Part VII Suspense - Setting and Atmosphere

Besides a sense of place, the right kind of setting offers the reader an atmosphere conducive to creating tension. Certain settings bring established mental images of frightening settings or ones open to danger. Think of a rundown farmhouse, a lonely cabin in the woods, a Gothic mansion, a hospital ship, an abandoned building, a park at night, a cemetery, or a gloomy parking garage. You have seen movies and read books with settings like this that set you up immediately for bad news.

Even a familiar setting can create fear. A night shift stock boy working when the store lights go out. Visiting your place of employment at night. Entering an empty church at night. Losing power in your own home during a storm. All of these locations, normally familiar, add an unknown element of darkness, gloom, or loneliness.

Each of the sense images you create for your setting came be affected by the time of day, weather conditions, and mood of the character. In this case, setting can become a character in itself or can reflect information about the character you place in the setting. Think of the movie Castaway with Tom Hanks. Characterization comes alive when we see the person in a setting of its making. Picture a woman sitting in her parlor filled with bric-a-brac and doilies. Imagine a different women in a modern apartment with limited decorations and everything in place. Imagine a man in his organized, pristine garage, and then picture another man with greasy tools and dirt under his fingernails.

The settings help describe the characters. In the parlor we have a woman who treasures her belongings. To her, they are cozy and comfortable. In the modern apartment, we have a no fuss business women or socialite living in a world that’s restricted by the her narrowness and control. The pristine garage owner prides himself in being organized, while the other man prides himself on repairing cars.

Now return to the parlor and have the modern business women studying the setting. She selects one of the many adornments, eyes it with a look of disdain and replaces it on the table before wiping her fingers on a pure white handkerchief. Same setting but different characterization. Use settings in this way to bring out the strengths, weaknesses, values and attitudes of your characters.

Details in your setting can foreshadow future events. A man’s den shows a display of antique rifles and revolvers covering one wall. Allowing your readers to see this display will alert them—even casually—that these weapons will reappear later in the novel. They will expect the weapons to play an important part of the novel. So be careful with what you describe or you will disappoint readers if the item is significant to your plot.

Use setting details to around reader’s curiosity and to draw them into the stories tension. My novel, A Love for Safekeeping, (which I preferred to be titled See Jane Run) is a good example of a novel with multiple red herrings and many of the techniques mentioned. Jane, an elementary school teacher, is being stalked. On a school field trip one of her students is missing, and she receives a message that he is in the barn and she leaves the lodge to find the child.

Jane raced from the lodge, praying nothing was seriously wrong. Her heart pounded as she rushed toward the barn, fearing the worst.
The door stood ajar.
Adrenaline fired her action. She took a deep breath, tugged back the door, and stepped into the dim interior. When her feet hit the straw-covered floor, terror charged through her. She faltered, peering into the shadows. No one was there. Nothing.

Yet from inside, she heard a childlike whimper. “Danny? Danny, are you in here?”

Her voice faded into the dark corners.


Overhead, she heard another sound.


She peered upward toward the dark loft. “Danny?” Jane held her breath. Fear prickled up her quaking limbs.


From above, another muffled moan reached her ears. Her chest tightened against her thundering heart.


“Danny!”


Terror tore through her as icy tendrils slithered through her veins. She stumbled backward.


No. Not here.


Engulfed by panic, she tried to run from the gloom, but her legs, as if nailed to the floor, held her immobile. Her throat constricted, paralyzing her scream.


Out of the blackness, a body hurled through the air and swung from the rafters.


Her legs buckled, and Jane faded into the darkness.

This is a good example of ending a scene with a hook.

Give serious thought to your settings in all fiction, but particularly in suspense novels, and use the setting to bring characters to life, arouse readers curiosity and create tension that grabs the reader and doesn’t let go.

Part VI Suspense - Plotting a Suspense Novel

Plotting is plotting. All the techniques you’ve used in good plotting work for all types of suspense novels, but suspense adds some elements that are not always found in other genres. A suspense falls into a similar pattern of the three act play that I discussed under plotting.

Beginning (Act I)
The beginning of a suspense must be dynamic and hook the reader within the first few seconds. Part V of this Suspense series talks about the opening paragraphs and you can review this information there.

Act I also includes the same information any novel provides—establish main characters, setting, and the opening conflict. In suspense, this conflict is the beginning of the suspense element—something traumatic happens: kidnaping, stalking, murder, robbery, threatening letter or phone call, break-in, or any strange phenomenon that will cause major problem to the main character or the person he or she is protecting. This immediately evokes the dangerous or sinister tone of the novel which all readers expect.

The initial introduction of the crime can be done in a variety of ways:
• finding a body
• someone is missing
• threats of danger
• a cryptic note
• an old map or letter
• a telephone call or email
• focus on a playground with a child’s bike parked near the jungle gym bars but no child

Any of these elements set the reader on edge as well as the main character and the race begins.

Middle (Act II)
The middle act of a suspense novel is the building of conflicts—tension and emotion—as the hero or heroine tries to solve the major issue in the story. This is where red herrings are found, meeting the villain or contact with the villain, and watching the hero or heroine dig deep into their abilities to find resources they didn’t know they had. Here is where you see cunning and growth. The middle of a novel covers about 50% of the plot.

As I said earlier, the middle is made up of conflicts and tension which results in emotion. Emotion makes the readers care about your characters and what happens. Therefore it’s important to make sure that the middle is action and emotionally paced in a suspense. Conflict is the action that happens as the main characters follows the leads to the villain.

Ways to reveal conflict and tension are:
• Through dynamic dialogue
• Plot twists—faces roadblocks, resolve on issue to face another, things aren’t as they seem.
• Ticking Clock—setting a timeline with horrific results if not resolved, bomb under the table and the reader knows but the characters don’t
• Cliffhangers—stopping a scene in the middle of action and changing the scene to a different POV character usually in a different location.
• Jack In The Box—letting the reader know through hints or clues that something is about to happen, but they don’t know when.
• Foreshadowing—tossing out a comment or showing a piece of business that has greater meaning than it appears. Readers often realize, and it makes them work at putting the pieces together and solving the crime. It also promises that something will be fulfilled.

Pacing
Plotting is the journey from one place to another and pacing is the speed at which the character travels. I have used white water rafting as an example. The rafter begins the journey and knows where he’s headed, but the river has shallows, rocks, large boulders that pull at the raft, eddies, dangerous white water experiences that can overturn a raft, and even a waterfall. The journey is filled with moments of danger followed by moments of calm. As you plot your novel, use pacing to plan how your story will flow. Make each problem more and more serious as they approach their destination. Use the calm moments to review the clues, think through the crime solving process, recount suspicious activities, introduce new characters, discuss possibilities, reveal information, romance the heroine, rejuvenate and grow as a character.

The Ending (Act III)
The final act is the last quarter of the book when the most desperate situation must be faced. This is where time is running out, where the villain has become even more devious and all seems lost. The hero will then find a way to overcome the villain and where final threads are quickly resolved and the story ends in a way to please the reader. In most cases, this would be the punishment or capture of the villain and the victory of the hero.

Plotting is complex because it is also affected by the number of POV characters you will use in your novel and it includes many other elements such as conflict, tension and emotion as well as other suspense techniques such as foreshadowing and red herrings. So it is important to keep track of each of the these facets of fiction writing so that the story isn’t confusing to the reader and you cover all of the elements you set up in the novel.

Keeping Track
For each chapter, you must keep track of what’s happened in terms of foreshadowing, conflicts, red herrings, characters’ POV and plot lines. You can use any of the following techniques. Make notes for each chapter, chart the plot showing what special elements were used, keep a running synopsis, and one final method is using index cards to keep track. I have found jotting ideas and info on index cards allows me to shuffle them and see where they best fit into the plot to keep the tension and conflicts growing.

Part V Suspense - The Opening Sentences

The very first concern in beginning the novel is the opening sentences. An author’s goal is to hook the reader from page one. Create curiosity or intrigue, make readers ask questions, and this creates a page-turner.

Understood elements: To write an effective opening, you must have three things resolved.
• Compelling, believable characters with real emotions.
• A sense of place—town, building, year, time of day, atmosphere and mood.
• Plot with driving internal and external conflicts built on realistic motivation and goals.

Next your opening begins with the purpose to Hook the Reader. As in fishing, hooks come in different types with bait or lures depending on the fish. Different novels require different hooks, but the hook must catch the fish. In this case, the reader.

Read these opening lines:
He couldn’t sleep that night.
From the moment she stepped off the bus, Jane knew what she had to do.
By the time Ralph telephoned, Rose knew it was too late.
Keryn Wills was in the shower when she figured out how to kill Josh Trenton. (from Randy Ingermanson’s Double Vision)
Yank Lucas fell asleep late one night and left the gas burning on the kitchen range. (from John O’Hara’s The Informant)

After reading these opening lines, ask yourself what they have in common.
The answer is fairly obvious. They leave the reader with questions. They arouse the reader’s curiosity. The pull the reader into the story.

Opening Hooks should puzzles the mind, arouses curiosity, asks questions.
Reader wants - action, characters in conflict, something unique or unexpected

Every novel should open with:
• With action in the form of dialogue, conflict, and the unique or unexpected.
• Close to the point of change - a day that’s different, a character’s arrival, a problem.
• A sense of urgency with captivating character or an intriguing situation.

Here’s the opening of my suspense: A Love for Safekeeping
“Why?”
Jane Conroy asked herself the same question a hundred times as she peered at her vandalized classroom and cringed at the crunch of glass beneath her feet. Two wide windows stood with shattered panes, their glass slivered on the wide marble sill and scattered across the floor. Textbooks lay in jumbled heaps around the room, and student desks had been strewn topsy-turvy.

This opening leaves readers asking question, and it presents an omen of things to come.

Keep these ideas in mind when you write the opening lines of your suspense novel.

The next blog will cover Plotting a Suspense Novel