Elements of Fiction Writing - Conflict and Suspense (24 page)

1. Find a moment of terror in your novel. If it’s a character-driven novel, you can find an inner terror that is meaningful to the Lead: terror of being exposed, of losing a love, of being ostracized, etc.
   
2. Write a page-long paragraph, stretching this tension out.
   
3. Now write a page of short sentences, one after the other, doing the same thing.
   

You will now have plenty of material to work with to the benefit of your scene.

Can you stretch the tension too far? Will it snap like a rubber band?

Yes, but the length of the stretch is farther than you think. Go for it. You can always cut it back later.

When in doubt, stretch it out.

T
he use of conflict and dialogue is covered in chapter ten. Here I want to focus on ways dialogue can carry suspense and stretch tension.

When you read the masters of dialogue—Hemingway, Elmore Leonard, Robert B. Parker—you will find they do this all the time. Dialogue for them becomes another means of heightening the stakes.

Remember, dialogue is an expression and extension of
action.
It is a physical act by a character in order to serve his purposes in a scene.

With that in mind, you have several options in your toolbox.

In chapter one of Lee Child’s
Worth Dying For,
Eldridge Tyler, a seemingly benign Nebraska grandfather, gets a call. He and his rifle might be needed.

Immediately we’re hooked. A grandfather and his rifle? What for? Child uses spare dialogue to develop it for us. Tyler asks, “What’s going on?”

Here we get a ton of information, explicit and implicit. We know Tyler is a skilled sniper who has killed before, seemingly without a mistake. We know there’s an unwitting victim (Jack Reacher, it turns out) walking around about to get his head blown off. We learn about his background in the military, and a bit of what he looks like. We don’t know who is talking to Tyler, and that fact ratchets up the mystery.

1. Find a high-tension section of your novel that is dialogue heavy.
   
2. Make a copy of the scene and open it in as a new document.
   
3. Compress as much of the dialogue as you can. Cut away at words, use fewer complete sentences.
   
4. Compare the two scenes and rewrite your master scene utilizing as much of the new material as you deem appropriate.
   

You can stretch the tension in dialogue, too. Remember to use the techniques of nonresolution and withholding information.

In
Velocity
by Dean Koontz, Billy Wiles is being played by a clever killer who seems to know Billy’s every move. Threatening notes tell Billy what to do, or else.

In this scene, Billy is outside on his porch, as per instructions, to listen to a man named Cottle, sent by the killer with a message.

What is it?

Instead of telling us what it is right away, the dialogue continues:

Now we get a paragraph of description, setting the scene but, most of all, making us wait for the answer:

Still no answer! More description. Koontz knows exactly what he’s doing. The tension grows from the delay.

In fact, the dialogue goes on for another full page before we get the information. Which I won’t give to you here. This section is about suspense, after all.

1. Find a dialogue exchange in which information is being revealed.
   
2. Can you stretch this section out so the information comes later, even in another scene?
   
3. Try adding an interruption to the scene so the information is held up.
   

One of the surest ways to create instant conflict or tension in dialogue is to avoid the “on the nose” response (see also “Sidestepping” in chapter three). That refers to the statement >> direct response >> further direct response sequence:

You get the idea. Now, this is not to say you should avoid all direct response in your dialogue, because it wouldn’t be real. We do talk this way, and so do your characters. Scenes like the above scene should be cut because there’s no conflict at all. You certainly can redo the scene with different agendas and so on. Direct responses can be full of conflict:

So there you have direct responses with conflict.

Now let’s turn to the unexpected. Throughout your novel, look for places where you can insert “off the nose” responses.

One way is through simple avoidance:

Seemingly innocuous answers can take on tension if they are avoiding what seems like a simple statement or request. Why would Joe not want to talk about going to the store? What’s going on in his mind? Immediate interest is created.

A stronger form of avoidance is to answer a question with a question:

Instant conflict.

An interruption also creates conflict on the spot:

The unexpected creates a freshness that elevates the writing. One of my favorite movie examples is
Moonstruck.
Loretta has just agreed to marry Johnny, a likable lug but no great catch. She wakes up her mother, Rose, to tell her:

What’s funny about the exchange is that you would expect Rose to protest that Loretta should marry only if she loves Johnny. But she quickly and plainly lays out the exact opposite case.

Later in the script, Ronny, Loretta’s true love, is trying to convince her to come into his abode after a night at the opera. How does he do it? By declaring how great love is? No, he says this:

Not exactly
Romeo and Juliet
, is it? But the unexpected makes it fresh and full of tension, if for no other reason than the audience doesn’t know what the heck to make of it.

Now some of you may have a question bubbling around in your writer’s mind. We usually hear that it’s a good idea to cut in order to make our books more readable. That is not quite correct.

The idea is to cut the parts that don’t hold the reader to the page. Clunky exposition, bloated dialogue, interchanges with no tension, and so on.

But when you have the reader nailed to the page because something major is happening, keep them there by adding—so long as what you add keeps the moment hot with suspense.

What would a roller coaster be if you got one climb and one dip? A rip-off, that’s what. Give your readers the full ride by stretching tension.

C
onflict in setting (see chapter two) is important and suspense in setting is equally so.

Overall, you want the setting to operate similar to a character. That is, a good deal of the time, you want the setting to be opposed to your Lead character.

Your goal in a suspenseful scene is to keep the reader feeling as if circumstances are closing in on the character. Shoot for a sense of foreboding, a feeling that, at any moment, the trap could snap shut and take the character out, physically or psychologically.

Your setting should do double duty in getting the reader into the experience of the scene as perceived by the viewpoint character.

Perhaps no one is better at doing this than Stephen King. In his story “1408,” Mike Enslin enters the Hotel Dolphin. At first, it’s benign:

But then Enslin is let off on the thirteen floor (called the fourteenth, of course) and the haunted room he’s investigating:

Not a big thing, but enough askew to begin the mounting suspense. A small visual that is in keeping with the mood King is building, slowly. A bit farther on:

Inside the room, continuing the theme of something not being quite right:

And then some seriously weird things start to happen. Like an old menu supernaturally changing languages right in front of his eyes. Then:

And this being a Stephen King short story, things get even worse. I won’t give away any more. Read it and watch how the room is described near the end.

Think of your prose in these sections like the score of a great suspense film. In the build-up sections, the theme is rather muted. It gets more intense as the scene progresses. There might even be a shock and a strong uptick, like the screeching violin in the shower scene in
Psycho.

It’s all part of the score, the mood you’re trying to sustain.

You can create suspense in any setting, not just the dark ones. In fact, the fresher the setting the better.

The grand master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, knew this. In an interview, in
Focus on Hitchcock
by Albert J. Lavelley, Hitchcock described coming up with the famous crop duster scene in
North by Northwest
:

Let’s review that scene, shall we? Cary Grant arrives at the crossroads of a desolate cornfield. The shot is wide and the scene is bright sunlight. And Cary Grant is a little dot in the middle of the picture. In other words, he’s quite alone.

He gets to the side of the road and starts waiting, looking around, but there’s no one there. Empty fields. Fence posts. No sound. He waits a little more. Finally a car comes by, but it just whizzes on past. Cary looks a little confused.

A moment later another car approaches. Hitchcock takes his time, letting the suspense build. But that car runs by, too.

Cary looks around in the silence, hands in his pockets. Still another car approaches and then recedes.

Cary waits some more. Hitchcock is stretching the tension. In the distance another vehicle heads for him. This time it’s a truck. Grant looks hopeful. But then the truck goes by without stopping. It kicks up dust, too, all over Cary and his nice suit.

Now what?

Off to the side, coming out of the corn patch, is another car. This one winds its way down a dirt road toward the highway. Cary watches. The car finally stops at the main road. A man gets out and walks to the side of the road opposite Cary, and stands there.

Could this be the guy? The mysterious contact?

Hitchcock is going to make us wait.

The two men just stand there looking at each other. This goes on for a couple of beats. Then Cary decides to take matters into his own hands and walks across the road to talk to the man.

They make small talk. The man gives no indication that he is the one Cary is supposed to meet. And then the man, looking off into the sky, makes mention of a strange thing. A crop duster in the distance, flying low where there aren’t any crops.

This remains a mystery for the next several moments.

A bus arrives and the man gets on it. The bus takes off. Cary Grant is once again alone at the crossroads, waiting.

All this time, the setting’s desolation keeps building a feeling of menace.

As he waits, Cary looks at the crop duster again. It’s making a long lazy turn in the sky. Cary watches for a bit, unconcerned, until the plane starts heading his way.

Closer and closer it comes.

And then Cary realizes it’s coming directly for him. He hits the ground as the plane zips right over his head.

Does Hitchcock waste this moment? Does he have Cary flee into the cornfield? Or get help from a car? Of course not.

A stunned Cary gets up and dusts himself off as the plane makes a strong turn and comes right back for him. Where is he supposed to run? Everything is wide open.

But he does run. He runs until he finds a ditch. He dives into the ditch, and as the plane flies over him it fires bullets. Machine gun bullets!

How much worse can it get? What’s Cary supposed to do now?

The setting has revealed itself to be an absolute curse. Nowhere to hide.

The scene continues, with Cary trying to stop cars, hiding in the corn, getting poisoned, running out to the road to stop a truck, and the plane going out of control and hitting the truck in a burst of flame!

All this from a simple, wide-open field in bright sunlight.

1. Look over the settings of each of your scenes. Have you selected the obvious or the overdone?
   
2. Consider changing it to the opposite. If it’s a daylight scene, change it to night. If it’s a scene in a desolate place, move the characters to where there’s a crowd.
   
3. Test locations. The nice thing is you can travel anywhere you want in your mind and scope out places on your computer.
   

4. Try rewriting a couple of scenes in a new locale. Practice creating suspense where you least expect to find it.
   

   1. What sort of person might be part of or show up in this place? How can that person be opposed to the POV character?
      
   2. What sorts of physical items exist in this setting? Look deeply at each one and ask how someone could use it for menace.
      
   3. When all else fails, do a variation on Chandler’s guy with a gun trick. Bring in a normal, everyday thing (like Hitchcock’s crop duster) and make it do something unexpected.