When I say "think like a woman," I don't mean that it's impossible for a female hero to pick up the sword and face danger head-on, only that if you don't have to face it head-on, what's wrong with an alternate approach that still gets you what you want? Psyche fulfills the task through intelligence instead of brute force; music soothes the savage beasts and allows her to take what she wants without shedding any blood, human or animal.
Similarly, the suspense hero learns to get information in ways other than simply pulling a gun on someone. Subtlety and intelligence prove mightier weapons than brute force and direct confrontation.
Task Three: Go to Hell
Aphrodite saves the best for last. Having watched her daughter-in-law separate the seeds and obtain the golden fleece, she now sets a task she's certain Psyche can't do. She orders Psyche to go into the dark realm ruled by Hades in order to get her some makeup used by Hades's wife, Persephone.
There are a few rules about going into the ancient Greek version of hell.
The first is that you have to pay the ferryman, Charon. The second is that you have to get past the famous three-headed dog guarding the gates. And you'd better not eat anything while you're there or you'll have to stay forever. The hardest thing Psyche must do is to refuse the many beggars she meets along the way. The truth is that they are beyond her help; if she reaches out, she'll fail in her quest. So setting limits is part of the final task and test.
Going through a symbolic death by visiting the Underworld is a major theme of suspense novels. Our hero is tested to the max and emerges from her deathlike state a stronger woman, one who is now worthy of her god-husband.
The next time you pick up a suspense novel, play a game with yourself and see how many fairy-tale elements you recognize. In Mary Higgins Clark's A Stranger Is Watching, she gives us a climax in the bowels of Grand Central Station—about as Inmost Cave-like as you can get. A bag lady gives our heroine vital information—and doesn't she remind you of the gnomic old witches of legend?
Spymasters are mentors; allies who turn into enemies are shape-shifters; the well-meaning friends who discourage our hero from pursuing the adventure are threshold guardians; and that diamond necklace handed down through the generations makes a very nice treasure.
And you can't tell me that Clarice Starling didn't play Beauty to Hannibal Lecter's Beast in Silence of the Lambs, or that her brave decision to go after serial killer Buffalo Bill wasn't the act of a modern Perseus heading into the Labyrinth to kill the Minotaur.
Myth lives.
ONCE UPON a time—not the world's worst opening line, is it? Let fairy-tale and hero's-journey elements act as your suspense template, and you'll hook the child in all your readers. The thing is, most of the early material in a suspense novel consists of setting up characters and situations that will pay off in the last half of the book. The question for the writer: how to keep setup from becoming mechanical and boring?
Let's take a look at Hostage by Robert Crais. It's a fast-paced thriller that pulls out all the stops for a state-of-the-art roller-coaster ride, and it's a good example of how to put suspense on every page.
The Prologue_
Crais opens with a prologue, and it is a true prologue, meaning that it shows us a scene that takes place before the action of the novel begins. That, after all, is what xhc pro in prologue means, but it isn't always what writers do. Some writers pull an exciting scene out of the middle of the book, stick it in the front, and then write their way toward the events of the so-called prologue.
It's cheating. I did it in Fresh Kills and I'd do it again if I had to (and I had to for a very common mystery reason, namely that the victim refused to die and I had eight chapters before the first body dropped. Unacceptable, so I put a finding-the-body scene up front to let the readers know that the character was doomed. It would be better if the body dropped
earlier, or if the plot contained sufficient suspense for the "prologue" to be unnecessary, but failing those things, something had to be done to keep the reader's interest.) Still, it's cheating. It's not a true prologue, and it's a stopgap measure taking the place of true in-the-moment suspense.
But Crais's opening in Hostage is a true prologue, which gives us the opportunity to explore its uses.
The main character, Jeff Talley, is a hostage negotiator for the LAPD at the time the prologue takes place. He's negotiating with a crazed husband who's threatening to shoot his hostages, and he's deathly afraid that he's blown the case.
He has.
He's blown this case and someone dies, which will haunt him throughout the rest of the book, and he's so burned out that even thinking about his own wife and daughter can't bring him back to life. He's an empty shell.
This prologue comes under the heading of "establishing the character's ghost of the past," or "how a trained expert hostage negotiator burned out in the big city and ended up in a one-horse suburb where he will, of course, face a much bigger, much worse, much more challenging hostage situation and be afraid he can't handle it."
In other words, it's setup. It creates deep doubt in the reader about the ability of the main character to deal with the stress of another hostage negotiation, and any reader with a brain will realize that the entire rest of the book will consist of putting him in exactly that position and letting us identify with him as he faces the ultimate test.
Arc One_
In Hero's Journey terms, this is the ordinary world the hero lives in before the big change that catapults him into the special world of challenge and fear, suspicion and skill mastery, tests and tasks, allies and enemies. We meet our protagonist and his world, the family, friends, lovers he thinks he can count on as allies. We learn his weaknesses, the inner need that this ordeal will resolve by testing him to the limit.
We need the ordinary world so that the special world will be special enough. We need a glimpse of Clarice Starling's ordinary life as an FBI trainee before we see her in Hannibal Lecter's very special world.
Accepting the Adventure
Just as amateur detectives in a mystery novel must commit to solving the crime, so must suspense heroes accept the adventure. Often, they are reluctant heroes, who don't want to leave their ordinary worlds to head into danger (and who can blame them?). Something must force them to act, something must be so important that they throw caution to the winds.
In Hostage, Talley's ordinary world is his new life as a cop in a boring suburb where nothing ever happens, which is just how Talley likes it. The special world is the world of hostage negotiation, which he hoped he'd left behind and would do anything not to be forced back into.
Chapter one begins with a robbery in which a convenience store owner is shot and lies bleeding, perhaps dead. This is bad enough from Talley's point of view, since he wants a quiet life.
So what happens next? What has to happen next?
Things get worse.
How?
The robbers decide to drive to Mexico and hole up until the robbery case blows over. Great plan, except for one little thing. Their cheap pickup truck dies an ignominious death on a side road leading to the freeway.
Okay, they think, we'll steal a car. And they just happen to have stalled right near an affluent housing development, so there are plenty of high-quality cars to choose from. We're on page 18 now, and we're getting closer to the hostage situation. (One more function of the prologue, not to mention the title, is that we're already thinking hostage before the robbers do.) All they want at this point is another getaway vehicle, but we're expecting them to take hostages and we want to know the people who will become their captives.
Which is precisely when we meet sixteen-year-old Jennifer Smith and her ten-year-old brother, Thomas. As might be expected from their respective ages, Jennifer resents having to take care of her younger brother, and he's giving her a hard time. Typical kid stuff—until it's interrupted by the robbers, who take the kids into Daddy's study. Daddy's response to the situation is more than a little odd. When th
e robbers demand the keys to his car, he says, "That's what you want, the car?" almost as if he were expecting them to demand something else. He readily agrees to turn over the car and then—
Things get worse.
How?
The doorbell rings. It's a cop. In uniform.
The robbers shoot him, but he's able to radio his base before dying on the doorstep.
It's only page 26. See what I mean about suspense on every page?
What created that suspense?
First, Crais started small, with the convenience store heist, and escalated at every possible turn. This resulted in two shootings in the first twenty-six pages, which adds to our suspense through the rest of the book by showing us that these guys aren't afraid to spill blood. When they threaten to kill the children, we believe them.
Second, Crais added complications and obstacles at exactly the right places. Whenever something could go wrong, it did go wrong. Bad luck is compounded by more bad luck, which "forces" the bad guys to do more bad things to save themselves. There isn't a moment of rest for them—or for the reader.
The Four Outcomes
A character wants something, something concrete in the here-and-now. Will he get it? There are four possible outcomes: "Yes," " No," "No, and furthermore," and "Yes, but."The first two outcomes do absolutely nothing to move the plot.
Think of the Jimmy Stewart character, George Bailey, in It's A Wonderful Life. Thanks to his absent-minded uncle, he's lost a huge sum of money belonging to the investors in his savings and loan company. So he goes to the richest man in town, played by Lionel Barrymore, and asks for the money he needs.
Barrymore could say yes: "Sure, for an old friend like you, anything." Jimmy gets the money, his uncle stays out of the loony bin, his investors are repaid, and writer-director Frank Capra makes the shortest movie in Hollywood history. Jimmy never jumps off the bridge, never meets Clarence the angel, and the audience is cheated of the catharsis we bought our tickets to experience.
Or Lionel, the meanest man in town, says, "No." Just no. Nothing else. It doesn't help Jimmy, but the trouble is, it doesn't hurt him either. Think about it. If Lionel just says, "No," nothing more, then Jimmy hasn't lost anything by asking. He's no worse off than he was when he went in the door—which means the writer has wasted our time in presenting the scene. It doesn't move the story because it doesn't change the hero's essential position.
Which is why Capra has Lionel give a different answer. A simple "no" isn't mean enough for the meanest man in town. Instead, Capra has Barrymore say, "No, I won't give you the money, and furthermore, I'm going to personally see to it that you get sent to jail for fraud and your dotty uncle goes to the funny farm." I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too.
Now we have movement. We've taken our hero from frying pan to fire; he's worse off than he would have been had he stayed home and tried to deal with the losses on his own. Capra has pushed George Bailey to the point where it seems right for him to stand on that bridge and jump in.
The "no, and furthermore" answer is one of the two outcomes that will move the story and fill the middle of your suspense novel with ever-deepening complications. Whatever your characters do in the middle of the book should not only fail, it should fail in such a way that it makes their situations actively worse than they were before.
Put enough "no, and furthermore" outcomes in your novel, and you'll soon have a nice thick middle, as your hero struggles to extricate herself from the fire and get back into that nice, safe frying pan.
What about the "yes, but"? This outcome presents interesting possibilities. What if Lionel had said to Jimmy: "Sure you can have the money, boy. I'll just take your soul in return." Now our hero must decide what's more important to him; if he takes Lionel up on his offer, the rest of the story will deal with the consequences of selling his soul and his belated realization that it wasn't such a good deal. There have been more than a few operas constructed on the "yes, but" outcome, and, when you come to think about it, all the "yes, but" outcomes involve the soul in one way or another.
The most interesting use of the "yes, but" outcome is the "yes" with a hidden "but." Our hero gladly accepts the "yes" part of the answer, and settles down in the comfortable belief that he's being helped. And then, when he least expects it, the hidden "but" pops up—and the hero is plunged into distrust and danger once again.
The Four Outcomes in Hostage Three guys go to rob a convenience store. Do they get away with the money? Yes, but they shot the owner, which means the stakes are higher than they'd planned.
They decide to escape to Mexico. Do they make it? No, and furthermore their car breaks down and they go in search of one to steal.
Do they get that second car and make their getaway? No, and furthermore they take hostages and kill a cop. At every turn, they dig themselves in deeper and deeper, which means they must take more and more drastic action that will keep the plot boiling.
Yes, but the robbers aren't the heroes. How do the Four Outcomes affect Jeff Talley?
After losing the hostage in the prologue, all Talley wants is a quiet life without major responsibility. Does he get it?
No, and furthermore, a store owner and one of his own cops are shot, and furthermore, he's about to be dragged back into a hostage negotiation situation, and furthermore—
This is only chapter one. The stakes will ratchet up throughout the book, and the mechanism by which they ratchet is the Four Outcomes scenario.
And if you think that's the end of the "yes, but" and "no, and furthermore" outcomes in this book, you'll soon find out that every scene in the book ends with one of the two plot-moving outcomes. Even the ones that look like simple noes and yesses will turn out to have hidden buts and further-mores lurking inside.
Suspense Writing
One more reason why this story moves so quickly: the pace of the writing.
What does that mean?
It means, first and foremost, that the prose is spare. Crais gives us just exactly as much information as we need to understand this moment in time and nothing more. There are no "extras" here, no long descriptive passages or internal monologues. We do go inside people's heads from time to time, but for the most part, they think about what's happening now, not what happened in the past. To the extent that the past enters into their thoughts, it's for a few short paragraphs and it's directly related to something happening in the present.
One decision is quickly followed by consequences that lead to a second decision, new consequences, a third decision, etc. There isn't much time for contemplation between events; one event happens right on top of another like a twenty-car pile-up on the Santa Ana Freeway.
The dialogue is crisp, which means that people say exactly what they think in no more words than it takes to get the idea across. Everyone is businesslike, speaking to the point, which fits because there is much at stake and no time for small talk.
Paragraphs are short, sentences shorter. All these devices working together create a sense of urgency.
We have our hostage situation and our reluctant hostage negotiator. So what could make things worse at this point?
• The robbers discover that the house is equipped with a lot of cameras and monitors, which allow them to see what the cops are doing outside.
• Then they find the money. Lots and lots of money. We're on page 57; still well inside Arc One, and our plot has thickened into cement. They don't make any decisions about the money yet, but we readers have a pretty strong sense that this information changes things in ways we have yet to understand.
• Ten-year-old Thomas manages to whisper to his sister on page 60, "I know where Daddy has a gun." This is our first hint that the internal dynamics of the hostage crisis won't be Bambi vs. Godzilla after all; it seems Bambi has a trick up his sleeve.
• We meet a mobster named Sonny Benza and learn that Thomas's daddy is his accountant. All of Benza's financial records are in the house, which is pretty serious because Ben
za is a big-time crook whose records could send a lot of people, including him, to jail.
• He doesn't want to go to jail.
Benza's records are in Smith's house and Smith's house is surrounded by cops. Once the hostage situation is resolved, cops will swarm all over that house and Sonny's enterprises will see the unwelcome light of day. Benza can see only one solution: to "own" the cop in charge of the case.
That's Talley. And that's the end of Part One. It's also Plot Point One and the end of Arc One. Let's look at the escalation process. We go from robbery to shooting to hostage taking to cop killing in very short order, and then we switch gears from the hostage situation to organized crime trying to cover itself by targeting Talley.
He thinks his biggest problem is holding on until other cops arrive to take over the hostage negotiation. We know his biggest problem is whatever Benza is going to do to "own" him. That's why suspense rests on the reader being two steps ahead of the character. We anticipate the trouble Talley doesn't even know is out there, and it heightens our emotional response to everything he does.
Alfred Hitchcock's famous story about the bomb under the table is relevant here. The great director said that the way to create suspense is to show a bomb under a card table and then show four men playing cards. The game could be the dullest thing imaginable, the dialogue could be flat, the scenery boring, but the audience is on the edge of their seats because they know what the card players don't: there's a bomb under the table. Every time someone shifts in his seat or gets up from the table, the audience wants to shout: "Get out of there!"
By showing Benza making plans to "own" Talley, Crais has let the audience know there's a bomb under our hero.
He detonates it in Arc Two.
Arc Two_
P.G. Wodehouse, who in addition to his wonderful Jeeves books wrote musical comedies in the twenties, gave the following advice about what to do in the middle of your story. "Never," Sir Pelham advised, "let anyone sit down in the second act."
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