• Allow your protagonist, under pressure, to react or act out in a way that causes unexpected conflict. David becomes emotionally volatile with Alma. If he had just let her talk in the first place, it's likely she would not have used the gun.
Remember that suspense is about delay. The longer the anxiety-producing event goes on, and the more pressure you can put on your character in the scene, the more suspense you'll build.
MOOD, SETTING, AND SENSORY DETAILS
The mood you create also has a large impact on suspense. Mood, of course, is conveyed through the physical conditions, such as setting and weather, that your protagonist finds herself in. In Auster's suspense scene, he zooms the focus down onto the landscape of the characters' bodies—to the exclusion of the physical world around them—which keeps the reader's attention uncomfortably planted where the action is, in the distance between David and Alma.
Other authors very purposefully use the senses to create a suspenseful mood, as in this example from Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird. At-ticus Finch's two young children, Jem and Scout, are walking home alone after a play on a very dark night, without a flashlight. What informs this scene is that their father, an attorney involved in a heated, racially divided court case in town, has developed some eager enemies. As they walk, the children hear what sounds like a person following them. At first Jem tries to convince Scout that it's nothing, but soon it becomes clear he's scared, too.
"Be quiet," he said, and I knew he was not joking.
The night was still. I could hear his breath coming easily beside me. Occasionally there was a sudden breeze that hit my bare legs, but it was all that remained of a promised windy night. This was the stillness before a thunderstorm. We listened.
"Heard an old dog just then," I said. "It's not that," Jem answered.
Notice how the simple use of the sensory details that come after Jem warns his sister to "be quiet" add up to a feeling that trouble is brewing, and build the suspense. The "sudden breeze" on Scout's bare legs. Her brother's breath coming "easily" beside her, and that eerie "stillness" before the storm allow the reader to enter right into the suspenseful moment. Sure enough, trouble comes soon after, in the form of a man intent on harming the children to send a message to Atticus.
Sensory details are tailor-made for suspense, because they lend themselves to metaphor and mood well, and through them, you can affect the reader's senses; sensory details help bring authenticity to the scene. A terrible odor, or the creepy slickness of a dank cellar, can turn an otherwise normal scene into a suspenseful one.
Some great suspense-building setting and sensory techniques include:
• Weather. Using dramatic weather, such as storms, blizzards, or harsh, beating sun, is a great way to create suspense if it imperils your characters, keeps them from their goals, or adds complications. Be mindful that the weather relates to your plot.
• Decay. In the physical world, a house or boat or car in a state of decay will inevitably create suspense. Rotting wood, a half-submerged car in a lake, or a trail of faded old clothing will cause the reader to feel concerned that if the protagonist investigates these decayed places or objects, he will meet the same fate as the original owners of the objects.
• Color and light. Dark colors lend themselves to dark emotions. Dark fabrics or art pieces can add a note of suspense. Intensely bright lights can cause feelings of pressure—as when a character is being interrogated, or caught in a spotlight, trying to escape.
• Touch. There are many subtle ways to use the sense of touch to create suspense, particularly when a character fears he is in danger. Think of the eerie nature of these kinds of touch: the feeling of a hand on the back of a neck; the slippery quality of blood on skin; the light pressure of breath in a person's ear.
The beauty of setting and sensory details is that you can add them in mini-mally—it doesn't take more than a handful of small, well-placed details to evoke a feeling of suspense.
Of course, you'll want to be thinking of more than just setting in creating suspense. The difference between a suspense scene and other scene types is that you want to infuse uncertainty and anxiety into a suspense scene in every way possible. So don't forget that you must introduce new plot information in a suspenseful way, too.
RAISING THE STAKES
Suspense scenes are fantastic when you are about to take your plot in a new direction by changing your character's fate or adding complications to his story. They dramatize these twists, rather than narrate them in exposition.
In Sarah Waters's novel Tipping the Velvet, protagonist Nan King, a waitress in her family's oyster bar, comes alive the day she meets Kitty Butler, a vaudeville actress. She is drawn into Kitty's world, joins her on tour, and quickly becomes a part of the act, performing in nineteenth-century London. They also begin a love affair they can carry on only in secret. Nan takes a long overdue leave of absence to visit her home, and when she returns, full of eagerness to see Kitty, Waters builds suspense by hinting to the reader what Nan's fate will be before Nan realizes it herself.
Our house, when I gazed up at it from the street, was, as I had hoped, quite dark and shuttered. I walked on tip-toe up the steps, and eased my key into the lock. The passageway was quiet: even our landlady and her husband seemed still abed. I laid down my bags, and took off my coat. There was a cloak already hanging from the hat-stand, and I squinted at it: it was Walter's. How queer, I thought, he must have come here yesterday, and forgotten it! — and soon, creeping up the darkened staircase, I forgot it myself.
I reached Kitty's door, and put my ear to it. I had expected silence, but there was a sound from beyond it—a kind of lapping sound, as of a kitten at a saucer of milk.
Waters strategically slows the pace down to a near crawl, so that the reader's focus is delivered very carefully to the most important clue: Walter's cloak on the hook. She also cleverly calls the door "Kitty's door." It has previously been Nan and Kitty's door, but after this scene, Nan will never live there again. While Nan is curious at the "kind of lapping sound" coming from behind the door, she still doesn't realize that her fate is about to change. By keeping Nan ignorant but cluing in the reader, the author keeps the reader in suspense, waiting for the moment when Nan's heart will be broken and her life (and plot) changed forever.
The longer you can delay the moment of conflict through suspense, the more intense the conflict will be for the reader. When you can also keep your own character ignorant of the conflict that is about to come, you have far more possibility for a dramatic change, which is the goal of good suspense.
PLAYING UP THE UNEXPECTED
Strange or surprising actions that challenge a protagonist's sense of normalcy can drive suspense to a crescendo, adding pressure to anxiety by creating confusion. Here's a quickly paced moment of suspense in Justine Musk's horror novel BloodAngel. Musk is a deft and careful writer who doesn't just go in for big, melodramatic horror. Instead she puts her character Lucas Maddox in a very unusual situation and does not give him, or the reader, time to understand what's happening. The effect is disturbingly suspenseful.
He had been waiting for maybe fifteen, twenty minutes when he caught movement from the corner of his eye.
He turned.
Saw an animal in the yellow grass.
He blinked twice, looked again.
Skittering crab-like on all fours: animal-girl in jeans and stained white T-shirt, sun glinting off her pale hair—
He thought: No.
And the girl stood in front of him.
Smiling.
What she does after that smile is pretty gruesome, and the suspenseful buildup lets the reader feel unnerved first.
Even if you don't write horror, challenging a protagonist's sense of normalcy is a useful suspense-building technique. Notice how the way she moves on all fours, like a crab, is creepy and unnatural, and makes the reader—as well as the character—look twice. You can challenge normalcy in many ways. For instance, you might
confuse your protagonist. Not quite trusting one's eyes can lead to suspense. Was that man in black following him, or just walking down the same streets? Did he actually see his dead wife in the crowd? You might also use bad weather, loud noises, fatigue, or physical illness to play with your protagonist's (and thus your reader's) sense of reality.
ending a suspense scene
Eventually, you must end the suspense, even if only temporarily. Sometimes one kind of suspense can lead to another. For instance, in The Book of Illusions, at the final moment of the scene, after suspense has mounted to a terrifying crescendo, David pulls the trigger, and this is what happens:
I finally saw what the trouble was. The safety catch was on. She hadn't remembered to release it. If not for that mistake, one of those bullets would have been in my head.
The suspense doesn't end when the gun fails to go off; it ends when David reflects on the fact that he just survived his own death by a fluke of luck (this also inserts a powerful symmetry into the subtext when you consider that his wife and sons did not have any luck on their side to survive their plane crash). You might notice the urge to take a breath there, now the sense of imminent danger is over. To break the suspense you must conclude the action and offer a pause—either a literal one, or one of reflection from the character's point of view. For all the reader knows, Alma pulls out another gun in the next scene, but the reader isn't there yet—she's basking in a moment of relief. To conclude suspense, you finally give the reader what you've been withholding throughout the scene.
You can also end a scene of this type by maintaining the suspense right up to the end, leaving the scene on a cliffhanger. In BloodAngel, the suspense is kept hanging:
And in the moment before he blacked out, Lucas Maddox seized on the impossible fact that this was not a dream, not a drug. She had come for him.
By having a character lose consciousness, you end the scene, but maintain the feeling of danger or trouble, hence suspense.
If you leave your scene on a suspenseful ridge like that, however, you have to pick that dangling thread back up in the next scene, which means your next scene will have to open suspensefully, too—so consider whether that is what you want to do. This is one of the details about scene-building that is so important to remember; you must always consider how the current scene will set up the scene that follows it.
One last caveat about suspense scenes. Too many of them in a row can take a toll on the reader. There's no perfect formula, but more than three suspense scenes in a row without relief is going to push the reader toward exhaustion. You might want to throw in a contemplative scene or even just a dramatic, but not suspenseful, scene to temper the intensity.
SUSPENSE SCENE MUSE POINTS_
• Open your scene in an uneasy or anxiety-provoking way.
• Throw your protagonist quickly into trouble.
• Add emotional intensity to the scene.
• Let events or an antagonist add pressure to your protagonist through opposition.
• Delay conclusions to scene events and thwart character intentions.
• Either break the suspense at the scene's end, or end on a cliffhanger.
Dramatic scenes are the vehicle for emotional content in your narrative. When you intend to deliver stunning emotional consequences on either end of the spectrum—from tremendous joy to terrible tragedy—that push your protagonist and his plot into new territory, dramatic scenes will take you there.
What is drama exactly? Director Frank Capra is quoted as saying, "I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries." Drama's goal is to elicit feelings in the reader, not to show off the writing or the emotional range of your characters. The hallmarks of a dramatic scene, which is often used as a precursor to an epiphany or climax scene, are:
•A focus on emotional intensity
•An emphasis on relationship-oriented interactions (the deepening of connections, or the severing of ties with other characters)
•Actions that facilitate or support the protagonist's access to his inner life or self-awareness
•An indication that the protagonist (and thus the plot) is approaching a turning point
Drama takes many forms—big blowout fights, obsessive love letters, emotionally devastating emotional betrayals—but its main purpose is to drive characters toward change. Through drama, your protagonist will be faced with decisions and complications that cause radical shifts in the way he thinks and acts.
A dramatic scene is effective when it follows a contemplative scene or a dialogue scene in which the protagonist has engaged in an event or reflected upon one and is ready for an emotional confrontation; or it can create an emotional stew that your protagonist will need to process in a contemplative scene to follow.
Because dramatic scenes exist to drive your protagonist toward a point of change, you won't feature as many of this type of scene at the beginning of your narrative as you will toward the middle and the end, when more has happened, and your protagonist has more reason and need to change.
the beats of a dramatic scene
You can comfortably open and close your dramatic scene at a slow pace as long as you remember that the hallmark of drama is that the emotional intensity gets higher and higher over the course of the scene, until it reaches some sort of climax. Once you're into the emotional content, the pacing should be fairly quick. Insults are flung back and forth; demands are stated; passion erupts.
The pace of a dramatic scene can follow a three-part formula like this:
1. Open slow. Use exposition, setting details, and interior monologue to create a slow-moving beginning.
2. Speed up pace to match rising emotional intensity. Strip away exposition; use dialogue, quick actions, and hot emotional content to push the intensity to a crescendo.
3. Slow down to allow for reflection. Return to interior monologue or exposition to pull back from the intensity.
In this passage from Ellen Meister's novel Secret Confessions of the Applewood PTA, notice how quickly the dialogue moves, and how the emotions flip from anger to sorrow to tenderness:
Paul pushed his chair from his desk and swiveled to face Ruth directly. "I spoke to my priest.
Ruth leaned back and exhaled, deflated. "You didn't."
"We can't keep doing this, Ruth, it isn't right."
"Why not?"
"You took a covenant before God. Keith is your husband, for better or worse, in sickness and in health."
"Tell me something I don't know!" Ruth stood, growing agitated. "Do you see me abandoning him? Am I walking out the door? No I'm staying. I'm staying to take care of a man who will never be healthy. Will never be normal. Will never be a real husband to me. I deserve something, Paul." She started to cry. "So don't give me this sanctimonious crap, okay? Because your wife died. You're free. I'm stuck. This is my forever." She dissolved into sobs.
Paul's eyes filled with tears. He stood and embraced her.
In that passage, the emotional content is hot and intense and the author matches the pace of the scene to that intensity—the conversation moves quickly, emotions are on full throttle, and there is very little narrative summary of any kind to distract from the intensity. Remember that drama always has a quality of urgency—it becomes dramatic through mounting energy, which you can convey through a swift pace and limited narrative summary.
Hot and Cold Emotions
Since drama centers so much on emotional content, here is a quick shorthand for the ways that emotions are exhibited. When emotions are hot (think passion, rage, betrayal), they tend to erupt and spill over. They lean toward the lurid and the melodramatic; they're big and loud. Too much hot emotional content in a dramatic scene will lead to melodrama (we'll explore melodrama in greater detail later in this chapter).
When emotions are cold (think shock, hurt, internalized grief), the drama seems quieter. The character handles the emotional intensity by clamping down, clenching, withdrawing, walking away. When your emo
tional content is too cool, however, the scene can lose power or fall flat. In every dramatic scene you want to strive to keep a balance of hot and cold.
OPENING A DRAMATIC SCENE
As we just saw, dramatic scenes do not have to launch into intense emotions right at the opening. You have some latitude in starting a scene of this kind, but it never hurts to build slowly towards the drama in order to make it more believable. While it is possible for your protagonist to open his front door and engage in a fight within a few sentences, you want to build plausibility, because these scenes are pivotal in changing your protagonist, and affecting his plotline.
Below is an example of a dramatic scene that opens slowly. The Confessions of Max Tivoli, by Andrew Sean Greer, is a literary novel with a fantastical twist: Its protagonist, Max Tivoli (alias Asgar) is born an old man who is doomed to get younger and younger until his death. The only thing that has ever mattered to him is his love for a young girl named Alice who, eventually, through subterfuge and complex arrangements, he manages to marry when she is much older. Of course, he must hide his condition and the truth from Alice, but one day, after she stumbles across a clue, he makes a fatal mistake and tells her the truth. She doesn't take it very well, calling him insane. Notice how, while the scene opens with Max in emotional trouble, it doesn't feel emotionally hot quite yet. But there's a sense of drama about to brew:
It was early evening, still light, and the curtains were open. Alice lay on the other bed, fully clothed in violet plisse crepe, net frill at her neckline, gloves on her stomach as if she had spent the day out. Her coat and hat lay on the foot of the bed. Whiskey on the table, two glasses, both nearly empty; apparently I had been drinking. I came to and she was talking: "I don't want anything that's here."
"Alice," I said. "I'm not myself today. There's something I could say right now that would make all the difference, isn't there? You would stay if I said it, Alice. But I'm not thinking well, I'm in a kind of cloud, so you have to think of it. Help me, Alice, what could I say? Let's think. I know it's about ten words, and not big ones. What are they?"
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