The Fire in Fiction

by Donald Maass

  He was reluctantly fascinated. "Just what kind of perspective do you have on the subject?"

  "I take the Darwinian view. Lying is a universal talent. Everyone I've ever known can do it rather well. Most little kids start practicing the skill as soon as they master language."

  "So you figure there must be some evolutionary explanation, is that it?"

  "I think so, yes," she said, calmly serious and certain. "When you look at it objectively it seems obvious that the ability to lie is part of everyone's kit of survival tools, a side effect of possessing language skills. There are a lot of situations in which the ability to lie is extremely useful. There are times when you might have to lie to protect yourself or someone else, for example."

  "Okay, I get that kind of lying," he said.

  "You might lie to an enemy in order to win a battle or a war. Or you might have to lie just to defend your personal privacy. People lie all the time to defuse a tense social situation or to avoid hurting someone's feelings or to calm someone who is frightened."

  "True."

  "The way I see it, if people couldn't lie, they probably wouldn't be able to live together in groups, at least not

  for very long or with any degree of sociability. And there you have the bottom line."

  "What bottom line?"

  She spread her hands. "If humans could not lie, civilization as we know it would cease to exist."

  What is it that holds our attention in that exchange? Is it Clare's highly reasoned discourse on the importance of lying to human survival? Probably not. The tension instead comes from Jake's reluctance to accept what Clare is saying. His opening salvo sets his resistance: "Let me get this straight ..." From there onward he prompts Clare to justify her position.

  In other words, it is not information itself that nails us to the page; rather, it is doubt about the facts and skepticism of the deliverer. Tension in dialogue is emotional, not intellectual. It comes from people, not topics. What we want to know is not whether a debate will settle a point of contention but whether the debaters will reconcile.

  This testing and defending of the facts is, by the way, the secret behind best-selling stories that depend on large doses of explanation. Does your thriller require that the readers understand a lot about security systems? Are there complex interwoven relationships in your family drama? Do your romantic leads have many reasons to hate each other, especially arising from their past history? If so, it will be necessary to dump a lot of information on your readers.

  That usually is dull. Info dump is deadly. Backstory bogs things down. Zipping up information to make it more frightening or relevant doesn't help. Information is still just information. It's dead weight. Many authors attempt to get around that by disguising info dump as dialogue, but unfortunately that does not automatically work. Dialogue drags unless it is infused with tension; but, as we've seen, even that will only be effective when it is a tug-of-war between talkers.

  Dialogue between antagonists might seem an easy job, yet even there building tension depends on an artful teasing out of the hostility. The protagonist of Sara Gruen's smash bestseller Waterfor Elephants (2006) is ninety-year-old Jacob Jankowski, who is in an old-age home and not pleased to be there. In the dinner hall one

  evening, a new resident claims to have worked in the circus carrying water for elephants. This offends Jankowski, who calls the newcomer a liar.

  "Are you calling me a liar?" he says slowly.

  "If you say you carried water for elephants, I am."

  The girls stare at me with open mouths. My heart's pounding. I know I shouldn't do this, but somehow I can't help myself.

  "How dare you!" McGuinty braces his knobby hands on the edge of the table. Stringy tendons appear in his forearms.

  "Listen pal," I say. "For decades I've heard old coots like you talk about carrying water for elephants and I'm telling you now, it never happened."

  "Old coot? Old coot?" McGuinty pushes himself upright, sending his wheelchair flying backward. He points a gnarled finger at me and then drops as though felled by dynamite. He vanishes beneath the edge of the table, his eyes perplexed, his mouth still open.

  "Nurse! Oh, Nurse!" cry the old ladies.

  There's a familiar patter of crepe-soled shoes and moments later two nurses haul McGuinty up by the arms. He grumbles, making feeble attempts to shake them off.

  A third nurse, a pneumatic black girl in pale pink, stands at the end of the table with her hands on her hips.

  "What on earth is going on?" she asks.

  "That old S-O-B called me a liar, that's what," says McGuinty, safely restored to his chair. He straightens his shirt, lifts his grizzled chin, and crosses his arms in front of him. "And an old coot."

  "Oh, I'm sure that's not what Mr. Jankowski meant," the girl in pink says.

  "It most certainly is," I say. "And he is too. Pffffft. Carried water for the elephants indeed. Do you have any idea how much an elephant drinks?"

  The exchange of insults between these senior citizens is hilarious enough to hold our attention; however, is it the only source of tension in this passage? Have another look. Right away, Gruen gives Jankowski inner conflict. "I know I shouldn't do this, but somehow I can't help myself." Admittedly, Jankowski doesn't try very hard to restrain his impulse, but this mild self-reproach does make us wonder if he will back off. The alarmed and disapproving reactions of the old ladies and the all-powerful nurses only emphasize that Jankowski should shut up. He doesn't, of course, and the deeper he digs himself in the more we wish he would keep quiet.

  Or is it the opposite: that we are cheering him on as he defies propriety? Whatever our hope, there is delicious inner conflict underneath Jankowski's actions. What keeps us reading is partly a desire to learn the truth ofwater and elephants, but more powerfully the deeper mystery of what makes Jankowski so prickly on the subject? Gruen clearly is going to answer that question, so we eagerly read on.

  What about dialogue between friends? If there is no animosity to exploit, how do you generate tension? In such dialogue the operating principle is friendly disagreement. For example, in Naomi Novik's Napoleonic-era fantasy novel His Majesty's Dragon (2006), the relationship between Captain Will Laurence and his battle dragon Temeraire is one of cordiality and respect. Late in the novel Tem-eraire saves Laurence during an aerial accident, in the process risking the life of a fellow dragon. Laurence must later address Temeraire's misaligned priorities:

  "No, not without cause," Laurence said. "But we are in a hard service, my dear, and we must sometimes be willing to bear a great deal." He hesitated, then added gently, "I have been meaning to speak to you about it, Temeraire: you must promise me in future not to place my life above that of so many others. You must surely see that Victoriatus is far more necessary to the Corps than I could ever be, even if there were not his crew to consider also; you should never have contemplated risking their lives to save mine."

  Temeraire curled more closely around him. "No, Laurence, I cannot promise such a thing," he said. "I am sorry, but I will not lie to you: I could not have let you fall. You may value their lives above your own; I cannot do so, for to me you are worth more than all of them. I will not obey you in such a case, and as for duty, I do not care for the notion a great deal, the more I see of it."

  Such stalwart loyalty! How noble. And how difficult for Laurence, who now has command of a dragon whom he cannot count upon to adhere to his harsh duty in battle. The strain is understated, but still it is present. The polite tone of their disagreement only underscores its importance.

  Where is the tension in your dialogue? Is it present in every line? Why not undertake a dialogue draft? Check every conversation in your story. Are you relying on the circumstances or the topic itself to make it important for us to listen in?

  That is dangerous. Instead, find the emotional friction between the speakers. Or externalize your focal characters' inner conflicts. Or pit allies against each other. True tension in dialogue comes not fro
m what is being said, but from inside those who are saying it.

  TENSION IN ACTION

  Have you ever seen violence up close? One night when I was young my father and I rounded a bend on a Connecticut highway. Ahead of us at an intersection two cars had collided seconds before. One was engulfed in orange flames. Through its windows I could see them roiling in its interior. Sparks shot fifty feet into the air as if the wreck was a Roman candle spewing into the velvet black sky.

  "Can we do anything?" I asked my father.

  "No," he said slowly. "I don't think so."

  Death, I realized, is not a respecter of your plans. It waits around a bend in the highway and you don't get to choose which one. More than thirty years later I can picture those flames.

  By contrast, in the last few weeks I have read in novels much more gruesome and violent episodes that I do not remember at all. Perhaps that is understandable. Fiction is fiction, after all, and life is life. Still, shouldn't story violence have an impact? It should, but the truth is that on the page, on TV, and on the movie screen it often affects us very little.

  To make matters worse, not all action is violent. Sometimes action merely is meant to be exciting. At other times its purpose is only to create a visual picture of the people in the story in motion. Unless it is violent, though, how is routine action supposed to keep us glued to the page? If we are honest, I think we must admit that frequently it does not. Not even high action necessarily grips us hard.

  Writing together, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are one of our most reliable crafters of high-voltage thrillers. In their 2006 novel The Book of the Dead, they again feature FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast in a story about an Egyptian tomb, which, while under reconstruction at the New York Museum of Natural History, causes all kinds of trouble. (Naturally, it holds a secret that could bring destruction to all of New York.) Pendergast must stop his archenemy, his brother Diogenes, from enacting his evil intentions.

  Unfortunately, Pendergast is incarcerated at Herkmoor Correctional Facility, which has never had an escape. Guess what? Pendergast escapes—with considerable help from the tech wizards of his department, it must be said—in a highly planned prison break sequence that is one of the novel's high points. Pendergast first helps a group of convicts stage a diversionary escape of their own, then engineers his own liberation:

  As Glinn had anticipated, the door to guard station 7 had been left unlocked in the hasty departure of the first responders.

  Pendergast slipped inside, then threw an arm around the guard's neck and injected him. The guard slumped without a word and Pendergast laid him out on the floor, then half covered the guard's comm mike with his hand

  and yelled hoarsely into it, "I see one of them! I'm going after him!"

  He quickly undressed the unconscious guard while a burst of shouted countermands came over the speaker, ordering him to remain at his station. In less than a minute, Pendergast was dressed in the guard's uniform, equipped with badge, Mace, Taser, stick, radio, and emergency call unit. He was more slender than the unconscious guard, but a few minor adjustments rendered the disguise quite acceptable.

  Next, he reached behind the large rack of servers until he had located the correct port. Then, taking the flash drive from the plastic bag, he inserted it into the port. He then turned his attention back to the guard, taping his mouth shut, his hands behind his back, and his knees together. He dragged the drugged guard back to the nearby men's room, seated him on a toilet, taped his torso to the toilet tank to keep him from falling over, locked the stall, and crawled out beneath the door.

  Moving to a mirror, Pendergast pulled the bandages from his face and stuffed them into the waste can. He broke the glass capsule over a sink and massaged the dye into his hair, turning it from white blond to an unremarkable dark brown. Exiting the men's room, he walked down the hall, made a right turn, and—just before coming to the first video camera—he paused to glance at his watch: 660 seconds.

  Tick, tick, tick. With clockwork precision, our hero works through every clever step of his plan. Let me ask you, did the passage quoted above have your pulse pounding? No? Does it strike you as a bit mechanical? I'm not surprised.

  Granted, we have not experienced the long buildup of Herk-moor's invincible security. We haven't watched as the groundwork of the plan was laid. I've left out some of Pendergast's remarkable feats later in the sequence, too, as when he yanks a line of stitches

  from his face in order to cover himself in blood. It's a really cunning plan, trust me, and it works. But it's cold. We admire it more than feel it.

  Undoubtedly that was the authors' intention, but I believe this passage illustrates that action, when related in strictly visual terms, feels flat. Handled objectively, it does not move us. Emotions are needed to give action force.

  Even then, routine emotions are unlikely to get through to us. Fear! Shock! Horror! Uh-huh. What else have you got? We are inured to cliches, and that is as true of overused feelings as it is of familiar words and phrases. How to be original in inserting emotions into fast-moving action? Sometimes nothing more is required than honesty, authenticity, and understatement.

  Harlan Coben's first stand-alone thriller, Tell No One (2001), established Coben's mastery of twisty thrillers. Like Coben's follow-up novels, Tell No One is predicated on the possibility that someone who is dead and gone has come back; in this case it's the missing and presumed dead wife of Dr. David Beck, who, it transpires, may still be alive.

  David Beck will go to a lot of trouble to find out whether or not mystery e-mails are coming from his wife, but in order for that to be credible Coben knows that we must first believe that Elizabeth was the love of David's life. Coben manages this in a scene that recounts Elizabeth and David's annual ritual of returning to the lakeside camp that was the site of their first teenage kiss. After they have finished making love, David and Elizabeth swim and relax:

  I put my hands behind my head and lay back. A cloud passed in front of the moon, turning the blue night into something pallid and gray. The air was still. I could hear Elizabeth getting out of the water and stepping onto the dock. My eyes tried to adjust. I could barely make out her naked silhouette. She was, quite simply, breathtaking. I watched her bend at the waist and wring the water out of her hair. Then she arched her spine and threw back her head.

  My raft drifted farther away from shore. I tried to sift through what had happened to me, but even I didn't understand it all. The raft kept moving. I started losing sight of Elizabeth. As she faded into the dark, I made a decision: I would tell her. I would tell her everything.

  I nodded to myself and closed my eyes. There was a lightness in my chest now. I listened to the water gently lap against my raft.

  Then I heard a car door open.

  I sat up.

  "Elizabeth?"

  Pure silence, except for my own breathing.

  I looked for her silhouette again. It was hard to make out, but for a moment I saw it. Or I thought I saw it. I'm not sure anymore or even if it matters. Either way, Elizabeth was standing perfectly still, and maybe she was facing me.

  I might have blinked—I'm really not sure about that either—and when I looked again, Elizabeth was gone.

  As action goes, this is pretty tame. A raft drifts. A car door opens. A woman winks from sight. Despite that, wouldn't you agree that this passage is arresting? What makes it so? Is it the nude Elizabeth wringing out her wet hair? That's nice, I'll admit, but I think that what gives this passage its high tension is the contrast between the peace that follows David's decision ("I would tell her everything") and the menacing physical details that quickly follow.

  Coben does not need to tell us that David is deeply in love, nor does he need to elaborate that David feels guilty because he is hiding something. That is obvious. (What was it that David planned to confess? Coben makes us wait until the final page to find out.) It is the mix of David's contentment and guilt that snares us in his moment. They are contra
sting emotions, almost opposites. They get us because they are difficult to reconcile—and that's the point.

  Because we cannot square David's peace and David's torment, we want to. Unconsciously, our brains are seeking to make sense of a contradiction. To work on that we ... well, what do you suppose?

  We keep reading.

  So, of the above two excerpts, which one has more action? Preston and Child's. Which one has more tension? Coben's. That is weird because less is happening, but it makes perfect sense once you realize that tension in action comes not from the action itself but from inside the point-of-view character experiencing it.

  TENSION IN EXPOSITION

  Most novels today are written in an intimate third-person point of view. That is to say, we experience the story from inside the head and heart of a point-of-view character. We see what she sees, hear what she hears, think and feel what she thinks and feels. We become the character.

  There are many exceptions, of course, but it is a rare novel that does not include healthy doses of what's going on inside its characters' minds. Relating that on the page is an art that is poorly understood. Many novelists merely write out whatever it is that their characters are thinking and feeling; or, more to the point, whatever happens to occur to the author in a given writing session. That is a mistake.

  Much exposition stirs faint interest. Pick up any novel off your shelves and read a few pages with a purple highlighter in your hand. Draw a wavy line through the passages that you skim. Your eyes skip lightly over quite a bit, don't they? Much of what you skim is exposition, isn't it? Why doesn't it work?

  To write a page-turner means to make it so that your readers read every line on every page. Don't think that because you are writing literary fiction, say, instead of big thrillers that this isn't as important for you. It probably is more important, because the subjects of a lot of literary fiction, such as characters' emotional damage, for instance, require that the interior lives of the characters create constant tension.