Stein on Writing (15 page)

If you’ve eliminated the weakest scene, you now have another scene that is weakest. If you’ve got the guts of a writer, you may now be able to eliminate the second-weakest scene. It’s an ideal way to strengthen a book. Remember, your intent is to build a publishable novel. You are not a scene preserver!

It will help to keep in mind the difference between a scene and a chapter. A
scene
is a unit of writing, usually an integral incident with a beginning and end that in itself is not isolatable as a story. It is visible to the reader or audience as an event that can be witnessed, almost always involving two or more characters, dialogue, and action in a single setting. A
chapter
is a part of a longer work that is set off with a number or a title. A chapter may have several scenes or scenelets. When each chapter of a novel (except the last) ends, the reader’s interest should be aroused anew, thrusting him forward in the novel. The key is
not to take the reader where he wants to go.

To refresh our understanding, let’s look at that ideal architecture of a suspenseful novel in terms of chapters.

Chapter 1. The chapter ends with a turn of events that leaves the reader in suspense. The reader wants to stay with the characters and action of that chapter.

Chapter 2. The reader finds himself in another place and/or with a different character. The reader still wants to know what happens in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 ends with a turn of events that leaves the reader in suspense. The reader wants to know how Chapter 2 turns out.
Two lines of suspense are operating.

In Chapter 3, the reader finds himself in a continuation of the suspenseful events in Chapter 1. He is still in suspense about Chapter 2. By the end of Chapter 3, a new line of suspense has been created.
Two lines of suspense are still operating.

If you keep doing this with successive chapters, the reader will be kept continuously in suspense and there will be no sag in the middle of the book or anywhere else.

If you think this kind of architecture is crafty, you’re right. It is an important part of designing a novel to influence the emotions of the reader. And as we know, the emotions of the reader are affected by suspense more than by any other factor.

If you want to group your scenes into chapters, here are some guidelines:

• Short chapters make a story seem to move faster.
  
• Normally avoid chapters of fewer than three printed pages. They may not be long enough to engage the reader’s emotions.
  
• Ideally, each chapter might end the way the movies used to end their weekly serials: with the hero or heroine in unresolved trouble. If you’re not familiar with those serials, use a soap opera as a guideline, with the end of each episode making you want to see what happens next.
  

One of the best ways of accustoming yourself to the idea of continuing suspense is to study novels that you have found difficult to put down. Pick up any well-known suspense or thriller writer’s work and look at the chapter endings. You’ll see how most of the time each chapter ends on a suspenseful note and throws the reader forward into the next chapter. The most experienced suspense writers start the next chapter somewhere else or with other characters.

In literary novels, of course, the suspense is often more subtle. All forms of fiction have one thing in common: the chapter endings arouse the reader’s curiosity about what will happen next.

Your chapters are not cemented in place. You can reorganize them in any fashion that accelerates the suspense of the whole. Watch out for time shifts that would disturb the reader. Try to keep moving only forward in time until you’ve had a good deal of experience.

A word of caution. In reorganizing the chapters in a book it is crucial to avoid disimprovement. Whenever shifting locations, keep a copy of your present architecture, then play with rearranging the chapters in another order. You may find that what you will be putting into new places are parts of chapters or scenes within chapters. That’s fine.

If you change the sequence of chapters or scenes, you may also have to do some stitching at the seams. Obviously, this rewriting is much easier if you’re in an early draft, and still easier if you’re in the planning stage.

I cannot overemphasize the importance of architectural suspense. It has been a major factor in the success of writers I have worked with. Mastering this technique can in itself improve the chances of a book’s acceptance for publication.

The Adrenaline Pump: Creating Tension

W
riters are troublemakers. A psychotherapist tries to relieve stress, strain, and pressure. Writers are not psychotherapists. Their job is to
give
readers stress, strain, and pressure. The fact is that readers who hate those things in life love them in fiction. Until a writer assimilates that fact he will have difficulty in consciously creating sufficient moments in which the reader feels tension.

Tension is the most frequent cause of physiological changes in the reader. The sudden stress causes the adrenal medulla to release a hormone into the bloodstream that stimulates the heart and increases blood pressure, metabolic rate, and blood glucose concentration. The result is an adrenaline high that makes the reader feel excited. That excitement is what the reader lusts for. Like all excitement, it is endurable for brief bursts, which is one of the factors that distinguishes tension from suspense. Suspense can last over a long period, sometimes for an entire book. Tension is felt in seconds or minutes. There are occasions in fiction when it lasts longer and begins to border on the unbearable. The best novels have respites in which the reader is allowed to relax so that the tension can ebb, but not for long.

The word “tension” is derived from the Latin
tendere,
meaning “to stretch.” Tension is a stretching out. Think of stretching a rubber band more and more. If you stretch it too far it will break. We experience moments of tension as seeming longer because we want the tension to end. Tension produces instantaneous anxiety, and the reader finds it delicious.

The writer’s job is to create tension consciously, and in my lectures I sometimes demonstrate how tension is created. Without warning, I will suddenly adopt a stern expression, point a finger at someone in the first row, and in a commanding voice demand, “You! Get up out of your chair!”

For a moment, the person I’ve singled out doesn’t know what to do. The audience is hushed, watching. I order, “Stand up!” The person—face flushed—wonders why I am ordering him to stand. “Stand up!” I repeat. The tension in the room is great as long as he disobeys. When the person finally stands up, the tension in the audience is broken. I quickly point out that the way to create tension is to cause friction (ordering “Stand up!”) and to have the recipient of the order not stand up; the tension will continue only as long as the disobedience.

Several times luck has been with me during this demonstration. I order a writer in the front row to stand up, and he remains frozen in his chair. Again I order him to stand up. By this time the rest of the audience is as tense as he is. I step off the stage and come physically closer to the writer. In the voice of a marine drill instructor, I bellow the order to get up. The writer starts to stand, and before the tension can break I shout, “Lie down on the floor!”

Telling someone to stand is not necessarily unreasonable. Asking someone to lie down on the floor of an auditorium full of people seems unreasonable. That’s when the tension in the audience breaks. People laugh. Others titter. Finally, the victim in the front row joins in. He doesn’t have to lie down. The tension is over.

Our instinct as human beings is to provide answers, to ease tension. As writers our job is the opposite, to create tension and not dispel it immediately. In examining the manuscripts of hundreds of writers over the years, a common fault I’ve observed is that the writer creates a pressing problem for a character and then immediately relieves the pressure by resolving it. That’s humane but not a writer’s function. His mission is to manipulate the emotions of the audience, and when it comes to moments of tension, to stretch them out as long as possible.

A common way to create tension in a novel is to simply note a “fact” that is likely to chill any reader. The following is the opening sentence of a thriller I recommended earlier,
The Day of the Jackal
by Frederick Forsyth:

It is cold at 6:40 in the morning of a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad.

Does the precise time convince you of the reality of what’s taking place? Do you want to know who is being executed by firing squad? Do you want to know why he’s being executed? So did millions of readers.

That one sentence creates tension. I recounted the plot earlier. An assassin has been hired to kill General de Gaulle. The reader doesn’t want de Gaulle to be killed. That creates negative suspense (wanting something
not
to happen) that lasts almost to the end of the novel. The tension of that first sentence is momentary. The main line of suspense is book-long.

The most important moment of tension in a novel is its first use, which should be as close to the beginning of the book as possible. It puts the writer in charge of the reader’s emotions.

You might well say, “Wait a minute, Stein. Isn’t my job in the first few pages to create a living breathing character that will interest the reader?” Yes, of course. The closer writing gets to literature, the more likely it is that what fastens us to the early pages is our interest in a character. And then, as soon as possible, the writer creates some moments of tension for that character. Here, in outline, are the kind of plot situations that provide opportunities to create tension:

Dangerous work is involved:
The place is postwar Bosnia. A likable demolitions specialist parks his five-year-old daughter with a neighbor watching from a distance and then, a prayer on his lips, goes about trying to dismantle an unexploded shell. The author describes what the man is doing in minute detail. The reader, aware of the man as a human being, aware also of the five-year-old watching from a distance, feels tension mount with every turn of the screw.

A deadline is nearing:
Molly knows that at six o’clock the villain will return. At four o’clock the hero, Frank, has not yet arrived, and Molly, glancing at the time, is tense. So is the reader. At five o’clock Molly is beginning to panic. At two minutes to six, the reader’s tension is extreme. At one minute to six, Frank arrives breathless.

An unfortunate meeting occurs:
The heroine is in a department store elevator. She presses the button for the sixth floor. The elevator stops on the fifth floor, and the dangerously neurotic man she jilted gets on. The reader becomes instantly tense.

An opponent is trapped in a closed environment:
The protagonist, who in his youth hunted vermin on a farm, is now seventy years old. He owns the only rifle in the neighborhood, where the citizens are terrified by the rumor that a diseased mountain lion has come down into the town and chased a woman into the basement of her house. The woman has locked herself in the boiler room, and the mountain lion is roaring outside its closed door. The elderly rifle owner is summoned to kill the
lion. A younger man offers to take the rifle and go down the cellar stairs to the trapped lion. The old man gives his rifle to the younger man, but immediately sees that the younger man doesn’t handle the firearm in an experienced way. He asks for it back, and enters the house. At the head of the cellar stairs, he hears the lion below, but can’t see the animal clearly, except for its eyes. The older man has a flashlight, but how is he to hold the rifle with one hand and the flashlight with the other? As he puts the flashlight down, the crazed lion bounds up the cellar steps.

Well, we’ll stop right there. What we’ve done is add one tense moment to another, piling up the degree of tension toward a climax. The temptation for the inexperienced writer is to have the older man go in and shoot the crazed animal right off. That makes short shrift of the tension. By adding the element of the younger volunteer and the flashlight, we add to the tension, stretching it out.

Tension can be as valuable in literary fiction as in thrillers. The opening story in Ethan Canin’s collection of novellas,
The Palace Thief,
is called “The Accountant.”

At the very beginning, the accountant-narrator tells the reader that his crime was small. We then hear him tell the circumstances and details of his crime. Far into the story, when we are witnessing the crime, we don’t want the accountant—whom we’ve gotten to like as a human being despite his faults—to wreck his life by going forward with the crime. While he is in the process of committing it, the reader becomes extremely tense. As the accountant takes an object that doesn’t belong to him, we want him to put it back. This isn’t suspense because he told us at the outset that he committed the crime. But there are moments of high tension, stretched out. The reader keeps hoping that any second the accountant will stop the clock, change his mind, not go through with this stupid, unnecessary, trivial, bizarre crime, and yet he goes ahead with it, wrecking his life. “The Accountant” is a story worth reading for pleasure the first time, and worth studying the second time.

Relocating a sentence to increase tension is a valuable technique. The “she” in the following is a young woman who doesn’t yet know that a boy she had made love to is dead. She meets several of his friends. Here’s the original:

“Before I got your message, I thought we were going to meet over at Urek’s like usual. He in trouble again?”

A fog of silence descended. Nobody looked at anybody else. Finally, Feeney said, “She doesn’t know.”

I transposed one sentence and created two new paragraphs. Note the increase in tension, though no words have been changed.

“Before I got your message, I thought we were going to meet over at Urek’s like usual.”

A fog of silence descended. Nobody looked at anybody else.

“He in trouble again?”

Finally, Feeney said, “She doesn’t know.”

One of the easiest ways to create tension is by means of dialogue. The best dialogue sparks with friction, generating tension in the reader as it does in life. In the next chapter, we’ll see how that’s done.