The Fire in Fiction

by Donald Maass

  Judging by queries that arrive at my agency, though, there are certain fears that in our times provoke extra degrees of paranoia.

  Control of government by a self-selected few, the far reach of ancient secret societies, cloning and genetic engineering, and supernatural beings such as vampires, werewolves, and shape-shifters all seem to preoccupy us.

  Why these dangers and not communists, nuclear bombs, cults, giant meteors, aliens, or any of the other unsettling worries that have preoccupied us in the past? Obviously, paranoid fears are topical. They reflect what is new and unknown. Well, I suppose except for vampires. They've been around for a while, in entertainment at least, which may explain why they've morphed from scary monsters to sex objects.

  But we'll get to that.

  Let's begin with this principle: We are afraid of the dark. In other words, we are afraid of nothing. There's not a thing under the bed at night that wasn't there during the day. The closet still holds our clothes and smelly sneakers and nothing else. So it is with conspiracies, clones, computer brains, and supernatural beings. They're not real.

  No, sorry, they're not. Let's not get into an argument about this. Real conspiracies are, historically speaking, exceedingly rare and mostly unsuccessful. We cannot clone human beings and are unlikely to do so for a very long time. Computers cannot think. Heck, they can't even infer that the crack of a bat and the roar of a crowd mean a home run.

  And vampires? Please. Have your dentist implant prosthetic fangs, if you want, but get over it: You won't live forever.

  People know this. Readers, generally speaking, are not paranoid. Despite the efforts of religious extremists, our times remain rational and scientific. It is important for suspense novelists to accept this. Why? Because their first task is to convince readers that the improbable is not only possible, not only likely, but actually is happening.

  That is not as easy as it sounds. If you don't believe me, drop by my office any Wednesday afternoon during our weekly query meetings, when we comb through query letters and partial manuscripts. Paranoid conspiracy stories turn up every week. Many have similar premises to already successful novels, movies, and TV shows, but they don't work.

  They fail to frighten. The failure lies not in the selection of a terrifying possibility. After all, many other novelists have already kept us awake with Masonic cabals, computers run amok, and Hitler clones. No, the real failure is to overcome our rational resistance. It can't happen. That is a reader's first assumption. A thriller writer's first responsibility is to convince us, yes it can.

  How? Essentially, you must pulverize every particle of reader resistance. Every single rational objection must be obliterated, one at a time. Every bit of help for the hero must be taken away; every obstacle for the villain must be overcome. No problem, you are thinking. I'm here to tell you that virtually all thriller manuscripts fail to meet those challenges.

  Even established bestsellers find it difficult to frighten us with the improbable. That is why they have developed certain narrative strategies to help. Three recur in successful suspense fiction. What are these magic formulae?

  First, ignore the reader and instead make believers out of the story's characters. Second, focus strongly on the human villains. Third, convince the reader of the improbable by overwhelming her with brute force pseudo-facts, and simultaneously by eliminating every reason why this scary whatever-it-is wouldn't happen in the real world.

  All of these are ways of getting around a reader's natural skepticism. I emphasize, again, that these techniques are not simple or easy to apply. They require an extreme level of commitment. Be warned. If you want to frighten readers, deeply and for real, then you are in for more work that you've ever imagined—and more pages too. Did you ever notice that most thrillers are fat? There's a reason.

  That said, let's dig in to examples of how winning suspense strategies have been applied in some successful contemporary novels. It doesn't matter whether you are putting over conspiracy, cloning, computers, or any other fear. The techniques are the same as they are for serial killers, courtroom skullduggery, medical horrors, and monsters.

  MAKING CHARACTERS AFRAID

  Do you want your readers to be afraid? Sure, me too. Let's try it. Are you ready? Here it comes: Be afraid! Be very afraid!

  There. Are you terrified? No? A little nervous maybe? If you aren't quaking in your shoes right now then you are experiencing resistance, or possibly even defiance. You trying to make me afraid? Ha. Keep trying. In other words, announcing to readers that a story will be scary does not by itself invoke fear. In fact, it may rouse the opposite. It will now be twice as hard to make readers tremble.

  Let's try a different approach. Ready? Cold terror chilled Steve to the bone. Heh, heh. Got you that time, didn't I. No? Well, why not? Steve's fear has chilled him to the bone, for Pete's sake. More frightened than that you cannot get.

  Needless to say, my simplistic approach isn't going to get you to feel Steve's fear. You don't know anything about him. You aren't connecting with his life, experience, and emotions. You don't identify with him. Furthermore, my thudding cliche "chilled to the bone" has no impact. Its effect has dulled over time. In order to get you to feel Steve's fear I will first have to get you involved with Steve and then get you to experience Steve's terror in a way that is fresh.

  John Case, in his thriller The Genesis Code (1997), faces these very problems. Something profound has happened: a famous fertility doctor in Italy has conducted an experiment at his clinic that could change the course of human history! Hmmm. Do you already feel resistant to that premise? Sure. Case knows that, so in his opening chapters he does not explain the doctor's work but instead details the effect it has on several important characters.

  The first is the doctor's chess partner and confessor, Father Azetti. On hearing the doctor's deathbed account of his experiments, Father Azetti is shaken. He realizes that he must tell someone. He sets out for Rome. That would be good enough to set the plot in motion. Five pages would do it.

  But Case is too experienced a novelist to let it go at that. He makes sure that we get to know Father Azetti. As the opening unfolds, we learn everything from what Father Azetti likes for lunch to his sad history as a politically active priest in South America whose wings were clipped by the Vatican—clipped, in fact, by the very Cardinal whom he must now visit. He's barely got enough money to get there, too.

  In the following passage, Father Azetti waits on a train platform for the first of several local trains he must take:

  Father Azetti had nearly an hour to wait before the train to Perugia arrived. In Perugia he would take the shuttle to the other station, and wait another hour for the train to Rome. Meanwhile, he sat on a small bench outside the train station in the Todi, baking in the heat. The air was heavy with dust and ozone, and the black robes of his order pulled the sunlight toward him.

  He was a Jesuit, a member of the Society of Jesus. Despite the heat, he did not relax his shoulders or let his head droop. He sat erect. His posture was perfect.

  Had he been an ordinary parish priest in a small town in the Umbrian countryside, the entire matter of Dr. Baresi's confession would probably have gone no further. Indeed, if he'd been a simpler priest, it was unlikely that he'd have comprehended the doctor's confession, let alone its implications. And if he had understood, he wouldn't have had the faintest idea what to do with the information or where to go with it.

  But Giulio Azetti was no ordinary priest.

  Seated on the platform, Father Azetti mediated upon the dimensions of the sin confessed to him. Simply stated, it was an abomination—a crime not only against the Church, but against the cosmos. It offended the natural order, and contained within itself the end of the Church. And not only the Church.

  Father Azetti shook his head ever so slightly and let his eyes rest on the dusty weeds that grew in the cracks of concrete near the train bed. Just as the seeds that had fallen in those cracks contained within themselves the promise
of this destructive vegetation, so, too, the sin confessed by the doctor, if unaddressed, contained ... what?

  The end of the world?

  Notice how many different tasks Case accomplishes in this passage. There is no action, per se. Father Azetti is sitting and waiting. That should be deadly dull. But Case makes waiting a tense experience by detailing Azetti's inner fear. Azetti, with his dignified posture and sense of purpose, also becomes heroic. Case wants to be sure we care about him.

  Eventually Azetti makes it to Rome, there to wait in the outer office of Cardinal Orsini, who oversees the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the CDF), the Curia or department charged with investigating heresy. Azetti waits there for a month, sleeping on a train station bench at night and growing smellier by the day. Eventually the Cardinal deigns to see him. The confession that Azetti reports has an even stronger effect on Cardinal Orsini:

  In the days that followed, Cardinal Orsini worried.

  He worried about Man. He worried about God. And he worried about himself. What was he to do? What could anyone do? The implications of Dr. Baresi's confession were so profound that for the first time in his life Orsini felt that he'd been asked to shoulder a burden that was too heavy for him. Obviously, the matter should be taken directly to the Pope, but the Pope was barely conscious half the time, his lucidity flickering in and out like a weak radio signal. An issue like this ... it could kill him.

  Thus, the torch is passed up the ladder of authority. Worry increases. This buildup is not quick. Case spends thirty-one pages on these early plot developments. Wait, isn't the idea to keep thriller plots moving fast? Yes, yet Case is crafty. The premise underlying his story is going to be a hard one to swallow. Therefore, he first builds our belief in his characters.

  Having laid his groundwork, Case next launches events in America. In an upscale suburb ofWashington, D.C., a house explodes. The single mother and a small child inside are dead, but an autopsy shows that they were killed before the explosion. The dead woman's brother is the novel's protagonist, Joe Lassiter, head of a high-tech investigation agency. Joe takes a leave of absence to find out who killed his sister and why. Now, let me ask you, how many pages would you spend on this set-up phase of the novel? Two or three chapters?

  Case gives it more than one hundred pages. Why so many? He is investing us deeply in Joe Lassiter. We are shown his methodical working method, the loyalty of his staff, his bond to his dead sister. Only a third of the way through this long novel does Lassiter finally land in Rome where we meet the novel's villain, the leader of the sinister Catholic organization Opus Dei (yes, it's the same Opus Dei as in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code), which is one by one murdering eighteen select children around the world, including Joe's nephew.

  What makes those eighteen children special? It turns out that the world-renowned Dr. Baresi specialized in a fertility solution known as "gamete intrafallopian transfer." Got that? Case spends a number of pages detailing this procedure to make sure we know it's genuine. (It means a donor egg and a father's sperm are combined, then implanted in a mother's uterus.)

  Dr. Baresi also became obsessed with religious relics. Now, most relics are medieval fakes, but Baresi investigated thousands and concluded that eighteen had some possibility ofbeing genuine. Salvaging DNA from those, he impregnated eighteen women. One or more of the resulting children may carry the DNA ofJesus.

  At this point you may be groaning, but remember that in the novel that kicker is not disclosed for nearly three hundred pages. Three hundred pages of groundwork! What hooks us, in other words, is not the shocker that the son ofJesus walks the Earth. To that our reaction is a snide Yeah, right! But Joe Lassiter and others believe it to be so, and because we now believe in Case's characters, our skepticism is overcome ... or at least enough for us to read ahead to see what will happen to Joe Lassiter, Father Azetti, and others.

  Another novel involving the Vatican, Richard Doetsch's debut thriller The Thieves of Heaven (2006), pursues a similar strategy. This time, let's start with Doetsch's ridiculous premise and work backwards to discover how he prepares us to accept it.

  Ready? Three hundred pages into The Thieves of Heaven we learn that Satan is hanging around in our times in the guise of—what else?—a billionaire German industrialist and collector of macabre religious art who goes by the name Finster. Finster has hired a reformed American thief, Michael St. Pierre (St. Peter, get it?), to steal two ancient keys from the Vatican. These keys are literally the keys to the gates of Heaven, given by Jesus to Peter. With these keys in his possession, Satan gets to go home and, better still, control access to eternity.

  Are you sweating bullets contemplating this awful scenario? Nah, me neither. We don't buy it. If Doetsch had started off with this information he'd face impossible-to-overcome degrees of reader skepticism. So he holds it back. Instead he begins by introducing his protagonist, the former master thief Michael St. Pierre. There's a lot to know about him. Michael got caught on what was supposed to be his final job because he paused in his escape to rescue a woman (spotted through a window with his night vision goggles) who is being tortured by a serial killer.

  Having established Michael's credentials as a thief with a heart, Doetsch zooms ahead to show us Michael's life following a three-and-a-half year stretch in prison. Remarkably, Michael's beautiful and spirited wife, Mary, has stuck by him. She's a schoolteacher. He has opened a security hardware business. They're struggling but happy. She's religious; he is not. Michael has a steadfast best friend in Paul Busch, who also happens to be his parole officer.

  Now, hold on. This is all backstory and setup. Stuff like that bogs down most openings. It's unnecessary junk that the author thinks we need to know to understand his characters, but actually is for the author's benefit not ours. So how does Doetsch get away with it? He does so by making each scene genuinely narrative; that is, by presenting a problem (bridging conflict in my terminology) and keeping us constantly wondering what will happen with line-by-line micro-tension. (We'll discuss that in depth in chapter eight.)

  After fifty pages of Michael's bridging conflict—fifty pages!— Doetsch finally puts the main problem in place: Michael and Mary don't have health insurance. She's briefly between jobs; he's starting out. They decide to save money for the three months before Mary's new benefits kick in. Unfortunately, during this window they learn that Mary has aggressive ovarian cancer. Treating it will cost $250,000. To pay for it, Michael has no choice but to break his solemn vow to Mary, and the conditions of his parole, by thieving. Enter Finster, who wants Michael to steal a pair of keys from the Vatican.

  Fifty pages of setup is excessive—or is it? In the hands of a lesser writer those fifty pages would be dull and obstructive. Agents and editors would reject with comments like slow to get underway. What is meant by slow, however, is really lack of tension. Tension is the technique that makes any action necessary and riveting, even ordinarily slack passages such as travel, mulling over prior events, drinking tea or coffee, or relaxing in a nice hot bath.

  Allow me to digress for a moment on this business of thriller openings. It's highly important and too little understood.

  Beginners' beginnings indulge in scenery descriptions, arrival, setup, backstory, and all manner of low-tension material, but unintentionally. More experienced writers know better. They get the plot going. A frequent choice, especially in thrillers, is a grabber prologue in which an anonymous killer slaughters a hapless victim. Seize their attention and don't let it go! Right?

  The problem with slamming a killer on stage and hitting the readers with immediate violence is that we have no reason to care. We know nothing about these characters and, worse, are inured to violence. Real life violence is unforgettable and life changing. Violence in movies, on TV, or in novels is ho-hum. Even if visually fresh, we're still not emotionally invested.

  Don't get me wrong: I'm not recommending fifty pages of backstory and setup for most novelists. But for thriller writers who g
rasp the methods of micro-tension and are committed to using them all the time (trust me, that is less than one percent of all fiction writers), there is enormous benefit in getting readers deeply involved with characters before trying to put over a premise that they will resist.

  Okay, thanks. Back to The Thieves of Heaven.

  Does Doetsch succeed? I'd say so. The middle third of his novel is a highly researched and effectively detailed account of Michael's theft of the keys to Heaven. (It turns out he must steal them not once but three times.) Doetsch also effectively weaves in Michael's atheism, which stands in for any reader skepticism. Michael's motive is to save his wife, who does believe, so no matter what your own orientation you have a way to enjoy the story without having to accept an unwelcome postulate. The conflicts of the secondary character Paul Busch are also developed, as are Mary's cancer struggle and her faith in Michael. A secondary villain also gets page time: the serial killer who was the cause of Michael's arrest.

  Talk about packing a plot! Doetsch makes sure there's plenty to occupy readers who may not be willing to buy that Satan is a German billionaire. Michael doesn't either, or at least not for a long while. Finally, though, deep into the novel he realizes what Finster really is and the horrible mistakes he's made. He even persuades his buddy Paul.

  Does Michael, or more properly Doetsch, persuade us? By then it doesn't matter. We're afraid because Michael is afraid.

  Are you willing to commit to the same level of character building, constant tension, research, and multiple-point-of-view plotting? You are? I accept your willingness but pardon my cocked eyebrow. The proof is on the page.

  FOCUS ON VILLAINS

  As I mentioned earlier, there's another way to overcome reader skepticism about scenarios that, in reality, are unlikely if not impossible. It involves convincing a reader to fear not what's happening but who is doing it.