Writing is Hell...without suspense
Also - more on my online November suspense class with Writers & Artists
‘But the boy was pointing out the window, and when he looked, he went cold all over. Coming across the field towards the house were four bearded men and two women. He grabbed the boy by the hand. Christ, he said. Run. Run.’ The Road, Cormac McCarthy.
I’m teaching a masterclass on suspense with Writers and Artists. Suspense - according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a feeling of excited or anxious uncertainty about what is going to happen.
Suspense is what got my novel, The Lagos Wife, published - the worry about what had happened to Nicole, a British woman who moves to Lagos, Nigeria, as the wife of a wealthy businessman, and, one day, simply disappears, kept my agent up all night after receiving my manuscript and the next day she offered to represent me. It was bought about a month later by Atria Books (Simon & Schuster US) in a preemptive deal, and soon after that, optioned by HBO to be adapted into a television show. This is the life-changing power of suspense in literature.
I didn’t come to suspense by chance. I came via The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins, via My Sister, The Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite, via the entire canon of Sherlock Holmes, many Agatha Christie books, Stephen King, and more. If you have watched a lot of movies or TV, suspense is already within you. You just need to deploy it like a heat-seeking missile in your writing. Sadly, this is easier said than done.
There are many literary devices that can be used to great suspenseful effect. Here are a few below…
dramatic irony
plot twists
reversals
pacing
POV
Chekhov’s gun
Cliffhangers
Reveals
Stakes
Tension
Foreshadowing
One of my favorites is the dual POV. There’s something about pitting two characters against each other and also using them to reveal information in an engaging way. Girl Gone, Gillian Flynn, a crime thriller about a married couple whose relationship disintegrates after the wife, Amy, disappears on their fifth wedding anniversary, is probably still the best example of dual POV used suspensefully. Girl on the Train, about an alcoholic’s fixation on a seemingly perfect couple, also does it brilliantly, and inspired me to do the same. In The Lagos Wife, Nicole, the missing woman, narrates before her disappearance, and Claudine, her investigating aunt, narrates the immediate aftermath.
Suspense can be poetic - in the sentence construction, using words that heighten anticipation, or that point to the next sentence and the next, using suspensive sentences. I find Cormac McCarthy particularly poetic in his use of suspense. The rhythm of ‘The Road’ is unsettling, like a train rumbling to some ominous destination, his language often sparse and abrupt. a repetitive choice of words. Short sentences. No speech marks. Little punctuation at all.
‘They bore on south in the days and weeks to follow. Solitary and dogged. A raw hill country. Aluminium houses [..] Cold and growing colder.’
Suspense has the writer playing with the reader like a cat with a ball of wool, but too much of a good thing can get tiresome. The thriller/horror genre has become formulaic - like painting by numbers, enjoyable, but when one book is too similar to the rest, forgettable. ‘Read in a day and throw it away. ’ Afterwards, what is there to say about them? Also, an overuse of ‘and then’ or ‘but then’ as beloved of Kindle Vella stories will leave the reader feeling abused, even if it is ‘unputdownable’.
The ancient Greeks were not huge on surprise. Cassandra keeps telling the people of Troy everything that is about to happen to them in Homer’s Iliad. At the beginning of Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, we are pretty much told that this is the story of a man who kills his father and marries his mother. The Greeks also info-dumped a lot, and most of the good stuff (violence) happens off-stage. However, they teach us a ton about dramatic irony, delaying resolution, peripeteia, and tension. Moreover, the Greeks were often more interested in why than what. And look, you don’t need a trailer-load of suspense; a spoonful makes the medicine go down just as well.
Take the suspense of theme: Beloved, Toni Morrison, tells the heartbreaking story of historic American slavery, of loss, of redemption, via a daughter’s ghost haunting its formerly-enslaved mother.
Also, what about the suspense of a riddle? The strange roommate in Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, the haunting widow in Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier, the seeds in A Pocketful of Rye, Agatha Christie.
I adore the suspense of a dodgy boyfriend and a comi-tragic, emotionally-crumbling narrator, as in The Coin by Yasmin Zaher or Luster, Raven Leilani.
The suspense of setting in The Road is a masterpiece. One of the central questions is whether the sun will ever shine again. We are always looking for a break in the clouds. I can see why it won the Pulitzer.
Whatever your literary inclinations or aspirations, a little consciously-wielded suspense goes a long way to getting your book published.
If this whets your appetite, along with the opportunity to hear about my publication journey and ask questions to facilitate yours, sign up to my online masterclass, Writing Suspense at Writers & Artists on 25th November, 7 pm GMT, only £30, and proceeds go to Book Aid. There’s more to say. Much more…