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And now for something completely different.

By

 

 

The piece is the Fantasia and Fugue in A-minor, by Bach, BWV561.  And I’d like to thank Trinity Church, Shelburne Falls, MA, for letting me use their beautifully preserved, late nineteenth-century Hook and Hastings.

So, let’s get a discussion started.  Take a look at your favorite suspense novels. How do the writers do it?  How do they balance anticipation with uncertainty?  Have you known of any suspense writers who have failed — who broke plausibility and lost you?

About Dave King

Dave King is the co-author of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, a best-seller among writing books. An independent editor since 1987, he is also a former contributing editor at Writer's Digest. Many of his magazine pieces on the art of writing have been anthologized in The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing and in The Writer's Digest Writing Clinic. You can check out several of his articles and get other writing tips on his website.

Comments

  1. Amos Decker would forever remember all three of their violent deaths in the most paralyzing shade of blue. It would cut into him at unpredictable moments, like a gutting knife made of colored light. He would never be free from it.

    –From David Baldacci’s Memory Man

    This was the opening paragraph of the book, and WU’S monthly Flog A Pro series would have a hard time not turning the page IMHO. We don’t see the clichéd Thriller opening here. What we read is the reaction the main character has had to a horrific event, and that’s why I think it’s so effective, and it builds anticipation in the reader because we want to know what happened.

    • Yes, excellent example. Readers learn not only about the violent deaths but get to know the character whose life was transformed by them. And they’re intrigued not only to discover what happened but to get to know the character better.

  3. Dave, beautiful playing and lecture. Wow! You explain natural progression so well. I was very much aware of this while singing Byrd’s Mass for 4 voices, esp. in the Agnus Dei. The tension is stretched out so beautifully and in unexpected ways. Thank you for this lesson on a Sunday morning.

    The book that came to mind was Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. You keep thinking you know where it’s going but the entire trajectory is both surprising and inevitable.

    • Oh, the way the harmonies develop in Renaissance choral music are astonishing — I’m hooked on Victoria’s O Magnum Mysterium.

      Could you tell us a little more about the Mistry book, so readers who haven’t read it can appreciate how he does what he does?

      • Dave, we sang O Magnum just a couple of weeks ago. I could listen to this music for hours, lost in contemplation. That’s its purpose though, no?

        In A Fine Balance you first think it’s just a little domestic tale as you get to know the characters and then as their lives intersect you see how they are being affected by the draconian laws passed by Indira Gandhi (this is the period of the Indian Emergency in 1975). There is escalation, stakes are raised and the unthinkable happens. Mistry is downright cruel to his characters. I wept. And at the end, although the sorrow remains and some things cannot be undone, you see too, grace. In acceptance.

  4. Hi Dave, just wanted to say how much I appreciate this dual-genre approach to thinking about suspense. I don’t read a lot of suspense, but these days suspense techniques are used in literary and women’s fiction all the time. An unresolved chord is a perfect metaphor for where I want to be about 2/3 of the way through a novel—my stomach is in a knot so I have to keep reading straight to the end to relieve the tension that has leapt from the page and invaded my body. I felt that physical need for resolution reading Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS and Jojo Moyes’ ME BEFORE YOU, for example. Loved your playing, thank you for the gift of this post!

    • I’ve long been pushing to break down the distinctions between suspense or mystery (or romance) and mainstream fiction. It’s true that each genre has its conventions, but all of them use the same basic storytelling techniques. The suspense may be about someone deciding to overcome their inherent distrust of people to commit to a relationship, but the techniques that develop that suspense are the same.

      Could you tell us a little more about the Diffenbaugh and Moyes books, so those who haven’t read them can understand how they do what they do?

      • Ha! Of all days to walk away from the computer…

        The Language of Flowers was about a young woman with precious few social skills who, by that 2/3 point, had left foster care, learned to “speak” through the meaning of flowers as set out by a Victorian flower dictionary, had grown close to a young man and had his baby. It was becoming increasingly clear she was not equal to caring for the child. The stakes for its welfare, and for the need for love, felt so high.

        Me Before You was about a vivacious young woman who becomes a companion to a quadriplegic because she had no skills for any other job. By the 2/3 point she knew he had a date scheduled to end his life, was only waiting that long to appease his mother, and the caregiver and are falling in love. We know he doesn’t want to live this way but also want to believe in the healing power of love—again, high stakes.

        In each case, I just had to know, as the stakes created an underlying ticking clock.

  5. This is so inspiring! The analysis is fruitful, and the concept is mind-boggling and true. This is a very special lesson that can only come from someone who knows both subjects through-and-through.

    This is the kind of thing that makes me grateful to have WU on my feed.

  8. Thank you. I enjoyed the beautiful music and the insights into creating suspense. I agree that the progression of the story has to seem natural and yet introduce new and surprising developments along the way. Hard to achieve for the writer!

    I don’t read many modern thrillers as a rule since the few I’ve tried have felt somewhat formulaic. But, as I write this comment, I’m thinking about the classic Victorian novel THE WOMAN IN WHITE and wondering just what it is that makes it so suspenseful. The pervasive sense of menace hovering over decent people?

    • It’s been some years since I’ve read The Woman in White. But if I remember right, the techniques could be a little different — fairly heavy reliance on coincidence for plot twists, a six-month gap in the middle of the story — since he was helping create an entire genre. Still it would be fun to reread with suspense techniques in mind.

  9. Excellent post.

    I recently started a suspense by a NY Times Bestseller where the heroine witnessed a murder, chose not to report the murder, and instead, crept into the house from which the deadly shot had come, even though it was likely the killer was still there. That’s when I put the book down. Sorry, but when heroines are that stupid, I find myself rooting for the killers.

  10. I loved this post, Dave. and though my work has only elements of suspense, I can see how a writer could apply Bach’s musical approach to the creation of a work of fiction. The music can take you somewhere harmonically, but it should not disappoint, it must resolve, must bring the listener to an end point–as literature must tie up lose ends and provide a satisfying finish. Composers have explored so many ways to avoid that resolve, but in the end, there must be some musically sound point where the listener feels closure, a musical sigh of relief or satisfaction. So too in literature. Thanks.

    • Absolutely. And the reverse is true — understanding storytelling techniques can inform your performance. On my to-read list is a work by Professor Leon Couch on playing the works of Buxtehude rhetorically.

  11. Robin’s comment above raises a topic I didn’t have time to go into — the relationship between suspense and character. It’s a huge topic, which is why I avoided it, but briefly, if your readers don’t care about your characters, you aren’t going to generate suspense. They have to be uncertain about how the story will turn out, but it also has to matter.

  12. Well said. In this case, the author didn’t convince me that this woman’s action reflected her character. I presume it made sense in the author’s head, because she knew and loved her heroine, but I wasn’t there yet–not even close.

  13. Constant surprise within a known framework: Bach and Stephen King. Of course. Right. I knew that already. Sure.

    It’s the issue of plausibility that has me in suspense. The events of any thriller are inherently implausible. More so in horror, SF and fantasy. Really, any fiction. So how does one make the implausible believable?

    I think it starts with the major cord. Everything is normal. The digressions from normality are introduced gradually, cleverly, surprisingly, intriguingly. Every so slightly plausibly. And they pile on.

    In “real world” based stories, like King’s, you don’t right away have to buy into total weirdness. It gathers like a wave until the implausible overwhelms you and you’re swept along against your rational beliefs.

    In fantasy the weirdness starts right away. Weird *is* normal. We accept it because but the novel’s characters do. Suspense is based not in what is strange, but in what is stranger than strange, by the need to set things right and return to what is (weirdly)normal.

    Or something like that. That’s a pretty cool post, Dave. Do you play the trombone as well? Might be a helpful analogy in that, too?

    • I’m actually hoping to really get into surprise next month. If I can figure out how to upload a large file.

      But you’re absolutely right about the way King starts off with a plausible world – that little Maine town — and, once he gets readers to accept his world, slowly shifts the metaphysics into something much stranger.

      But he also uses another technique. His main characters, Ben Mears, Susan Norton, and Matt Burke in particular, remain skeptical. Because they refuse to accept the existence of vampires without pretty overwhelming evidence, skeptical readers have someone within the story they can sympathize with.

  14. Thank you, Dave, for this “harmonic” lesson on writing suspense. If I ever considered getting a tattoo (not really my thing) I’d have these words tattooed on my forearm: suspense comes from the suspension of disbelief. I do wonder if Mr. Bach realized that as he was playing the Wender in Arnstadt, he was also teaching others how to write. Again, thank you for sharing your musical talent and your words of inspiration. It made my day!

  15. Brilliant, Dave! When I took a music theory course a few years ago (not a musician, but wanted to understand how a sequence of notes/chords produced such emotion), I was surprised by how similar it was to writing. As part of the course we actually had to compose short pieces–panic time for me! But I took away many lessons to apply to writing (e.g., in my second piece I got so involved in variations I forgot to resolve back to the original key). Thanks for this addition to my writing toolkit!

    I don’t read horror but agree that suspense is an essential element for any story. One of my favorite mystery writers, Ian Rankin, often uses a technique that I love. He’ll casually drop a reference near the beginning of the book, perhaps in dialogue, without explaining it. It usually comes up again once or twice, again casually and without explanation. At the end, when all becomes clear, you realise what that seemingly insignificant reference means. The effect, for me at least, is that there’s this tiny question in the back of my mind throughout the book that adds to the suspense. I think of the technique as doing a Chinatown. Remember in the film someone keeps saying “That was Chinatown” as though it explained everything, but we don’t understand until the final scene.

    • Nice example. It works if you’re reading Rankin for the first time. But if you’re already familiar with his work, it may work even better because you know he’s using the technique and can anticipate the payoff even more.

  16. Thanks, Dave, I enjoyed your playing and your teaching very much. So much so that I wrote about you and Bach and Stephen King in my blog this morning–http://blog.billpercybooks.com. My readers will not only enjoy your beautifully blended music-and-craft performance, but they’ll learn something about creating suspense in any work of art. I hope WU will get a few new members as well! Thanks, again.

 

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