How to Write Fiction (7 page)

The dark art of creating suspense

More than any trick or technique, what makes suspense so enthralling is empathy – crafting characters your readers can truly connect with, says
Mark Billingham

I
am often asked at events and creative writing workshops how you go about creating suspense. There was a period when, in answer to this question, I would talk about the tricks of the trade: the cliffhanger, the twist and the “reveal”. Such things are still important, of course, but I have come to realise that the answer actually lies in something far more basic, something that should be central to the writing of any piece of fiction: the creation of character.

The techniques mentioned above are, of course, all vital pieces of the mystery writer's armoury and, as such, are components of the genre that readers of crime novels have come to expect. They are part of the package; the buttons that a writer has to push every so often. When a crime writer thinks up a delicious twist, it is a great moment. Time to relax and take the rest of the day off. I do think that it can be overdone, however. There are a number of writers who believe it is their duty to throw as many curve balls at the reader as possible. To twist and twist again. These are the Chubby Checkers of crime fiction and, while I admire the craft, I think that it can actually work against genuine suspense. Put simply, I find it hard to engage with any book that is no more than a demonstration of technique.

That said, the “reveal” remains a very effective technique, and one with which I am very familiar from my time as a standup comedian. It may sound surprising, but a joke and a crime novel work in very much the same way. The comedian/writer leads their audience along the garden path. The audience know what's coming, or at least they think they do until they get hit from a direction they were not expecting.

The best example I can think of from the world of crime fiction is in Thomas Harris's novel, The Silence of the Lambs. The Swat team have the killer cornered and are approaching his house. At the same time, Clarice Starling has been dispatched to a small town many miles away to tie up a few loose ends. A member of the Swat teams ring the killer's doorbell. We “cut” to the killer's ghastly cellar where he hears the doorbell ring. This is the moment when the dummy is sold and the reader buys it completely. The reader stays with the killer as he slowly climbs the stairs. We know he has a gun. We know what he is capable of. He opens the door, and … it's Clarice Starling! The Swat team are at the wrong house, she is at the right house and she doesn't know it. It's the perfect reveal and it happens at the precise moment that the reader turns the page. The best crime fiction is full of heart-stopping moments such as this.

The reason that Harris's reveal works so wonderfully, however, is not just because of the sublime timing. It works because of the character of Clarice Starling; a young woman the reader has come to know well and to empathise with. Ultimately, this is where I believe that the key to genuine suspense is to be found.

This revelation happened several years ago when I was reading a novel called The Turnaround by American writer George Pelecanos. Pelecanos is happy enough to call himself a crimewriter, but he is not one overly concerned with the sort of tricks already described. There is usually shocking violence, often with an element of investigation in its aftermath, but his books are not traditional mysteries by any means. What he does do is create characters that live and breathe on the page. As I read, I realised I had come to know some of these people so well that the idea that something bad was going to happen to them had become almost unbearable. I was turning each page with a sense of dread and it dawned on me that here was the most satisfying way to create suspense.

These are crime novels, after all. The reader has seen the jacket, read the blurb and knows very well what they are in for. Yes, there may be redemption and resolution of a sort, but there will also be suffering and pain, grief and dreadful loss. You know it's coming, but not when or to whom. The tension is real and terrible, because you care.

So, by all means throw in a thrilling twist every now and again, but not so often that they lose their power to shock. Time those “reveals” to perfection so as to give your reader a punch line they will remember for a long time. But above all, give your readers characters they genuinely care about, that have the power to move them, and you will have suspense from page one.

Mark Billingham is the author of 11 crime novels. Winner of the Theakston's Old Peculier crime novel of the year award, he has tutored creative writing courses for both Faber and Arvon. His latest novel, Good As Dead, is published by Sphere

Writer's workshop 7

How to transform a trivial list of events into a deliberate, focused plot

T
he first step in designing a story is to get together a collection of events.

1
Take 10 minutes to write an account of something you did yesterday. Include as many different events, no matter how trivial, as you can, to give yourself plenty of material to work on.

Look at what you've got and how your piece works on the level of event.

• Did you tell your events in strict chronological order or is there a point where you've darted backwards or forwards?
  
• Is there something in these events that you might call a “climax”? Is there some event that all the others led up to? Or are all your events of equal weight?
  
• Do you just have one string of events, or do you have more than one?
  
• Have you told another story in miniature, perhaps to explain something in yesterday's events? Have you referred to some past action, or some future hope?
  
• Is there a second character who creates a second mini-story?
  

2
Now rearrange all the elements that you have.

• If you have a strictly chronological piece, try putting the end at the beginning, or telling it backwards.
  
• If you have a climax, try streamlining everything else to make the climax more forceful.
  
• If you have several kinds of events, several characters or any references to past or future, arrange the piece in a flashback structure, a story-within-a-story or as two parallel stories.
  
• Where your piece ends, ask the question “and then what happened?” See if you can give the plot another twist.
  
• Invent new events and discard real ones as it suits your purposes. Try to rearrange the piece as differently as you can, even if the original structure seems the best.
  

3
Next, look at your piece from the point of view of secrets. Rewrite it with the following questions in mind:

• Is there something the narrator knows but isn't telling the reader?
  
• Is the narrator deliberately trying to mislead the reader?
  
• Is there something the reader knows that the narrator doesn't?
  
• Is there something that a character knows that they're not telling?
  
• At what point should information be given: should it all be laid out at the beginning or should information be withheld until the end?
  
• Is there something that should never be made quite clear, something that should stay obscure?
  

4
Lastly, let's look at the focus of the piece.

• Give the piece a title, or several titles.
  
• Write a one-line summary of the piece.
  
• If you can, give the piece to someone else and ask them to think of a title for the piece, or summarise it. Their way of seeing it may lead to new insights.
  
• Is there some unifying thread through all the events? Did they all happen to the same person, for example, or are they all tragic?
  
• Has anything been repeated in the piece: a word, a kind of action, a feeling, an image?
  

The answers to these questions will probably give you some idea about the focus of your piece. Now rewrite it, sharpening the focus. Remove or play down anything that doesn't help to focus it and invent anything you can to make the focus clearer.

5
The focus of a piece can change drastically as you explore it further. See if these shift the focus of your piece at all:

• Delete the first paragraph of your piece so that the second paragraph becomes the start of the piece. Does that suggest a different emphasis?
  
• Make the piece half as long. What have you left out?
  
• Make the piece twice as long. What have you added?
  

Cut, then cut again

Every successful writer knows that revising is a crucial part of the creative process.
MJ Hyland
explains how to go about distilling your novel to its essential core

I
've never read or written a perfect first draft. Perfect first drafts don't exist. And yet most writers, at the beginning of their careers, think they must. This intimidating myth of effortless gift persists because successful authors aren't in the habit of admitting to writing weak drafts and rarely show the public their mistakes.

“Every writer I know has trouble writing.”
Joseph Heller

The truth is that every beautiful, exciting and moving work of fiction is last in a line of at least a half-dozen carefully reworked drafts. Good writers are good because they have the right measure of intellect and talent for the hard labour of rewriting. Most writers haven't the stamina for this exacting work, or are too thin-skinned, defensive, or too impatient to face the bad news that they haven't got it right the first time round.

Rewriting accounts for the lion's share of a writer's work; the calculated and deliberate work that comes after the gleeful, and sometimes unconscious, first draft. Good writers, even the arrogant ones, are also humble and self-aware enough to know that revision is always necessary.

Fixing the first draft

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
Elmore Leonard.

Here are seven techniques which are sure to make your job of revision easier and more effective:

1
Remove exaggeration (tell the fictional “truth”).
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”
George Orwell

2
Cut out cliches.
“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
Anton Chekhov

3
Remove your failed similes. A bad simile is embarrassing, like a long joke with a weak punch line, told by a nervous comedian.
“Kate inched over her own thoughts like a measuring worm.”
John Steinbeck

4
Don't attempt a final version of the beginning of the story until you know how it ends. (And don't waste time fussing over the beginning until the rest of the work is done.)
“Be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.”
HW Fowler

5
Do at least one of the following to help you see your prose more clearly:

• Write by hand
  
• Use an ugly font
  
• Read your work aloud, or have somebody else read it aloud
  
• Write your second draft without referring to the first draft
  

“Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.”
Matthew Arnold

6
Don't use more words than you need to and beware of fancy or ornate words.
“I never write ‘metropolis' for seven cents when I can write “city” and get paid the same.”
Mark Twain

7
Make sure your adverbs and adjectives aren't muting your verbs and nouns.
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
Stephen King

An example of poor prose

This is typical of the kind of thing I see in early drafts every day, and it can be cured, in time, if the writer has the right kind of talent and intelligence, and by applying the above principles:

The smell in the crowded pub was so vile that I nearly gagged. It was like the smell of a camel that's been dead for three days. I whispered under my breath to Sarah, ‘That smell is so disgusting,' and Sarah nodded so violently I thought her head would fall off, but she still looked beautiful with all her red curls wrapping round themselves like the golden tendrils of an ancient oak tree or like the snakes on Medusa's head that we saw in the museum last week.

This bad prose is very bad. The descriptions are overwrought, dilute dramatic effect and undermine authorial and narrative credibility. To say “nearly gagged” is not just cliched, it's barely credible. Something prosaic is better than the wrecking-ball of “gagged”. A more subtle and truer description of the smell would better serve to establish trust between reader and writer. Something like, “The pub smelt of whiskey and vegetable soup.” Most people know what whiskey and vegetable soup smell like, but few know the smell of “a camel that's been dead for three days”. And the “crowded pub” is probably noisy, so the idea of “whispered under my breath” is tautological and untruthful.

As for the other errors, see if you can find them yourself and rewrite the paragraph knowing this: it's crucial that the reader not only sees what you want them to see but also believes you.

“The best style is the style you don't notice.”
Somerset Maugham

Curing the fear of inadequacy

Many fledgling writers suffer from a problem that turns their prose into overblown mush: the idea that good writing is fancy writing, packed with complicated writerly flourish, staggering similes and metaphors, and that all great writing begins with a knock-out opening sentence.

Through most of my early 20s I thought the same. There was panic and lots of wasted, misdirected effort – time spent glued to the idea that I must prove my intelligence, at the cost of worrying about much more important things, such as character and truthful storytelling. I gave up chasing similes as good as Nabokov's, and thought more about Chekhov's compassion for character, and the brutal and compelling grace of Flannery O'Connor's fiction. I stopped showing off and set out to write drama void of conspicuous artifice.

When I quit trying to sound like a writer, I became more of a writer. I took my desire to impress off the page and listened to Leo Tolstoy:

Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.

MJ Hyland is the author of three novels, How the Light Gets In, shortlisted for the Commonwealth writers' prize, Carry Me Down, shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and, most recently, the Orange prize-shortlisted This is How. She is co-founder of
Hyland & Byrne: The Editing Firm
and her short story, Rag Love, was shortlisted for the BBC national short story award 2011