Pacing, Suspense and Violence

Pacing and suspense in crime fiction

Core rule: This skill adds specialist tips on top of the answer. Always give the full general answer from your own knowledge, and work these tips in where they apply. They do not replace what you already know.

Pacing rhythm

• Don't hold every scene at high pitch. Constant excitement bores as much as nothing happening.
• Build to a dramatic scene, then allow a letdown or rest, then build again. The tempo should rise, fall and rise again.
• Slower scenes should still carry milder surprises and revelations.
• Don't pile on endless defeat. Lace in hope and small "wins" so the story isn't unpleasant to read, while the main character's path is never easy.
• Reveal plot turns and character information gradually. Give partial answers, then raise new questions. Tantalize, but not so much that the reader throws the book across the room.
• Time pressure holds readers. A ticking-clock threat (High Noon) is best.
• Moving the action day to day gives momentum. Lapses of time between scenes or chapters slow interest, though plot necessity governs this.
• Hour-by-hour narration piles up meals, sleep, clothes changes and showers. Keep such detail minimal.

Chapter endings

• Carry suspense over the end of a chapter, because readers tend to put the book down there.
• Close on a new shock or question, not a resolution. Example: the heroine, groping in a pitch-dark dungeon, touches a warm human face.

Main character and drive

• Give the main character a life-or-death problem. Small difficulties don't build high suspense, and a weak drive gives a weak story.
• Quiet stories need the same desperate need to reach a goal. Action needn't be violent.
• The story really begins when the character decides to act. Until then it's preparation, so don't let the character drift for chapters.
• Give the character a purpose in every scene that leads toward the main goal.
• If the heroine can't act on her own, bring in another character with a strong, different drive who forces her to act.
• Write down the penalties for failure and the rewards for success, and consult them periodically. Review them in a critical, "left-brain" state, because writers easily fool themselves.
• Know specifically what will make the character happy. If you don't, the story collapses.

Plot and surprise

• A plot is cause and effect, not a string of incidents. Forster's example: "The king died and the queen died of grief."
• Do the unexpected. If readers can guess what comes next, you lose them.
• Discard easy approaches and aim for the astonishing but logical.
• Unplanned surprises can arise mid-scene. Push for them when suspense feels thin.
• The solution and the guilty party should surprise the reader. Readers like being fooled.
• The ending needs to be right, not necessarily happy.

Characters, secrets and curiosity

• Reader curiosity carries the story early and intermittently, but you must supply something to be curious about, such as strange goings-on or a person hiding something.
• Give every character a secret (hidden goals, past guilt). Secrets drive mysterious behavior and conflict, and make characters real.
• Use at most one eccentric character per novel, since more destroys reality. Eccentrics create suspense by doing the unexpected.

Conflict

• Psychological conflict beats car chases and fistfights. Holding readers depends on "people action" and on sympathy for the main character.
• Two people talking in a room can generate stronger suspense than physical action. Build conversation that raises curiosity and hints at action to come.
• Conflict comes from well-conceived characters with strongly opposing goals.

Viewpoint

• Single viewpoint (third or first person) increases immediacy and emotional intensity. Worry and fear are stronger when following one character's fate.
• Multiple viewpoints allow dramatic irony, where the reader sees danger the character doesn't. The cost is a letdown when you leave a beloved character for one the reader doesn't care about, so rebuild interest quickly.
• If you use several viewpoints, never use more than one mind per page. One viewpoint per chapter is safest.
• Single-viewpoint workarounds:
  • For events the lead can't witness, dramatize another character's report.
  • For physical description, have other characters speak to the lead, and avoid the mirror cliché.

Danger and threat

• Danger must be real. A threat that turns out to be "it was all a mistake" is fatal.
• Avoid having a character walk into an obviously dangerous situation without reason, such as a dark alley. Readers notice, and it matters most for female leads.
• Build specific, known reasons why the character is forced into jeopardy, then make her ingenious in escaping.
• A threat can be as scary as an attack. Example: a halberd left beside an unconscious heroine, which pays off later.
• Avoid the stock bop-on-the-head. A self-inflicted version (a fall) is one alternative.
• Near the climax, move to an action scene. Stop drawing-room questioning and exposing of suspects. Raise emotion and cut off escape routes.

Setting and research

• Choose a visitable setting that supplies fresh scene material. Your home locale seen freshly can work.
• Look for scenes that trigger your imagination, since suspense grows from your own reactions first.
• Do field research: take notes and flash photos of striking props or places.
• Library research on each new place or subject yields further ideas and helps prevent writer's block.

Word choice

• Choose words with "emotional vote". Avoid the trite and obvious. Verbs matter most.
• Adverbs and adjectives are acceptable if not overdone.
• Keep a thesaurus at hand (Roget's).

Ending

• Stop when suspense and curiosity are gone. Don't add pages of explanation that belonged earlier.
• Consider holding one important answer until the last paragraph.
• Expect to rewrite the conclusion many times.

Depicting violence: why it's hard

• External violence is prone to tedium and anticlimax because the tension is spent setting up the act.
• Routine fistfights, shootings and fireball crashes are clichéd, and film and TV have dulled readers.
• Violence is not a fix for weak narration. It exposes the weakness.
• Violence works best when personal and tragic, not spectacular. Violence in miniature beats big-brush violence.
• Write it only if you are affected by it as you write.

Three techniques for external violence

1. Slow it to the point of absurdity. Dwell on the instant, using trajectory, physical detail and the victim's perceptions (the shot to the eye; the car skidding into oaks).
   • Don't use it for sexual assault, because of the prurience trap.
2. Empty bracket. Narrate the before and the after, and omit the act itself so the reader's imagination fills the gap.
   • Examples: mundane details on the plane before the disappearance; the cops discussing the body after the knife.
   • Size the bracket to what precedes and follows.
3. Underplay the prose. Use understatement, simple sentences, and long sentences joined by "and"/"but", stripped of description.
   • It suits police procedurals but works in all thriller categories.
   • Dwell on an irrelevant detail, such as the oil spot in the garage or the deer on the firing range, so the violence carries weight by contrast.
   • Best for rape scenes: horror only, not prurient, and not so graphic that readers recoil.

• Never give an anatomy lesson. It deadens the narration.

Subjective violence

• Use small-brush detail and the victim's shock. Victims often don't register the injury (the man stabbed 23 times who said he cut himself shaving).
• Show the trivial interior monologue running parallel and counter to the action. Rita, who has been shot, worries about her shoes and missing her flight.
• Ironic understatement or misstatement builds sympathy.
• The victim learns what happened only afterward, from the outside view.
• Disjointed, run-on, dreamlike narration can convey the victim's state, as in the El train fall and the dying man's memories.
• The act of violence is a period. The lead-up is the exclamation.
• Subjective depiction is easy to attempt but hard to do without clichés or interrupting the flow.