Lee Rene's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing-tips-from-elizabeth-sims"

Bestselling author and writing authority Elizabeth Sims, author of seven popular novels in two series, including The Rita Farmer Mysteries and The Lillian Byrd Crime series, shares writing tips.

Occasionally I talk to school children about writing. I begin by asking them how many sheets of paper it takes to write a novel. They guess, and suddenly they very much want to know the answer. No matter what their guesses are, they’re always shocked and horrified when I unveil the foot-high stack of handwritten yellow pages that make up the rough draft of one of my novels. They’ve just experienced suspense and a payoff in its simplest form.

When I ask what you need to write a story of suspense, inevitably one kid yells, “Put in a bad guy!”

Good advice, if obvious. The fact is, stories in all genres need suspense: Readers must stick with you to the end, and suspense is the foremost element that keeps them turning pages. Likewise, when you’re trying to write your way through to that teetering stack of a finished draft, a quick injection of suspense is a great way to keep your story’s engine fueled. Suddenly, you’ll very much want to write on to find the answer. Here some ways to do just that, beyond the excellent suggestion of putting in a bad guy.

1. Point a finger.
Mary Renault’s historical novel The Persian Boy starts with a cataclysm: The death and destruction of the protagonist’s family and home. Before dying, his father screams the name of his betrayer. Well, guess who the Persian boy will meet up with later … much later?
This powerful scenario can work to create and maintain suspense in any genre. Any kind of betrayal will do: financial ruin, a broken heart, a lost opportunity.

2. Pull a false alarm.
“The Boy Who Cried Wolf” is not only an instructive moral fable, it’s a nail-biter. As soon as you learn of the shepherd boy’s plan to get attention by screaming that a wolf is attacking the sheep, you just know a real wolf is bound to show up sooner or later.
You also know that the townspeople won’t like to be made fools of. Nobody does, which is why this technique works, whether in a sleepy town, a Wall Street office or an emergency room.

3. Build an oubliette.
Medieval lords would sometimes construct a simple pit below the castle floor, into which they would throw any captive they’d prefer to just forget. (Oubliette is French for forgotten place.) No screams could penetrate the heavy lid, and the screams were short-lived in any event.
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” involves a blood grudge, settled when a man tricks his enemy into joining him in his wine cellar, then bricks him up in a cranny there. The suspense lies in wondering what Montresor has up his sleeve, as he lures Fortunato ever deeper into the catacombs.

4. Plant a hazard, then wait.
Taking the concept of the oubliette a step further, in Charles Portis’s True Grit, outlaw Tom Chaney describes a snake pit into which he threatens to toss our heroine Mattie Ross. Then lots of other stuff happens. Eventually Mattie manages to shoot Chaney, but gets knocked backward by the recoil of her Colt.
The heart-clutching moment comes with the tumbling Mattie’s realization: “I had forgotten about the pit behind me!” The beauty is that the pit has been lurking in the back of readers’ minds all along.
Show us your hazard, then put time (and action) between its introduction and its use.

5. Make panic your friend.
Although causing a character to panic can be a cheap way to gin up suspense—the victim stumbles and falls, letting the killer overtake him—people sometimes do legitimately panic, and you can exploit that.

A believable way is to build a character who is flawed, especially a person who displays flawed judgment early on. Thus a panic move not only will be plausible, but somewhat expected. That anticipation alone can be suspenseful, and then when it happens the reader experiences a payoff—and a craving for more.


6. Water a plant.
Growth can be incredibly suspenseful. Think about it: You plant a seed and you water it. Will it be a stalk of wheat, or a vine of poison ivy? Horror novels from Rosemary’s Baby to The Bad Seed to Carrie and beyond have made use of this simple technique.

Watching a character develop over time can be suspenseful, especially if that character is a child with a pronounced pedigree: a mass murderer’s son conceived during a conjugal visit; a squeaky-clean politician’s daughter. Will this toddler turn out to be a drug-addicted prostitute, or a Nobel laureate?

7. Withhold the right stuff.
Keeping information from the reader can be a cheap trick, but there’s a right way to do it—by playing fair.
In his novella The Valley of Fear, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle keeps the secret of Birdy Edwards’ identity from the other characters and from the reader—but everybody’s given the same information. Characters and readers alike have a chance to interpret the clues, so when you come to the payoff, either you’ve figured it out already and your suspicions are satisfyingly confirmed, or it’s a breathtaking reveal immediately followed by, “Of course! I should have known!”

Withhold substance, but give tantalizing information.

8. Banish someone.
The ancients invented this one, which figures large from the Bible (God throws Satan out of Heaven) to modern tales (troublesome kid gets sent to boarding school, dysfunctional narcissist gets kicked off the island).

What’s so great about banishing a character? We know he’s still out there. The malefactor broods on his punishment, grinds his axe and plans his revenge.
If you use an omniscient narrator or multiple-character POVs, you can flip back and forth from the banished to the peacefully complacent tribe, ratcheting up the tension by contrasting what everybody’s doing and thinking.

9. Rip it from the headlines.
The daily news is a terrific place to get ideas for suspense. Recently at a writing conference session I brought the morning paper (yes, it was a town that still has one) to show how easy it is to get story ideas.

As we worked, I realized that you really can find suspense in practically every section. Will the local skating pair make it to the Olympics? What if one of them is having an affair with the coach? Here’s an ad for a lost camera. A reward is involved. What images might be on that memory card? A happy family picnic? Maybe. Maybe not.