An Exercise in Suspense

 
1. How do you create suspense in fiction? Lee Child has a simple and brilliant answer in this article from The New York Times.

2. See his technique in action in this short-short story, "Guy Walks Into a Bar . . ."

3. Print out the story and get a pen. Set your timer for fifteen minutes. Now diagram it: Note every place where Child raises a question in the reader's mind (e.g., what country is the girl from?) and every place where he answers one (she's likely from Russia).

Number the questions and their answers so you can see which go together—Q1, A1; Q2, A2. Or draw arrows between each question and its answer.

Note how they overlap: he might raise two questions, answer only the first, then raise a third, etc.

This is not a precise, right/wrong sort of exercise. There are different ways you can classify a "question" and an "answer." But paying close attention to the text, and marking it up in whatever way makes sense to you, will reveal some of the mechanics of the plot to you in amazing ways. Try it.

4. Now do this very basic exercise in writing suspense, from John Gardner's classic The Art of Fiction:

Write the paragraph that would appear in a piece of fiction just before the discovery of a body. You might perhaps describe the character’s approach to the body he will find, or the location, or both. The purpose of the exercise is to develop the technique of at once attracting the reader toward the paragraph to follow, making him want to skip ahead, and holding him on this paragraph by virtue of its interest. Without the ability to write such foreplay paragraphs, one can never achieve real suspense.

The important thing here is to make it clear from the first line that something is going to happen. For the purposes of this particular exercise, make it clear that it's a dead body we're about to find. Set your timer for ten minutes and write.

5. Now after you've set us up to think we're going to find a body, have us find something else. Below are two suggestions for what the "something else" could be. (Or do whatever you want. If you're having fun and you're on a roll, shut your browser and just go write.)

     a. Set the timer for ten minutes. Have that "something else" be more horrible than what the protagonist expected. Perhaps it's an ambush; perhaps it's many bodies instead of one; or perhaps it's just one, but it's his best friend, his loyal dog, his wife. If you do that, the exercise ends here.

OR:

     b. Set the timer for ten minutes. Have that "something else" be no big deal. A dead rat, or nothing at all—just an empty closet. But this no-big-deal discovery is a false lull, similar to a cat scare in horror. Something else still remains to be found. If you go this route, then after the no-big-deal discovery, set your timer for ten more minutes and write some more: Have the truly horrible thing turn up.

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In this exercise, we're working with mystery and suspense, using something like what tvtropes.org calls a subverted trope: You set us up to expect one thing is going to happen, then have something different happen. You can see this idea brilliantly in action in the short "Teaser" section at the beginning of Welcome to the Hellmouth, the pilot episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Charlie Chaplin talked about this same structure in the context of humor in his famous bit of advice recorded in David Niven's autobiography, about how to design the perfect banana-peel gag. (Longer version here, page 9).

Whatever you write in this quick exercise is likely to be messy and imperfect. Maybe you'll get to the end and think, "Oh, I should have started with X instead of Y" for more foreshadowing, or more surprise, or whatever. That's good! Set it aside for a little while, and then come back and see if you can improve it by rewriting.

No matter what results you produce, the fact that you turned these ideas over in your mind, and put them into practice with a pen in your hand, will serve you sometime in the future. You may not know when, and you may not know how, but it will happen—I promise.