Suspense

            Evening there, reader. I hope things are going swimmingly for you today. Now, I notice these last few days I seem to have gotten into some rather uncertain territory, making all sorts of odd surmises and suggestions about what writing is… methinks I’ll take a break from all that heady theoretical stuff—although it is such good fun—and go back to looking at how writing works, how certain techniques produce certain effects in a piece of writing. Now, one thing that you absolutely have to produce if you’re going to get anyone to read a work of any substantial length is the effect of suspense. And this is how it works.

            Suspense doesn’t apply to writing alone, but also to everyday conversation. Ever been talking to someone, and they say they’ve got a story to tell you about this thing, this awful-awful or maybe just funny thing that happened to them at work or out on the street? They say this, but then they go into the story and it’s just, “This happened, and that happened, and this other thing happened next. Then we got here and now I’m telling you about it.” The problem with this is that this is just a chronicle, not a story. The difference between a story and a catalog of events is in the way the events relate to one another: in a way, every moment of a story implies every other moment. There’s a wholeness, a coherence to a story that isn’t present in a chronicle. The key to developing suspense is to periodically wink at the reader, smile and point the finger over at some detail of the developing narrative that implies the wholeness of the narrative, but without giving the game away.

            It seems like there’s kind of a wave-pattern in the way narratives work. For my purposes I’m only talking about a linear narrative that starts at the beginning and moves forward in time—not necessarily good storytelling technique, but it’ll do as a basic model of structure. You start with an event, and this event is always presented to the reader as somehow implying the rest of the story. This event is a sort of “peak” of the story’s first wave. But after this event, especially with longer works, the pace drops off and you get the introduction of a few key players (but not all of them), you get some background (but not all of it), you get some rumblings of conflict… some of the characters may disappear for a time, a kind of hide and seek effect. But if this goes on too long, the reader may get bored—so it’s time to introduce another event! And this structure goes on working, so you’ve got event/background/event/background and so on and so on and so on, until you reach the main event, the catastrophe, the climax, the what-have-you. Then things taper off, linearly speaking.

Never thought I'd use a graph on this blog, but maybe the visual helps... sort of.

            Put it another way: let’s assume that the ideal narrative would be entirely the most exciting part of the story. It would be ten, fifty, a thousand pages of beatific perfection. But if you’re going to tell a story you’ll never be able to manage that; somebody’s bound to think this is the best part, somebody else likes such better… and so. An ideal narrative could never be a work of any length at all, in fact it would look a lot like this:

Exhibit A: The Ideal Narrative

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Which, when you really look at it, isn’t that interesting of a story. The first time you read it you might say, “Whoa there!” But you read it again and then it just looks a little flashy… even a little dull. Trust me on this one: it doesn’t improve on a third reading.

            So, granted that some parts of the story have to be better than others if we’re going to have a story at all, we have to pay special attention to matters of arrangement. Now, if you’re the writer you already know what the best part of the story is, or at least you know the part that you personally like best. So in order to keep the reader going on reading to that point, you put it at or very near the end of the book… assuming you’re not some brilliant but infuriating formalist who likes to puncture the narrative at the very end of the book in very clever ways that, while they seem kind of appropriate are also pretty infuriating.

            Which isn’t to say that frustrating the reader’s expectations isn’t also a good way to maintain interest in a narrative… it just has to be done with a bit of finesse and it’s best if the reader knows that it’s all in good fun. A good author always defers to the reader’s expectations eventually. You don’t want to cheat the reader. But I digress.

Laurence Sterne's immensely helpful diagrams of the plot of Tristram Shandy.

            I was saying that you put that event, whatever event, somewhere in the future off towards the end of the narrative. You’re already constantly referring to it from the very beginning of your narrative, but always in very vague, very general terms, always as if it’s some kind of secret knowledge. As you’re working your way through the various narrative peaks, you keep referring to whatever it is that you’re driving at, but also to the previous peaks and to all the other major events in the narrative. And the references grow increasingly direct over time, so that what we call foreshadowing seems like nothing more or less than a progressive narrowing of vision. This is the way, or at least I think a way, that narratives can maintain coherence and unity. Plenty of books are nothing more or less than collections of fragments that are lacking in unity and cohesion, and so they never really achieve anything more than a sort of momentary interest. Some writers have a very difficult time learning that particular lesson.

            So those are my thoughts at the moment, structure-wise. Penny for your thoughts, reader? I know I’m certainly still in the process of learning the art, but I think there’s at least a kind of sense to all this mess. I’m sure I’ll learn. Have a great day, reader. Go weave some beautiful narratives.