Lauren Reding
Develop your setting! It’s a cardinal rule of fiction, and we see setting work wonders in S.A. Crosby’s Blacktop Wasteland or Louise Penny’s Three Pines series. But for those of us writing domestic suspense, where our characters are often confined literally or metaphorically to one house, it’s not always easy to turn that single location into an evocative setting. And yet! I’m here to say, friends, that your fictional house, where marriages sour, reality twists, and lies turn to murder—that house is not a writerly chore: it’s a precious gift that will make your book better and your life easier.
Let’s explore!
#1 Make a heat map of your fictional house by listing which scenes currently take place in which rooms. You’ll begin to see patterns: rooms where your POV characters spend most of their time and rooms they (or you) seem to be avoiding. Look within your patterns for opportunities to inject more tension into your story. If your character isn’t welcome in the kitchen, your reader will be dying to know why.
“But Lauren!” you say. “Some rooms are just boring! Looking at you, laundry room.”
Far from it! The laundry room is where we go through our loved ones’ pockets, where we keep our dangerous chemicals, where we treat blood stains on white linen.
Set a scene in the laundry room today.
#2 Think about where your characters are hiding their secret things that range from Awkward Clutter to Incriminating Evidence. Look, we all hide things from our guests and even our family. There’s that box we packed for the move but never unpacked, that expensive gift we can’t stand to look at but can’t throw away. And then there are the things we really don’t want anyone to find. Ever since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by the little spring door stoppers that go boing. I’ve always wanted to unscrew one, hide a tiny secret inside its hollow core, and screw it back onto the wall.
Don’t tell anyone.
Instead, ask yourself where your characters would hide their most shameful secrets and what they would do if they went to check their hiding place one day and found it empty.
#3 Something is broken in your fictional house. What is it? Drippy sink, zappy wiring, leaky roof, these are the daily travails of homeowners and renters alike, and your characters aren’t better than us. In fact, the number and flavor of busted and malfunctioning items can help your reader gain insight into the age and history of the house, your characters’ finances, and what they’re willing to cover up or endure to pretend everything’s okay. A leak drips on because your character can’t afford to fix it. Or they can afford to, but they won’t because if plumbers came into the house, they’d see something they’re definitely not supposed to.
#4 What’s uniquely dangerous in the house (besides the people)? Recently a friend showed me a stunning antique leaded glass window in her staircase. She said she was afraid someone would fall down the stairs, break the window, and be impaled on the pointed segments of metal. Now, I keep a wary eye on that window every time I visit. I know a loaded Chekhov’s Gun when I see it.
Dangers are everywhere, friends! Don’t let them go to waste.
#5 Access those five senses! Okay, before you (and all my undergrad writing students) start an eye rolling contest at my cliché advice, hear me out. Firstly, I have to say it if I want to keep the coupon for free carpal tunnel syndrome they hand out to all the writing teachers. Secondly, I made you a special sensory lightning round just for domestic suspense.
Sight: What can your characters see when they’re eye-level to the floor? Think halfway up the staircase, peering around the second level. Think pressed to the ground, casting around for a weapon.
Sound: It’s the middle of the night. What sound would make your POV character sit up in bed? What noise would be the first to indicate someone has broken into the house—or broken out?
Smell: How does the house smell when it’s been closed up for a long time? When there’s no fresh air, all the things we cover up with candles and air fresheners come out to play: mildew flourishes, houseplants decay, and decades-old cigarette smoke seeps out of the walls.
Taste: How does the water taste straight from your fictional house’s pipes—no filtration, no carbonation, no whiskey added? Whether it’s chlorinated from the municipal treatment plant, sulfurous from underground minerals, or rusty from the ancient pipes, I want to know what it tastes like when your POV character eagerly splashes water on their face or, you know, struggles to keep from drowning in a tub that’s already nearly full.
Touch: Exactly how solid is this house under your characters’ feet, and what would make the whole house shake in its foundation? The daily train passes by. A heavy weight tumbles down the stairs. The police battering ram strikes the front door. Again. Again.
#6 Somewhere in the bottom of the basement or corner of the attic is a box. It’s the oldest continuously unopened box in the house. It’s covered in grainy dust, and the cardboard has begun to molder. It’s not full of secrets per se, not secrets anyone is actively trying to keep, but it contains things your characters have forgotten about. Things they don’t realize the significance of. Perhaps things they have chosen to forget.
What’s inside that box, my friends? I really want to know.
