You can have a remarkable style and intriguing characters, but if your writing doesn’t quickly arouse the reader’s curiosity about what will happen, the reader will close the covers of your book without reading further.
Suspense is achieved by arousing the reader’s curiosity and keeping it aroused as long as possible.

Readers aren’t articulate about what keeps them reading a particular work. Some, impatient to find out what happens to the characters next, will say, “I can’t put this book down,” which means the reader’s curiosity is greater than his need to do almost anything else. Suspense is strong glue between the reader and the writing. I remember my pleasure at getting a letter from Barnaby Conrad, founder of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and author of many books, including the novel
Matador.
Conrad had just finished reading a novel of mine, which, he said, he had been unable to stop reading except once when he “got up to micturate.” The function of suspense is to put the reader in danger of an overfull bladder. Of all the reviews of my novels, the line I remember best was in the
New York Times:
“If you bury yourself in a Sol Stein book while walking, you’ll walk into a wall.” That’s the idea: immerse the reader so deeply in the story that he’ll let go of the book only when the real world intrudes.

“Suspense” derives from the Latin word meaning “to hang.” Think of yourself as a hangman. You take your reader to the cliff’s edge. There you hang your hero by his fingertips. You are not to behave like a compassionate human being. You are not a rescuer. Your job is to avoid rescuing the hero as long as possible. You leave him hanging.

Hanging, of course, is an extreme situation from melodrama. Suspense can take many forms, some of them subtle. Suspense builds when the reader wants something to happen and it isn’t happening yet. Or something is happening and the reader wants it to stop, now. And it doesn’t.

Suspense needles the reader with a feeling of anxious uncertainty. Here are examples of the kinds of situations that create suspense:

• A prospective danger to a character.
  
• An actual immediate danger to a character.
  
• An unwanted confrontation.
  
• A confrontation wanted by one character and not by the other.
  
• An old fear about to become a present reality.
  
• A life crisis that requires an immediate action.
  

The writer’s duty is to set up something that cries for a resolution and then to act irresponsibly, to dance away from the reader’s problem, dealing with other things, prolonging and exacerbating the reader’s desperate need for resolution.

Therefore:

• Don’t eliminate the prospective danger to a character.
  
• Don’t let the character overcome the immediate danger without facing an even greater danger.
  
• If your character is apprehensive about an unwanted confrontation, make sure you hold off that confrontation as long as possible.
  
• When an old fear is about to become a present reality, don’t relieve the fear. Make the situation worse than the character anticipated.
  
• If a character’s life crisis requires an immediate action, make certain that the action backfires. Prolong the crisis.
  

The point, of course, is that you don’t resolve the suspense you’ve aroused. Your duty is to be mean. You are giving the reader a thrill he
yearns for in books and detests in life. You frustrate the reader’s expectations.

Let’s look at some examples.

Isak Dinesen, a remarkable short story writer, began
The Sailor-Boy’s Tale
with a young sailor observing a bird caught high in the rigging, flapping its wings, turning its head from side to side, trying to get loose. The young sailor thinks, “Through his own experience of life he had come to the conviction that in this world everyone must look after himself, and expect no help from others.”

The reader wants the young sailor to climb the rigging to free the bird. That action is delayed by the young sailor’s thoughts about the past. The delay causes tension in the reader. In the fourth paragraph, the boy is climbing up. The bird turns out to be a peregrine falcon, which has special meaning for the boy. But just as he frees the bird, the falcon hacks him on the thumb, drawing blood. The reader wanted the bird freed, and look what happened.

The reader has to wonder what will happen now to the sailor boy, to the falcon, to the young sailor’s notion that “everyone must look after himself, and expect no help from others.” In other words, the reader’s curiosity is thoroughly aroused by boy, bird, and theme, all in a few paragraphs of a short story that ends not many pages later. The novelist’s job is even harder, for he must arouse the reader’s curiosity enough to hold him for hundreds of pages. That means that suspense and tension must be constantly renewed.

In popular or transient fiction the author usually relies much more on plot than character to arouse suspense initially, as Frederick Forsyth does in
The Day of the Jackal.

Forsyth’s ingenuity in creating suspense is worth noting. Based on an outline of the plot alone, more than twenty publishers turned down his first novel,
The Day of the Jackal,
I among them, because the plot was about an assassin out to kill General de Gaulle—who was already dead! However, when Forsyth, unanimously rejected, wrote the actual novel, he skillfully held the reader with powerful negative suspense, the reader hoping that the assassin would be stopped before he could kill de Gaulle. In other words, the reader was forced to suspend disbelief for the sake of the plot. And he was made to do so by the author’s technical skill in arousing suspense, not through character as much as through the intended action that the reader wanted desperately to see stopped.
The Day of the Jackal
is worth studying for its use of suspense.

* * *

One of the most common complaints heard from editors is that a novel “sags in the middle.” By “sag” they mean the story loses its momentum, suspense flags, the reader no longer has his curiosity aroused about what will happen next.

To prevent this problem from happening in the first place, you must understand the ideal organization of a novel and how each chapter can be made to contribute to the suspense of the whole.

In speaking before writers’ conferences, I demonstrate a method for achieving suspense throughout a book by summoning eight or ten volunteers up onstage. I ask each person to think of a location for a scene and to announce it to the audience. The likelihood is that we get a series of wildly unconnected places, the desert near Palm Springs, Chicago, Hong Kong, a cave in Virginia, an island off the west coast of Florida, and so on. The audience laughs, enjoying the wild hopping about in space. We enjoy the surprise of moving around to unexpected places.

I organize where each person stands to get the most interesting mix of locations. Then I ask each person in turn to remind the audience where his or her scene is located. I then point out how suspense will work throughout a book consisting of those eight or ten different scenes.

Let us say that the first scene takes place in the desert near Palm Springs. The scene will end with the hero in serious trouble in the desert. Do we then start the next scene (or chapter) in the desert with the hero? Absolutely not. We leave the reader in suspense and go to the next location, Chicago, where we see a scene with a different character, say the hero’s fiancée, getting into trouble. We still want to know the outcome of what happened to the hero in the desert, but our attention is now diverted to the heroine in Chicago. At the end of scene (or chapter) two, we desperately want to know what the heroine in Chicago, who is in serious trouble, will do to extricate herself.

We now have two lines of suspense going: what will happen to the hero in the desert at Palm Springs and, most urgently, what will happen to the heroine in Chicago.

We begin the third scene in either of two places. We can go on to a third location, Hong Kong, and leave the reader in suspense about both the hero and heroine, or we can go back to the desert and continue the story of the hero at Palm Springs, leaving the reader in suspense about the goings on in Chicago. Of course, at the end of scene three, the hero is facing an even greater obstacle than he did at the end of scene one, and the reader is left hanging, and in scene four we go back to the heroine in Chicago, or to a third person in Hong Kong.

The places don’t need to be as far apart as Palm Springs and Chicago and Hong Kong. The entire novel can take place in Marshalltown, Iowa, with the first scene ending with a bank being held up, and our hero, the bank manager, being tied up and gagged by the daring robber, and shoved into the vault. The second scene can then be, say, in the bank manager’s home, where his wife is preparing dinner and wondering why her husband, always on time, hasn’t arrived home yet. The wife, nervous, cuts her hand badly. She tries to stop the bleeding but has difficulty tying a tourniquet with one hand. She runs to a neighbor’s house. The neighbor isn’t home. She gets in her car, and drives to the next neighbor, who is quite a distance down the road, meanwhile getting blood all over the seat of the car. As she arrives at the second neighbor’s yard, she passes out in the car. End of second scene.

The reader is now concerned about the bank manager in the vault and even more about his wife. The third scene starts with a local roofer working on a building across the street from the bank. He’s an observant fellow and has noticed people going into the bank, but no one coming out. It’s none of his business, but his curiosity gets the better of him. He slings his hammer into the leather carryall around his waist, eases himself down from his perch on the roof, and trots over to the bank. He looks in and immediately realizes what is going on and is ready to back off and call the police when the lookout for the bank robbers spots him, and thinking the hammer at his belt is a gun, fires at the roofer, hitting him and alerting the robbers in the bank.

Whew! The reader is now concerned about three things, the bank manager in the vault, the bleeding wife passed out in a distant neighbor’s yard, and the roofer, lying shot in the street. All of these events are in the same town, but by starting each scene in a different location and focusing each on a different character, we now have three lines of suspense going at the same time.

It helps to jot down the location of each of the scenes in your book to see if they can be arranged in an order that will take each scene to a location different from the one at the end of the preceding scene. It isn’t necessary to do this with every scene in a book. I find that if you change location or character in a majority of instances, you can also, where appropriate, continue the action of a suspenseful scene in the following chapter. The plan should be followed to achieve the purpose of suspense, not to follow a rigid pattern. Many writers also find this exercise useful in imagining different locations, which always increases reader interest.

Making a simple chart like the one that follows will be of help. On each line, note the location (different from the location of the preceding scene, if possible), the principal character in the scene, and, briefly, the action that takes place there. Be brief. (Keep in mind that if there is no action, you don’t really have a scene.)

One of the frequent failings of novelists is the inclusion of material between scenes. This usually takes the form of a narrative summary of offstage happenings. By using the simple outline above, the temptation to include material between the scenes may diminish. Remember that a reader’s interest is in the scenes, not the interstices between the scenes. When I have a group onstage, each representing a locale where a chapter takes place, I have the writers first hold hands in a circle, then drop their hands to indicate visually that transitions between scenes aren’t needed. Those transitions almost always constitute the offstage parts that make a book sag. Today’s reader is used to jump-cutting.

The next step requires discipline also. Look at your list of scenes and find the weakest one, where your own interest flags. If you eliminate your weakest scene, you will strengthen your book as a whole. It takes guts, but do it!