Sunday, November 14, 2021

Building Suspense

How does one build suspense as a writer?  I may as well ask how to spin gold out of straw.  If it was as simple as capturing it in a blog post, everyone would be great.  So I decided instead to share what worked for me, and to do that, I’ll need to go to what I consider my greatest work – Salvation Day.

For those who don’t know, Salvation Day is about a grief-stricken man who wants to kill God(a lot more complex than that, but that’s the essence).  To build a narrative that allows the reader to sympathize with such an awful motivation, I had to build it slowly and put the reader on the edge of his or her seat.  I brought in echoes of the past lamenting how he lost his family.  I integrated supernatural elements with his own paranoid personality.  I made characters that are nominally seen as “evil” into more fleshed out versions that push back against such a simplistic caricature.

I also had to know how to draw readers into wanting to keep reading.  Most folks read from chapter to chapter.  After all, the chapter is where the action is, so who stops reading in the middle of a fight scene or impassioned speech?  Yet the reader also had to be drawn into the next chapter and want to read it as soon as they could, so I set mini-cliffhangers.  The main character was fired, had an awful vision while sleeping, and wakes up to answer his phone.  The gates of Heaven had been breached and the demon army was on the cusp of storming inside.  The main character was given an ultimatum by his allies to decide whether to bend to them or face death.

Basically, it was about creating a compulsion to keep reading, even when the reader was tired and wanted to go to sleep or had to dart off to their kid’s ballet practice.  That compulsion may have to lay dormant for a while, but the urge to continue must be there or it becomes easy to not read.  So answer some questions, but create more.  That makes the reader hungry to know, and that’s what helps create suspense.

No comments:

Post a Comment