Category Archives: ucla-novel1

I spent a lot of energy in my essay on hooks talking about curiosity… about a raising question in the minds of readers, so that the need for answers pulls them ever deeper into your narrative. Now I’m going to talk about taking that spark of curiosity and fanning it into a raging fire of I Must Know! In other words, creating suspense.

Every novel relies on suspense, to some extent, to keep its audience engaged. Even a poetic, angst-ridden vignette about two people suffering together over a cup of coffee should have enough ‘what happens next?’ to bring readers back if the phone rings when they’re mid-way down the page.

It should be self-evident, I hope, that suspense doesn’t just mean action tropes. The guy hanging off the cliff’s edge, the car chase, the scary monster lurking behind the heroine as she roams the darkened room in the scary old mansion, the full-on battle scene–these are what we often think of when called upon to imagine nail-biter situations. But suspense is also generated when we wonder: Will Lady Impertinence accept Lord Well-Heeled’s proposal? Can Lonely Guy overcome his need to seem invulnerable and reach out to his family? Is the eccentric, retired landlord’s wacky new tenant going to propel him out of his suffocating apathy… or merely send him to the file cabinet for an eviction form?

Note all the question marks? Wondering if I’ll answer any of them? See, that’s suspense.

And the answer, to Will I Answer, is an unequivocal yes. Because here’s the thing: suspense doesn’t work by just leaving the questions sitting. We’ll get tired and move on if we never get resolution. But once we know everything, the mystery is gone… so unless you’re at the very end of a book, each answered question should bring with it another question.

This is suspense in a nutshell: you make us wonder what’s next. You show it playing out. Then you make us wonder what’s gonna happen after that.

In the case of Impertinence and Lord Well-heeled, the question is ‘Will she say yes?’ The answer… well, say she says no. An obvious next question might be Why? But maybe we already know that. In that case, we ask: what’s Welly gonna do next?

If she says yes, on the other hand, maybe there’s a “But what if her family forbids it?” Lord Welly wants to know too! So maybe he finds out, through diligent but gentlemanly snooping, that his beloved was previously engaged to some boy who’s been missing for three years. There’s the answer. And the next question is: what if Impertinence’s ex is still alive?

Welly digs into that… and whatever he finds, it probably pushes the hoped-for marriage even further away.

You see how this works, right? As they say on shampoo bottles, lather, rinse, repeat. If you wrap something up and there’s nothing else to wonder about, you’ve finished your story.

Ramping it up or down.

The above story of Impertinence and Lord Welly forms an outline of the sort of suspenseful situation you might find in a romance . . . or within a romance subplot tucked into some other genre of novel. It’s a little melodramatic, of course, but you could tone down the storyline I’ve created, perhaps making the questions lie entirely with the realm of character. You might still have a proposal in the offing, in other words, but the questions could be less colorful: not so much a missing fiance, more of an internal struggle with intimacy. The unknown still lies at the heart of it: what do these characters want? What drives them? What choices will they make?

Or, of course, you can make it bigger.

When we think of suspense, we do often default to the stuff of action-adventure movies: the ticking countdown on the bomb, the car with runaway brakes, the outcome of a shootout. These are life and death events, big and noisy, with high and easily comprehensible stakes.

The question “Will They Die Now?” is endlessly compelling.

The speed, noise, and life or death stakes of a big action event can sweep us up in its excitement. We often care about the outcome of a fight scene even if we don’t know the participants all that well. Or imagine a Pink Panther-style scene, one that pits an anonymous masked thief against an array of alarm gadgets and highly trained security staff. We don’t know any of the people involved, not really, but the intricacy of the job at hand and the conflict–the thief’s ingenuity versus the threat of jail–fills the scene with a strong sense of Who Will Win?

That said, sustaining a sense of edge of the seat excitement in a longer work is easier if you develop the readers’ investment in our characters. We’ll care about Joe Stranger bleeding out as the ambulance wails, too far away to get there in time, because we’re human and most of us feel a certain amount of sympathy for a fellow being who’s injured.(If that’s not you, honestly, don’t tell me.) But we’ll care more when the injured character is someone we like.

So in my next craft essay, I’ll talk about that whole tricky thing where you make readers care about your characters without actually making them all treacly boring do-gooders.

I wrote not long ago about generating a big pile of ideas for a future book or story, of using the brainstorming process to explore all the things you might want to write, the better to figure out which idea would be the best use of your time and energy.

But once you have that big shiny pile of potential storytelling treasure, how do you separate the iron pyrite from the nuggets of gold?

Sometimes you’re lucky. There’s an obvious contender. It grabs you, it beguiles or terrifies or otherwise drags you to the notebook or keyboard. You are compelled to write it. That’s an incredible feeling, and can lead to some amazing fiction. But what if there are a few tantalizing prospects? How do you decide which ones are keepers?

I believe a skilled writer can take almost anything and turn it into a decent story. All those quickly jotted concepts have some potential; like seeds, they’re just waiting for the right conditions so they can germinate. I mentioned Macbeth in Spaaaace! in that previous post. It sounds a little silly, right? It’s meant to. I scrawled it down quickly and initially dismissed it out of hand. But as a starter for a book goes, there’s nothing actually wrong with it. Tend it just a bit, and you might get something like: “a tale of ambition and murder, set on a 29th-century space station haunted by ghost-like aliens who adopt the appearances and personalities of the recently dead.”

I could run with that. And I bet every single one of you could spin up your own interesting take on that same questionable catchphrase. Shakespeare’s core idea is all about ambition out of control, after all–the desire for power. That’s never going to lose its currency.

So, if you do have a bunch of rapidly generated concepts for stories, and they all have the potential to be amazing, does that mean all ideas are created equal?

No. Some ideas can simply carry more than others. I can think of no better way to put it than to go back to the metaphor of story seeds. Think of them this way: some are flowers and some are trees.

(Don’t get me wrong: I loooove flowers. I’ve published over thirty short stories and I’ve got more on the way.)

It’s pretty common for writers, especially new writers, to start on something they think is a story, only to have it climb sky-high on them. In almost any medium-sized story workshop–imagine ten or so writers, each submitting a completed work of short fiction–it’s common for at least one draft to come in that is super-dense, bursting with a complexity that challenges its length. These pieces have too many characters and too much going on. They have subplots begging to be written, or actually crammed within the margins of the action. Just establishing the setting and principal characters takes pages, everything’s incredibly interesting, you hit the 6000 or so word mark. . . and then Boom! The writer wraps it up suddenly, superfast.

“I think this may be a novel,” is what you hear, invariably, when these pieces are workshopped. Readers can see that the idea is just, somehow, a book. It can carry more.

Is there a way to tell which is which before you start writing? Perhaps not always. Experience helps. With practice, you develop a better sense of your own rhythms and proclivities, and you can take a look through the list and see which ideas are going to snap together beautifully, in a few scenes. Those are the flowers.

Here are some clues to help you evaluate the rest.

Do a census: Can you tell this story with two people, or does it need at least ten?

How many scenes can you imagine? Your main character’s gonna start out in one place, emotionally, and end up in another. How many beats will it take him or her to get there?

Could you do it in one scene? Is there a way to just write the climax and have it make some kind of sense?

How complicated is the thing the main characters want? Could they get it immediately if they just pulled themselves together, or are there obvious preliminary steps along the way, like walking to Rivendell or finishing grad school?

Does one big thing happen to the main character? Or can you see emotional arcs for any of the others? Is there more than one person going on a big journey?

What are the demands of the point of view? It’s not an absolute rule, by any means, but in short stories we often recommend restricting ourselves to one point of view. If you can’t imagine this story coming together without switching in and out of several of your characters’ heads, you may have a novel on your hands.

Can you imagine the story playing out in one physical locale? No? You need at least two principal settings? They’re going to visit at least four planets? Every member of the main character’s dinner club has to host a night out for the story to work? They’ll eventually quiz fifteen different murder suspects? The higher the number, the more likely we’re getting into book territory here.

Do you have a sense of its tone changing? Is it a quick, nasty, jolt, like Pat Cadigan’s “Roadside Rescue“? A hilarious comic sketch like Ray Vukcevich’s “A Holiday Junket?” Does one of the storylines look like it might be serving as comic relief? Are there places where you’re thinking: ‘here we need to slow the pace a little, or bring the mood down?’ If it’s big enough to need that kind of variety, it is, again, probably a book.

Sketch out a rough outline. Is it half as long as you expected? Four times bigger?

Do you find yourself thinking you can condense three scenes into one, or get rid of characters, to fit a 7,499 word limit? (7,500 is where a story becomes a novelette.) Does that idea, of cutting, fill you with joy or dread?

Most importantly: what do you want to say? What’s cool about the idea? If merely answering this question takes you pages, you’ve probably got a decent weight of material on your hands.

As you work through the above questions, one of your contenders should pull ahead of the pack. And if after all that evaluating you’re still excited about that little seed, still having new epiphanies and discovering things to explore, and “OOh! And also I can do this!” Then you’ve probably got a hell of an unwritten novel on your hands.