Elements of Fiction Writing - Conflict and Suspense (14 page)
Read Elements of Fiction Writing - Conflict and Suspense Online
Authors: James Scott Bell
In fact, Koontz is a consummate pro who knows exactly what he’s doing. He even names it a couple of pages in:
Abruptly, the world was a slow-motion movie. Each second seemed like a minute. She watched him approach as if he were a creature in a nightmare, as if the atmosphere had suddenly become thick as syrup.
That, my friends, is stylized action for an emotional effect.
We live in a visual age. Movies and TV and YouTube and the Internet have shaped the way we process information and entertainment.
That wasn’t the case in the nineteenth century. There novelists like Dickens and Eliot had to spend lots of ink on describing locations, building up the settings, pulling the readers in. Those readers, who had little to distract them from their reading time, were patient with this.
Not so today. We move fast. We form pictures in our minds as quickly as we can. We jump from task to task, and sometimes to two or three things simultaneously. We live our lives like a series of jump cuts in film.
Fiction, then, can profitably emulate cinema. By using techniques such as cuts, close-ups, and slow motion, we meet readers where they are. Our technique becomes translation software for the imagination.
Let’s look at another action sequence, this one from master thriller writer David Morrell. In
The Protector,
a private security cop named Cavanaugh has been retained to protect a brilliant biochemist named Daniel Prescott. Some very bad people want Prescott and are willing to kill to get him.
In this scene, Cavanaugh meets Prescott, who is holed up in a warehouse rigged with security cameras, monitors, and electronic consoles. Cavanaugh barely has time to begin instructing Prescott before an explosion blows up the nondescript Taurus he arrived in:
The roar from the speaker was so loud that the entire room shook. On the screen, chunks of the Taurus crashed onto the concrete, smoke and fire swelling.
Prescott gaped.
Morrell takes a moment after the explosion to give us a close-up of Prescott’s reaction. This “establishing shot” will be repeated:
A second explosion rocked the room. On a different monitor, the door through which Cavanaugh had entered the building blasted inward, smoke and flames filling the area at the bottom of the stairs. Three men rushed in, but although their hair was matted and their faces were beard-stubbled and filthy, their eyes had neither the blankness of the homeless nor the desperation of drug addicts. These men had eyes as alert as any gunfighter Cavanaugh had ever encountered.
In “real life” a second explosion like this would not give a character any time to think. But remembering that fiction is stylized reality for an emotional effect, Morrell rightly gives us a couple of beats to describe and draw out the effect of the action on Cavanaugh: He observes the men and their faces, and especially their eyes. This is the meaning of the action to Cavanaugh:
“Is there another way out of here?”
Prescott kept staring at the screen, which showed one of the men aiming a pistol at the elevator door while the other two aimed pistols upward and stormed the stairs.
“Prescott?” Cavanaugh repeated, drawing his weapon.
Prescott kept staring at the screen.
Returning to the “shots” of Prescott’s face, we get the sense of impending dread, the same way we would have in a movie.
There’s a famous shot in Hitchcock’s
The Birds
where the character played by Tippi Hedren watches in horror as a flame shoots across spilled gasoline toward the tank that will inevitably explode. Hitchcock goes back and forth between the flame and Hedren, who each time has a different expression and head angle (with no movement within the shot). It’s pure style and pure creation of emotion for the viewer.
So think of your action scenes in cinematic terms, and you’ll be on your way to creating the emotion you desire in the reader.
But action scenes and techniques are not just for writers of thrillers. If you’re of a literary bent, and pure style is one of your priorities, you can do the same thing with reality as the thriller set—stylize it for an emotional purpose.
In Pat Conroy’s
The Prince of Tides,
the narrator, Tom Wingo, and his brother, Luke, attend a poetry reading given by their sister, Savannah, in a Greenwich Village church:
The church was almost full when Savannah walked out of the vestibule. She was introduced by a supercilious bearded male who wore a poncho, a beret, and leather-thonged sandals. According to the program, he was a leading spokesman of the New York School and taught a course called “Poetry, Revolution and Orgasm” at Hunter College. I hated him on sight but changed my mind instantly when his introduction of Savannah proved so heartfelt and generous.
Why so much time spent on the description of a secondary character? Because the essence of action is what it does
inside
a character. Conroy continues:
I have always loved my sister’s voice. It is clear and light, a voice without seasons, like bells over a green city or snowfall on the roots of orchids. Her voice is a greening thing, an enemy of storm and dark and winter. She pronounced each word carefully, as though she was tasting fruit. The words of her poems were a most private and fragrant orchard.
The lyrical prose here creates an emotional effect even for the simple action scene of a woman reading her poetry. Conroy thus creates not only mood but a glimpse inside the soul of the narrator.
Turnabout is fair play, so I will note that heightened style can also play well in the action scenes of those who write thrillers, crime, mystery, and suspense. Once again, not being tied down to reflecting some notion of reality, we can stylize it for our purposes.
That’s why being a writer is so much fun.
As it was for the hardest of the hard boilers, Mr. Mickey Spillane. He is Exhibit A for the use of style within action, to slow things down and move
inside
the character, where the essence of action resides.
In
One Lonely Night
, Spillane’s hero, Mike Hammer, is armed with a tommy gun as he goes to rescue his secretary, the beautiful Velda, who is being tortured in a room by Commie rats. Just before going in, Hammer, a World War II vet, wonders about himself, why he likes killing so much, why he’s dark and twisted by society’s standards and, indeed, why he has been allowed to live.
Hammer gets close and sees the bad guys inflict more pain on innocent Velda. But does Spillane have him burst right in? Not yet!
And in that moment of eternity I heard the problem asked and knew the answer! I knew why I was allowed to live while others died! I knew why my rottenness was tolerated and kept alive and why the guy with the reaper couldn’t catch me and I smashed through the door of the room with my tommy gun in my hands spitting out the answer at the same time my voice screamed to the heavens!
So Hammer is firing away. Spillane still does not render this “realistically.” He now gives us Hammer’s inner thoughts:
I lived only to kill the scum and the lice that wanted to kill themselves. I lived to kill so that others could live. I lived to kill because my soul was a hardened thing that reveled in the thought of taking the blood of the bastards who made murder their business. I lived because I could laugh it off and others couldn’t. I was the evil that opposed other evil, leaving the good and the meek in the middle to live and inherit the earth!
Only now, after giving us the essence of the action inside Hammer, does Spillane get to the outer action:
They heard my scream and the awful roar of the gun and the slugs tearing into bone and guts and it was the last they heard. They went down as they tried to run and felt their insides tear out and spray against the walls.
This last paragraph would have been the only one written by a lesser writer (and Spillane is a much better writer than critics ever gave him credit for).
By using heightened language, run-on sentence structure, and a slow-motion look inside the character, Spillane has given us not merely action, but an enduring character.
Turn to an action scene in your manuscript. This is any scene where your Lead character is after an objective that will help solve the death problem in the story.
- Read your scene over once. Now open up a new document and write for ten minutes without stopping. Write only the inner thoughts of the character. Feel free to explore every aspect of these thoughts: current feelings, philosophies, self-reflection, thoughts about the past, flashback glimpses, and anything else that occurs in the writing. Don’t stop and don’t censor yourself. This is stream of consciousness. Go.
- Put the document aside for at least an hour. You can also wait a day or two, depending on your writing schedule. When you read it over, highlight the lines or words that jump out at you because they are fresh and insightful.
- Put these highlights into your scene. You might combine them into one paragraph or place them strategically throughout. The point is that you get us inside the character’s head.
- Remember, the more intense the action, the more of this style the reader will accept. Be sure the inner life matches the outer intensity.
In fiction there are certain types of scenes that tend to recur, and they also offer great opportunities to intensify the action. Here are a few with some suggestions for getting the most out of them.
Long a staple of action movies, chase scenes are no less valuable in fiction. They usually occur in thrillers but can appear in any kind of genre if used in the right way.
One can imagine a character-driven novel where the Lead is being followed by someone for an unknown reason. Maybe she’s walking down the street of her hometown and suddenly notices a man following her in the shadows.
Is it some random guy with something on his mind?
Or is it an old friend?
Whoever it is, you can use the chase to increase the sense of dread. You’ll need:
- The chased
- The chaser
- A narrow margin of escape
- A view of character emotion
Here’s a bit from “Rage Road,” a story I wrote for the collection
Watch Your Back.
A man and his fiancée are driving along a nice stretch of road together. But a jerk in a truck has decided to make things personal after the man blasts his horn at him:
“Tricia, we can’t let—” John saw in the mirror that the guy was speeding up, starting to pass him on the left. The left was the opposite lane. For a moment there was no oncoming traffic.
“No way, pal,” John said and pushed hard on the gas. He put the 9 mm Beretta between his legs and grabbed the wheel with both hands. For a few brief seconds he and the truck were going the same speed. John’s Altima was doing fine with its 3.5 V-6, keeping the pickup half a car length behind and to the side.
Then John saw, up ahead on the long strip of straight road, a big truck heading their way.
The pickup guy would have to get his butt back in line or die.
But the guy sped up. He was going to try to pass anyway.
John pushed the Altima.
“Let him pass!” Tricia said.
John said nothing, swiveling his head, watching the guy’s truck and the big monster up ahead.
The pickup was almost even with John now.
John gave more foot to the gas.
“Let him in!”
The monster trunk was howling now, the sound of the horn spitting vicious warning.
John shot another glance to the side. The guy in the truck locked eyes with him. They were dark, squinty eyes, deeply set in a twenty-something face under a shaved head. He looked like he wanted to crash into John’s car just for spite. For a second, that’s what John thought he’d do.
But at the last possible moment, Squinty Eyes dropped back and got behind John.
The truck honked past.
John felt sweat and heat, like a fever, breaking out on his face. He heard Tricia crying softly.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Shh.”
“Come on.”
“Don’t talk.”
He put his hand on her left leg. “Baby, please, I need you to be with me on this.”
In the mirror John saw Squinty Eyes staying close, about a car length behind.
Tricia issued a pitiful sob. Then put her hand on top of his. “I trust you, John. I promise I do. I just don’t want anything to happen.”
For the first time in miles John allowed himself to look at the rolling green hills. They always looked nice after a hard rain. “Nothing will, babe. Not as long as you’re with me.”
But what about Squinty? Would he have something to say about that?
Maybe, because here he came again, fast on the side.
John took his hand off Tricia’s leg and grabbed the gun. Time to make things plain. Just show the guy what would happen if he messed with them anymore.
Of course, John would never use it, not for real. Now it was just for show. But a good show. A hard show.
Left hand on the wheel, John reached over with his gun hand and used his index finger to lower the window.
Wind whipped in.
“What are you going to do?” Tricia said.
“Scare him.”
“But you can’t point a gun at someone.”
“If you’re threatened you can.”
And here came Squinty, almost even.
Okay, John thought. Let’s see if I can get his squinty little eyes to open wide.
He waited, timed it, increased speed just a little.
Squinty had his passenger side window down. When they were side-by-side Squinty shouted an F-bomb. John smiled, raised the gun.
He pointed it at Squinty.
For your chase scenes, consider the following:
- Is there sufficient motivation for the chaser to go after the chasee? It could be based on a mistake, but you must then justify the mistake.
- How does the POV character
feel
about the chase? Whatever side he’s on, we need to know how the action is being experienced. This will help you to avoid clichés and the feel of writing a “generic” chase scene. - A chase is a great opportunity to stretch the tension. Use various beats (action, dialogue, inner thoughts, description) to accomplish this.
