Talk Scheduled on January 25

On Saturday, January 25^th, I’ll be giving a presentation on generating suspense in fiction at the Biloxi Library from 2:00 to 4:00 pm. This is the branch at 587 Howard Ave., Biloxi, MS, 39530. The phone number I have listed for them is 228 436-3095. My talk is being sponsored by the Gulf Coast Writers Association but is free and open to the public. If you’re interested, here is the GCWA’s website and facebook page.

Suspense is what keeps readers turning the pages. At the simplest level, it is about wanting to know what happens next. I’ll be talking primarily about dark suspense, which is the kind you find in thrillers, mysteries, and horror fiction, but most of the elements I’ll discuss will have relevance to any kind of suspense, including romantic and comedic.

If you’re going to be in that area on January 25, I’d love to see you.

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Novel Spaces Suspense: Part 2

I'm still over at Novel Spaces today, but I'm down one post from the top. This is the second part of my post about using suspense in writing. I should put up a new post here but I came back from vacation with a whole bunch of things piled up. I hope you can drop by.

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Talking Suspense at Novel Spaces

I'm over at Novel Spaces today talking about Suspense in writing and in movies. I hope you'll drop by.
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Post Presentations, With Suspense

Well, there were five folks in the audience for my talk. One of them was Lana. Nevertheless, I thought it went pretty well. Everyone seemed interested and involved, and there were a lot of good, fun questions after. The entire audience was female as well. Maybe I need to redirect my writing focus. Some would say that my stuff appeals more to males than females, although I believe women often enjoy a good adventure tale as much as any man. As I was talking about my books, the eldest lady there, who was probably in her sixties, commented that Cold in the Light sounded like her kind of book, and she bought a copy after. I told her it was pretty gory so I hope she doesn’t blanche too hard when she gets to some of the slaughtering.

One thing I talked about was how it’s OK to open books with what I call “Quick” suspense, but that to keep the reader very long you soon have to introduce “Slow” suspense. Quick suspense is when you open with an action scene like: someone (often a child) is trapped in a burning building and another person is rushing into the flames to try to save them. Although the reader may be caught by this scenario, they won’t be held long because they don’t know anything about the characters. Slow suspense comes about when people care about the characters, and then anything—even something small—that threatens the character will create suspense.

Under certain circumstances, the kind of Quick suspense I just described can also produce a sense of Slow suspense. But only if the reader already knows and likes the character. This means that sequels or series can have a built in advantage in the suspense department. At least it seems so to me.

I’ll leave you with a couple of pics of my talk. I tried to get Lana to photoshop some pictures of folks like Steve Malley and Wayne Allen Sallee and Sidney Williams into the seats to make it look like my audience was bigger, but she said her computer couldn’t handle the visual overload. I understand. I understand.

Suspense Work

I plan to center my talk at the Tuesday signing around the importance of suspense in all literature and how to develop it. One thing I plan to talk about is the difference between what I’m calling “Quick” and “Slow” suspense. Quick is what thrillers often open with: a bomb’s about to go off in a school, a plane’s engine sputters and fails, a fire breaks out in a hospital and starts to spread. Such events quickly put you into a dramatic situation. An obvious emergency has happened, is happening, and people who are helpless or unaware, or both, are in danger.

There’s nothing wrong with Quick suspense. Horror, thriller, and mystery novels certainly need it. In very short stories it may even be the only thing you have to work with. But Quick suspense cannot carry an entire novel, of any kind. You must have Slow suspense too, which is the kind that develops as we begin to care about characters. In the opening of a book, unless it’s part of a series that we’ve been reading, we have no idea who the characters are. We can only care about them in an abstract manner, which is why thriller openings often place into threat those who we generally view as “innocent.” Schoolchildren and hospital patients work well for such Quick suspense, but would you honestly care as much if you knew the bomb was going to go off in a maximum security prison where the inmates are all murderers and rapists?

Once people have started to develop an attachment to the characters, though, the possibilities of suspense are endless. Even problems that are small in the scheme of things can generate suspense when we care about characters. We don’t have to have bombs going off and fires raging out of control. We just have to have one character that we like trying to do something, achieve something, and being met with obstacles and struggle rather than easy success.

I like books that start with Quick suspense. But I’m hard pressed to make it all the way through the work unless the characters come to life and the suspense turns “Slow.”

Cut the Fat and the Metaphors

Most of you reading this already know what I'm going to say below, but I was working on this for an article for beginning writers and thought I would post it here. I've been working on a piece about how to speed up the pace of one's fiction in order to ratchet up the tension and suspense. Here's one of the points I made in the article.

"Cutting out extraneous wording can significantly increase the pace of a story, and the level of tension in suspenseful scenes. Phrases like “it seemed that” or “she wondered if” are often unnecessary anywhere in a tale, and they can be the deadly enemy of suspense. Even metaphors and similes, which are great for scene setting and for creating atmosphere, will slow the pace in action sequences. Tight noun and verb sentences convey the pounding, dynamic rhythm that the reader wants when bad things are about to happen on the page."

Another Writing Article Up

The new Illuminata is up and I have a piece in it on "Quick Versus Slow Suspense." This is in my Writer's Block Column, page 5. If you're downloading from the archive page it's Vol #5, Issue #10 at the bottom right.

There's another writing related piece in this issue as well, "Power up your Prose by Eliminating Passive Voice" by the editor, Bret Funk. And don't forget those of you who are into the writing thing that Bret is always looking for reviews and some short story subs. He runs contests periodically as well.

Over on his blog, Lucas Pederson has posted an extensive revision to his "Chop Shop" story. He really did some work on this so check it out. Although be aware those of you with weak stomachs that some of it is still pretty graphic. Lucas is a horror writer.

And if you like beautiful prose in a fantasy setting, check out some of the short pieces that Bernita has been posting. Check out her June 09 and June 02 posts, and try to talk her into writing a complete short story in her voice, or a novel. I'd like to see it.