“People don’t read books to get to the middle.”
–Mickey Spillane
The four stories that make up The Broken Doll, from Amazon Original Stories, was written in the same way I’ve approached all my 45 novels and 90 short stories: from conception to execution, I strive to sure the reader is immersed in a nonstop tale.
I do not write character studies or atmospheric stories contemplating the nature of good and evil. I write foot-to-the-floor page-turners that race from start to finish, featuring whipsawing plot twists and surprise endings. (A recent review suggested that readers should send me their chiropractic bills.)
To achieve this goal I’ve come up with some rules I keep in mind and I thought I’d share here a few of the more important ones.
One caveat, though: I’m not advocating this approach to anyone else. Nothing is more subjective than writing and what works for one author might be completely wrong for another. I’m simply offering what have been helpful tactics for me.
Rule 1. Write a suspense novel, not a whodunit.
Crime fiction falls into two broad categories: murder mysteries (asking the question what happened) and suspense thrillers (asking what’s going to happen). I write the second. I don’t want to create intellectual puzzles. I want my fiction to be a roller coaster, keeping my readers suspended (the verb that’s the source of “suspense”) in anticipation, wondering what will happen next. Will the hero die, will her boyfriend die, will the bomb go off, will the assassin succeed, will the white-hat hacker stop the enemy missile launch, will the husband and wife we’ve come to love break up?
I love mysteries from the Golden Age (Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers) and classic P.I. stories (Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler); I just prefer fiction that moves more quickly. I aspire to create one-sitting reads.
Rule 2. Keep in mind what makes successful suspense.
The mission in writing suspense fiction is to emotionally engage your readers on every page by crafting a story in which living breathing characters, good and bad, pursue high-stakes goals, in the process of which they confront increasingly difficult questions and conflicts that are ultimately resolved in a way satisfying to readers.
When I teach my course in writing, this paragraph is the only part of my lecture that I require my students to write down. I keep it in mind every time I sit down to write.
Let’s examine briefly each key element of that mission statement.
- By high stakes I mean something vitally important to your characters. Not necessarily big crimes, hacking into the world banking system, terrorist plots, nuclear holocaust or asteroids hurtling toward earth. Those might be platforms for suspense, but unless we see the implications of the risk up close—that is to your principal characters– readers think: been there, read that. Think of superhero movies, where special effects trump heart: In the end, unsatisfying and, despite the explosions, boring.
My standard: If the loss that threatens can make a character well up with tears, then it’s high stakes.
A librarian digging through shelves to find out who killed someone in the 1800s is not high stakes. Discovering if a painting is a forgery is not high stakes. These can make a beautiful and successful literary crime novel, but they’re not suspense novels.
- By conflicts and questions I don’t mean only kidnappings, car chases, defusing the bomb, shootouts and the like, though those, of course, qualify. They might include an encrypted message that must be deciphed, a sidekick’s betrayal, a spouse walking out in the middle of a case, police department politics. Even car keys gone missing at a critical moment.
And remember: questions and conflicts plural. Constantly mess with your characters’ lives. You’ll keep your readers turning pages to the extent you keep your characters in trouble. And remember increasingly, too. As the story gets closer to the end, turn the heat up.
- By satisfying resolution, I don’t mean a happy ending, though I like those myself. It has to be a resolution that flows naturally from the story and ties up all the various plot twists and turns. Suspense fiction is only successful if, at the end, you bleed off the pressure you’ve built up. And never ambiguous endings. Kill off your hero if you must (I’d never do it), but don’t leave readers wondering whether or not she survives or who the villain is.
Rule 3. Suspense fiction is based on the mint-flavored toothpaste business model.
What on earth do I mean by this?
Say I’m a product designer for a toothpaste company and go to my boss with the idea of liver-flavored toothpaste—because I think it’s neat. He would point out, before firing me, that that the company exists to give their customers something they want, not what its product designers want.
I constantly keep in mind that I am writing for my customers—my readers—and my job is to give them what they want. What will guarantee that they have the emotional experience I talk about above? Is the story idea itself something they’d like to read? Is the plot too complicated or too simple? Is there too much violence or not enough? Are the characters real or caricatures?
Just think about what people want from a book: to be drawn into the story, captivated by the plot and in love with, or terrified by, the characters.
That’s mint.
What is the template for a mint-flavored suspense novel? In my case, it’s simple: My books take place over 48 to 72 hours, my stories 24 to 48. There are many internal plot reversals, two or three subplots and multiple surprise endings.
I also like to include some interesting details of various themes. For instance, The Broken Doll stories are, respectively a medical thriller, a police procedural, a courtroom drama and a tale of psychological suspense, and each one offers insights into those worlds.
My idea of a mint story means not mixing genres. Combing crime with ghosts, time travel, the multiverse, aliens and the like almost always damages our model of emotional engagement, since we move the reader a step or two from reality. This dulls empathy for characters and the plotting since readers need to step away from the story to figure out the alternative world that’s being presented.
Rule 4. Plan the novel or story ahead of time.
The writing world is divided into two camps: plotters (outliners) and pantsers (as in seat-of-the-). I am a strong advocate of outlining. I don’t get on an airplane that hasn’t been built according to a blueprint; I don’t write a book without having done the same.
I spend eight months or so working on the outline (and doing research). The outline for The Broken Doll cycle was about 30 pages. For a novel typically it will be 130-150. Every element of the work is detailed. I know where all pivotal events happen, when the characters enter the story and when they leave (either vertically or horizontally), where the clues and red herrings are planted, when to insert a flashback or flashforward.
A story or a novel is a sequence of events that must be arranged in a particular order to achieve that goal of emotional engagement. You can hit that mark by simply starting out with a blank page and jumping in, writing the prose as you go. It’s just far simply easier and more efficient to come up with those events and their sequence in a brief notation on an outline before starting the process of generating the text.
I’ve heard people say they don’t outline because the story is revealed in the writing process. I would counter that the story reveals itself more clearly and quickly through brief bullet points of scenes in the outlining process.
Here are some other reasons to outline:
- A suspense thriller of my sort, taking place over a short period of time with multiple, intersecting plots, requires a schematic overview and timeline to make sure all the moving parts work.
- Outlining will stop you in your tracks if you’re committing the crime of writing a book that should not be written. There are some ideas that sound good in the abstract but should not be turned into a book. They’re boring, farfetched, cliché-ridden, insubstantial, just plain weird. If you realize these flaws after you’ve written half the book then you’re confronted with two choices: one, you throw the damn thing out. Or two, you finish it, incorporating lame scenes and a hackneyed or noncredible ending and publish, giving your readers a liver-flavored tale.
But if you outline you’ll realize right up front that the book is a bad idea. You pitch out the Post-its and start something new. You’ve only wasted a few weeks of your time and ten cents in office supplies—and saved yourself a mountain of aggravation and anxiety.
- You’ll never have writers’ block if you outline because you know where the story’s going, from start to finish. You’ll certainly have moments of block in the outlining process, but that’s not a big problem. You leave the point where you’re stymied and jump to other scenes. By the time you’ve done that, a week or so later, you can return to the difficult scene and either finish or delete it.
Rule 5. Write in a suspenseful style.
I write my suspense fiction in what I call a “streaming style.” We authors are up against serious competition for entertainment dollars and time from television I want to steal back some of that market by writing books for an audience (and I’m one of them!) with a shorter attention span, a sea of distraction and an addiction to multi-tasking.
My tactic is to write shorter books, with shorter chapters, shorter paragraphs, more dialogue, less introspection and reflection, They’re just as twisty and surprising as ever, but much leaner and more concentrated. And, for that, frankly I feel they’re better books.
Rule 6. Give your book or story surprise endings.
A suspense thriller must have twists at the end. Yes, that’s plural. Readers absolutely love to be fooled but they’re also very smart. They can often guess a twist. So authors have to follow that twist with another that turns the prior surprise on its head.
Also, authors must play fair. The twist has to be based on clues seeded into the story earlier, and those clues have to do double duty; you misdirect the reader into believing the clue means one thing, when in fact it supports the final twist.
Rule 7. Rewrite extensively.
There has been no book or story written that can’t be improved upon by editing.
I rewrite perhaps 50 times altogether. About half those edits on the computer (for searching and replacing, cutting and pasting and using spell check and grammar), but then I print it out and edit again, another fifteen or twenty times. You’d be amazed at how many typos and even conceptual errors you missed when reading on the screen. Finally, I use the Read Aloud function of Word, or a program like Natural Reader and let my computer or smartphone read the book back while I follow along. That process too reveals mistakes and clumsy passages I missed entirely in the prior edits.
Hemingway said there are no great writers; there are only great rewriters.
Rule 8. Be Suspenseful, not gruesome.
I use as a model for thriller fiction Alfred Hitchcock’s movies, in which we were riveted by the anticipation that bad things would happen, including violence, but we saw little of it and what did make it to the screen was largely sanitized. This made his movies exciting and cathartic and such enjoyable experiences. Explicit gore, on the other hand, diminishes a story. It’s self-conscious and a creative failure, suggesting that the writer is too lazy or unable to create suspense and falls back on slicing and dicing, which leaves me, at least, feeling unclean and turned off by the entire tale.
I never injure animals or children (though I’ll gleefully endanger them), and I avoid portraying sexual violence in my works.
Rule 9. Stay off the soapbox.
Lecturing your readers has no place in suspense fiction. Write about issues, by all means—remember those high stakes of our mission statement—but let the reader form an opinion on their own by the action of the story, not your beating them over the head with the abstract.
Rule 10. Suspense fiction requires nonstop movement.
Virtually every sentence of a suspense book or story must further the plot or enrich the characters, with a very faint dusting of atmosphere and lyrical literary tone. Do not use as your model for suspense fiction any 19th century novel, especially if it involves a whale or a bachelor country gentleman.
Rule 11. Keep dialogue real.
Nothing can shatter the experience of suspense fiction faster than characters’ talking in novel-speak, which comprises two sins: over explanation of plot and clumsy word structure.
At the end of a story, I’ll want the reader to understand how the crime was solved, of course. But I’ll present that information in this way: “The detective looked over the suspects and said, ‘So wonder how I figured it all out? It was easy.’ He then went only to explain how he’d planted the listening devices and caught the plot on tape.”
As for the second failing, simply make sure to have your characters speak the way you do: Using contractions and verbal clutter (“like” and “well”), breaking the rules of grammar, stepping on other character’s words, picking the wrong word, backing up and correcting themselves.
Rule 12. Keep your description of setting to a minimum.
Fiction writers have a tendency to fall in love with place and devote too much time to its description, at the expense of the story. Roller coasters don’t stop so an amusement park guide can tell you all about the beautiful park to your left. Use just a few words to give the reader a sense of where the characters are and what the locale is like.
Keep it short, yes, but make it real: use vivid passages that describe not only what a place looks like, but its sounds, smells, climate, tone. Give a locale’s history only if important to the plot.
These are a few of the rules I follow in writing page-turning fiction. There’s a final rule I share with the student in my suspense writing class. It’s meant not just for suspense writers but for anyone who engages in the miraculous process of putting words on paper and in that act make a story come to life.
Rule 13. Be Proud.
The stories we write make people cry, make them laugh, make them shiver in terror, make them look at the world in a different way. Fiction changes lives. As difficult as the journey to publishing is–and the continual trek afterward–there is no creative effort more important than telling stories.
Be proud of your part of this remarkable and noble profession.
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