Suspense and Pacing in Stories

Suspense, Anticipation, Pace and Movement in Fiction

Rule for using this skill: These tips add to your answer and do not replace it. Always give your full general answer to the writing question first, using everything you already know about fiction craft. Then work in the tips below wherever they apply. Do not drop normal advice because a tip covers a similar point.

Anticipation (reader expects something bad)

• Introduce a situation fraught with possible danger or risk. The reader's knowledge that something bad could happen creates the pull.
• Raise the stakes with small qualifiers. A report that is "urgent", or papers that are "top-secret", makes the risk bigger.
• Plant an odd event that the character dismisses but the reader notices. Example: two men enter the boss's office and lock the door while the trainee is too busy to wonder.
• Foreshadow trouble for a vulnerable or sympathetic character. A single father who drops a spanner on his foot and feels faint worries the reader more because his child depends on him.
• Don't resolve anticipation too fast. Let tension build for pages.
• Don't stretch it too long either, or the reader gets irritated. Tease without annoying.
• Keep every detail relevant to the storyline. Cut research or colour that only shows off and slows the narrative.

Fear (the bad thing has happened, outcome unresolved)

• Order matters: anticipation comes before the event, and fear comes after it while the outcome is still open.
• Put the reader inside the predicament by showing the character's thoughts on the consequences (career, marriage, family).
• Stack complications so each scene worsens the last. Example: crash, then an angry driver phoning the police. Or: body found, then an incriminating paper naming the trainee, then a colleague walking in as she tries to remove it.
• Increase fear as the story progresses. Give the main character plenty of options early and remove them gradually.
• Don't over-escalate, or the story turns melodramatic.
• Use anticipation and fear in minor conflicts too, not only big plots.
• Plant setting details early that pay off later. A Tudor building supplies the beam used in the discovery scene.

Movement (physical and emotional)

• The character must get from point A to point B by the end, however circuitous the route.
• Characters reveal themselves through words and deeds. Have them interact with people, places and their own emotions.
• Run two levels together:
  • Physical movement is the plot events, the "what happens".
  • Emotional movement is the inner discovery that turns plot into story. Example: a woman discovers the melancholy of her marriage.
• Exercise: list the physical beats, then list the emotional beats alongside them, and check that they are linked.
• Raise emotional stakes through character attributes. A husband who is a Police Inspector has far more to lose on discovering stolen rings than an unemployed one would.
• An ending can mirror the beginning to show the underlying problem is unchanged (the wife steals again).

Pace

• Decide the time span first (a day, a week, a year). A longer span means more narrative summary and fewer scenes.
• Put dramatic moments "on stage" in scene so the reader watches the crisis unfold. This speeds the pace and pulls the reader in.
• Match pace to content. Use a leisurely pace for the news of an arrest, then quicken sharply when the character learns of the conviction.
• To quicken pace, use short, staccato sentences. To slow it, use longer ones.

Flashbacks

• A flashback should reveal something new that explains motivation, by showing and not telling.
• It can make an apparently out-of-character act credible. Example: a gentle man beats up a woman-hitter, then a flashback shows him as a boy unable to protect his mother.
• The key test is relevance. If a flashback doesn't enrich the story, cut it.
• Keep flashbacks short. Long ones lose the story's focus.
• Avoid repeatedly jerking between past and present, which forces rereading.
• Alternative: deliver past information through dialogue with subtext. Imply what you can and be economical.
• Models: Scrooge as a boy in "A Christmas Carol". "Bullet in the Brain" (Tobias Wolff) is in present tense with one expository-prose flashback listing the life events that flash through Anders' mind.

Foreshadowing

• Foreshadowing is anticipation of conflict. It suggests something will happen and makes the reader ask questions.
• Opening forms that work:
  • A witness report of a death with a suspect hint.
  • A retrospective narrator ("all my problems stem from my parents' divorce").
  • An incongruous detail (a boy with a rifle boarding a school bus).
  • A narrator's hindsight ("had no idea she'd just made one of the biggest mistakes of her life").
  • A threat in the first line, as in Poe's "The Cask of the Amontillado".
• Start at the end, as in Columbo. Open with the aftermath (a body), then go back to the beginning to explore who the victim was, why it happened and who did it.
• Minor characters can foreshadow the major characters' actions.
• Pay off every planted detail by the end and reveal what it meant, or the reader will feel cheated.
• Exercise: add foreshadowing to your story to intrigue or surprise the reader.