How to rite Killer Fiction

by Carolyn Wheat

  And if you think of a classic farce—whether it's a play by Moliere, a Bertie Wooster/Jeeves novel, or a Marx Brothers movie—you see at once how effective that advice is. Doors open and skimpily dressed blondes pop out just when the gimlet-eyed aunt is visiting. The maid is found in the closet with the constable from the village. The pompous banker mistakenly believes the chorus girl is an heiress and treats her accordingly— and then mistakes the real heiress for a gold-digging chorus girl. Complications are set in motion that will cause the second-act curtain to come down on a scene of hilarious confusion.

  Think of suspense as farce without the laughs. Something must be happening to your hero at all times; even moments of seeming safety must be fraught with possible danger. Will the peace last? Can this old friend be trusted? Will the police act, or have they been corrupted by the evil opponent? Can we cross the border into Poland or will the customs officials spot our phony passports?

  The Pendulum

  The middle of a suspense novel is a swinging pendulum of emotion. The hero veers wildly between trust and distrust, safety and danger. In the classic movie Suspicion, the wife alternates between blind trust in her husband and suspicion that he married her for money. The pendulum swings against the husband when she learns things that lead her to believe he is trying to kill her. He continually assures her of his love, but every time she relaxes into a normal, loving relationship, something else happens to rouse her suspicion.

  The middle of a fairy tale involves tasks and tests the hero must perform in order to win the princess. The tasks increase in danger and difficulty until finally the hero emerges triumphant over his older, stronger brothers. The same pattern exists in the suspense novel; the hero practices for the final confrontation by overcoming challenges from lesser opponents or by escaping from imprisonment. In some cases, the hero fails the early tests and appears to be on the verge of failing the final test as well. A certain amount of trial and error makes an interesting middle-book as your hero learns the skills he will need to confront the opponent in the end. And of course, a hero who has failed once or even twice creates a great deal of suspense as he goes for the third try. (Note the magic number three, a powerful number in fairy tales.)

  Isolate Your Hero

  One of the tests a suspense hero must deal with is the increasing isolation from his or her usual support system. This is a vital element in a good suspense novel. Your hero can't go to the police; they don't believe him when he complains he's being followed by a man who is never there when they come around to check on his complaint. Your hero's friends and lovers tell her she has to "get over it" and refuse to believe that she's been threatened by a man no one else has ever seen. The hero's isolation may begin earlier, but it is deepened to the point where she is wholly alone in the middlebook. One by one, her supports fail her. One by one, the social structures she has always depended on disappear or turn actively hostile. Why?

  Think about it. First, our hero needs to grow up, to make a transition from one stage of life to another. She must be forced to fall back on her own inner resources when facing the ultimate challenge. If she has too much help, we won't believe in the transformation. Second, our hero is on a quest for the elixir, and we won't think she's earned it if she hasn't gone through hell. If she has too much help and support, it's not hell, it's purgatory at best; and that just doesn't cut it, elixir-wise.

  The most important reason to strip away all your hero's old supports: if all the characters inside the book are lost to her, who's left?

  Clap if you believe in fairies.

  That's the ultimate reason why our hero must face these tests alone: because the one person left who believes in her isn't in the book at all. It's the reader, and the close identification with the hero you want your reader to feel can only come about if the hero is truly alone. Surround your hero with friends and you lose the intense identification that makes true suspense so compelling.

  Dick Francis does this to perfection in Nerve. The premise of the book is that a young jockey, Rob Finn, is suspected of losing his nerve— and as a result, losing races. The first time he loses a race, he is publicly scolded by the horse's owner. As his luck worsens, the rumor that he's lost his nerve flies around the track. Other jockeys avoid him, and bettors and owners castigate him. Finally, he loses the confidence of the owner he's been riding for; his dream of being a winning jockey seems all but over. As if that weren't enough, he is called a coward by a television commentator and his failure is gloated over by his enemies.

  Hitting Bottom

  But Francis isn't finished taking his hero down the path to hell, because the real hell isn't what other people, however influential and important to Rob emotionally, think of him. Rob hits bottom the day he looks in the mirror and questions himself: Are they right? Have I really lost my nerve?

  The isolation brought about by others turning on him leads to that moment, for if Rob had the confidence of even one friend, he might never stand before that mirror. And for us, the readers, to have the full experience of hitting bottom, of facing our inner demons, we need to be alone with Rob.

  Rob decides that, no, he has not lost his nerve. He is the same rider he always was—which means that his trouble comes from without and has been engineered by someone else. He makes a conscious decision to find out who that person is and pay him back. This is the turning point of the novel—and it happens in the middle of the book.

  Rift Within the Team

  Stories that involve confrontations between two organized groups use Rift Within the Team as a middlebook suspense generator. Each team has an overarching goal: win the murder case, for example. The prosecution wants to convict, the defense to prove innocence. The district attorney answers to supervisors who may have very different ideas on how to conduct the case, creating Rifts Within the Prosecution Team. The defense lawyer may have an assistant who's really selling him out to the D.A. or a witness who's accepted a bribe to change her testimony. Rifts Within the Team allow conflict, suspense, mini-arcs, and mini-goals to take place before the big confrontation between the two teams.

  One example of Rift Within the Two Teams can be found in Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October. There are two major focal points: Red Sub and U.S. Sub. They are in potential conflict, and inside each sub there is internal conflict. The Red Sub conflict is that its captain wants to defect to the U.S. and some of his men aren't in sympathy with that aim. The U.S. Sub conflict is that its captain believes the Red Sub captain and wants to help him defect, while most of his men think the Red Sub is out to destroy them.

  Red Sub answers to Moscow; U.S. Sub to Washington, D.C., creating two lesser focal points. In Moscow and in D.C. there are internal conflicts as well. Four focal points = four places for internal conflict, and that's on top of the essential to-the-death conflict between the Reds and the U.S. forces.

  Rift Within the Team keeps suspense high even when the two major forces aren't in direct conflict with one another. Because, let's face it, once the two major forces are in direct conflict with one another, we're at the end of the story. Someone will win, someone will lose, and it's over. You can't let that happen in chapter nine, so you delay the major conflict and play out a bunch of smaller, but still exciting, conflicts within each team. The key is that these internal conflicts must relate directly to the overall conflict.

  How does Rift Within the Team occur in Robert Crais's Hostage?

  The sheriff's department leader, Martin, moves too fast, sending cops into the perimeter (remember, the robbers can see it all on the security system monitors). The robbers freak out and threaten to burn down the house. Talley and Martin exchange heated words, and Talley has to stick around to save the deteriorating situation. He's dragged back into hostage negotiating in spite of himself.

  Rift Within the Team creates slippage. A not-bad status quo, such as the one Talley reached with the hostage takers, can move backwards into something worse, which then gives our hero the chance to reclaim the form
er status quo as a victory without the writer having to ratchet things further.

  What am I talking about?

  We've had threats to the kids. We've had a murdered cop. We've had a near-fatal attack on Daddy. What can Crais do to top this?

  Well, he could have one of the robbers kill or injure one of the kids.

  But he doesn't want to. He needs Thomas to be able to move through those crawl spaces and find that cell phone, and he's got bigger plans for Jennifer later in the book.

  So instead he sends in the cops, creating a moment of terror that the robbers will find Thomas out of bed (he's gone to look for Daddy's gun), and then resolves the situation by putting things back pretty much the way they were before. It's a lateral move, yet our hearts pound while Thomas creeps back to his room and our blood boils at the high-handed new cop. With any luck, we don't notice that in the end nothing really changes in the dynamic between cops and hostage takers.

  Raising the Stakes

  Remember Sonny Benza and his dangerous tax records? Remember how he said he was going to "own" Talley?

  We meet a man named Marion Clewes, and we get to watch him eat a fly. Leg by leg, wing by wing.

  He's the guy Sonny sends to grab Talley's wife and daughter.

  We know what Talley doesn't: that throughout the entire Rift Within the Team business, his wife and kid are headed for Nightmare City.

  Talley learns about his family's kidnapping in chapter fourteen, when he's told that they will be killed if he doesn't retrieve two zip disks from Smith's house.

  And, by the way, this is Midpoint, page 192 of a 373-page book.

  The man who hoped never again to negotiate a hostage situation now faces two at once: the robbers inside the house, and his own family in the hands of a psycho killer.

  Talk about "no, and furthermore."

  Arc Three _

  The astute will realize that all of Arc Two was in fact setup for this moment, and yet as you read the book, you aren't wondering when something exciting is going to happen, because it's already happening. By using mini-goals, mini-arcs, rifts within the team, lateral action, and the four outcomes, Crais has kept us on the edge of our seats while we waited for the bomb to go off.

  Arc Three is where the hero becomes proactive. He's been reacting to whatever the villain's been throwing at him (like Dick Francis's hero in Nerve), and now he's hit bottom, faced the worst that could happen (at least in his own mind), and now he's going to bring it home to the bad guy. He's not going to sit around being made a victim any longer; he's arming himself and going into the lion's den.

  That's one template for Arc Three. It's a very common one, and it works if Arc Two was a passive, taking-it-on-the chin arc. That's what happens in a number of stalking-oriented tales because it takes a while for the ordinary person to accept that she's being stalked, that what's happening to her is on purpose and not just random urban weirdness. This process is helped along by all those friends and allies who keep telling her, "It's just kids, honey," or "It's all in your head." The police, too, blow her off, telling her there's nothing she can do and refusing to believe that charming ex-boyfriend is really a vicious killer. Even the heroine's husband tells her she "needs to get away for a while," humoring instead of believing her.

  So when she finally accepts the reality of the stalking and the fact that she's in this alone, that's when she can become the hero by turning the tables and going after the villain.

  Other suspense novels put the Midpoint action of hitting bottom at Plot Point Two. In these stories, the hero may go proactive earlier, only he fails, usually spectacularly. He may fail because his heart wasn't pure, or because he's missing a crucial piece of information, or because he's after the wrong goal. That failure brings him to the hitting-bottom stage, and the experience renews him, teaches him the right goal, or gives the hidden piece of information he needs to make it all work.

  In Hostage, Arc Three finds Talley back in charge of the hostage situation and so desperate to resolve it that he pushes too hard. He uses his superb negotiating skills to get the injured Smith out of the house, but his motive isn't to save the Smith children, but his own wife and child. He's so single-minded that he actually assaults Smith inside the ambulance, trying to bring the man to consciousness so he can be questioned.

  Smith's trip to the hospital changes everything for Benza as well. Now Benza not only has to retrieve the disks with his information on them, he has to silence Smith before he starts talking. This gives Crais two places to focus our attention: the home where the hostage drama is being enacted, and the hospital where Smith lies vulnerable and unprotected. Splitting the Team is another middlebook ploy in the suspense novel; by doubling the locations where events happen, the writer can double the number of suspenseful moments.

  Marion Clewes the fly-eater makes an attempt to kill Smith in the hospital. Talley saves Smith's life, then tells Smith that Benza has his own wife and daughter. He begs for help, but Smith refuses to talk.

  Benza's henchman calls with a new, improved plan. His people will show up at the Smith house pretending to be FBI and Talley will let them take over and go into the house first so they can get the disks.

  We're coming into the home stretch (page 278, about 100 to go) and the players are all gathering in one place for the showdown.

  Inside the house, Thomas finds Daddy's gun.

  We're on page 312. A ten-year-old with a gun faces down a huge psycho killer (don't even ask) who's armed with a knife.

  What could make this worse?

  Thomas pulls the trigger.

  Click!

  No bullets.

  The kids race upstairs to the reinforced safe room.

  The psycho killer sprinkles gasoline all over and lights a match.

  Talley faces off against the phony FBI guys, who would just as soon let the house burn. He knows he's risking his family's lives if he tries to save the Smith children, and he also knows it's his moral and legal duty to save them.

  He does his duty.

  Building to Climax

  The astute will once again realize that important as saving the Smith children may be, it's not the main event. Everything in Arcs Two and Three simply cleared away the underbrush so we could concentrate on the real confrontation, the one between Talley and Benza, with Talley's wife and child as the bait and the prize. Similar things happen in mysteries as the detective clears up mini-puzzles, exposes lies, and tracks down red herrings before coming at last to the big solution that solves the murder.

  Crais built to this climax by ratcheting up the stakes at every turn. Now his Daniel is about to go into the lion's den. His hero is facing the hostage negotiation of his life. Can he do it? Can the man we saw in the prologue rise to the ultimate occasion and save his own child from death at the hands of a cruel sadist?

  Ending chapters with a cliffhanger is another powerful suspense tool.

  ENDINGS ARE HARD. How many times have you waded through pages upon pages of heated prose, your pulse racing and your fingers flipping the pages like mad, only to be disappointed by the so-called "big finish"? How many times have you put down a book with a sigh, thinking, "If only the ending had lived up to that thrilling opening chapter" or "What a great premise for a novel—too bad this writer couldn't deliver." When your friends ask how you liked the book you say, "It was great, but the ending fell flat."

  Why? What happened? How did a writer who had you with him all the way drop the ball in the final ten yards?

  For one thing, writers are only human. As the book nears its close, they get tired. Eager to finish—and not incidentally, to pick up the next installment of their advance—they may rush through scenes they ought to linger over. Piling one sensational event upon another is not the key to a great ending; it's a recipe for creating a dissatisfied reader. Racing against a ticking clock is what the hero of your book needs to do, not what you the writer ought to be doing.

  The second problem is also time-related: writers often
revise the earlier chapters as they go along, not just correcting grammar and spelling, but delving more deeply into the characters, adding telling details to the setting, building more suspense. Then when they come to the ending, all of a sudden they reali/.e their book is due and there isn't any time for revi-

  sion. The closing chapters can feel like a first draft instead of a finished product because the author hasn't taken the time to go back through those chapters and give them the full treatment.

  How to Finish Your Book Before It Finishes You_

  The obvious answer to these problems is to make sure you have sufficient time to do your ending right. The trouble is—that's easy to say, harder to do. Here are a few tricks and strategies to help you make sure you'll have the time and energy to give your slam-bang ending its true value.

  And the Last Shall Be First

  One radical thought: write the last chapter first.

  Well, okay, not exactly the last chapter and not exactly first, but the truth is, you know pretty early on who your ultimate villain is and you know your hero must confront that ultimate villain sometime, somewhere. So pick the most dramatic setting you can think of, put your hero and villain in that spot, and let them duke it out. Do this fairly early in your writing process, when you still have a full head of steam and lots of time to revise. Then set that scene aside and go back to the linear story.

  If you're working the four arcs, go back to your confrontation scene whenever you reach a plot point and look at it again. See if you've learned anything in the writing of that arc that would add resonance to the confrontation. Did you discover that the villain was a crack shot? If so, how about making your hero a moving target and letting the villain take potshots at her? Did you decide the villain's wife was almost as evil as he is? If so, she'd make a fine first-enemy confrontation before your hero gets to the final showdown with the ultimate villain. Perhaps your original scene took place on a rocky cliff, but you just finished a scene on the villain's yacht—you might rewrite your scene and have it take place on the yacht (in a perfect storm at sea, of course).