Elements of Fiction (59)

Element 59: Suspense

A first cousin to, and even more visceral than Tension is Suspense, one of the reasons so many readers love mysteries, crime and courtroom dramas, and what we still call (I believe) cliff-hangers.

Yes, many writers have given this crucial element some thought.

Such as E.M. Forster, “Suspense — the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.”

While John Gardner opens with, “When writing is successful, the reader senses that the climax is coming and feels a strung urge to skip to it directly, but cannot quite tear himself from the paragraph he’s on.”

Philip Gerard observes, “Suspense is made up of curiosity and delay.”

Ayn Rand asks, “When you set up a line of suspense, ask yourself: Is there any reason why anyone should be interested in this conflict? Are these values important enough to worry about?”

As for Madison Smartt Bell, “Two rules for suspense might be put this way: ‘Don’t answer suspenseful questions too soon’ and ‘Make sure to eventually satisfy the curiosity you’ve aroused.”

Erich Auerbach muses, “An episode that will increase suspense by retarding the action must be so constructed that it will not fill the present entirely, will not put the crisis, whose resolution is being awaited, entirely out of the reader’s mind, and thereby destroy the mood of suspense; the crisis and the suspense must continue, must remain vibrant in the background.”

Back to more from Gardner, who has considered this at some depth, “In serious fiction, the highest kind of suspense involves the Sartrian anguish of choice; that is, our suspenseful concern is not just with what will happen but with the moral implications of action. Given two possible choices, each based on some approvable goal, we worry, as we read, over which choice the character will make and, given the nature of reality, what the results will be.”

“All true suspense, we have said, is a dramatic representation of the anguish of moral choice.”

“Suspenseful delay is enjoyable, but even when distractions enrich the meaning of the climax about to come, we are not such fools as to miss the fact that we are being led, a little like donkeys. If the reader is not to wake from the fictional dream, it can be useful to anticipate the reader’s feeling and channel it back into the story.”

“When the central character is a victim, not someone who does but someone who’s done to, there can be no real suspense.”

“In the final analysis, real suspense comes with moral dilemma and the courage to make and act upon choices.”

“Suspense, rightly understood, is a serious business: one presents the moral problem — the character’s admirable or unadmirable intent and the pressures of situation working for and against him (what other characters in the fiction feel and need, what imperatives nature and custom urge) — and rather than moving at once to the effect, one tortures the reader with alternative possibilities, translating to metaphor the alternatives the writer has himself considered. Superficially, the delay makes the decision — the climactic action — more thrilling; but essentially the delay makes the decision philosophically significant.”

As for Sol Stein, “Your job is to avoid rescuing the hero as long as possible. You leave him hanging.”

He then goes on to elaborate, “Suspense builds when the reader wants something to happen and it isn’t happening yet.”

“The writer’s duty is to set up something that cries for a resolution and then to act irresponsibly, to dance away from the reader’s problem, dealing with other things, prolonging and exacerbating the reader’s desperate need for resolution.”

“The emotions of the reader are affected by suspense more than by any other factor.”

“I cannot overemphasize the importance of architectural suspense.”

And more from Ayn Rand, “Closely allied with the issue of plot, as an attribute of it, is the issue of suspense. If you cannot put down a novel, or if you sit on the edge of your theater seat, that is your emotional reaction to the fact that the story has suspense.”

“In a suspenseful story, the events are constructed in such a manner that the reader has reason to wonder about the outcome.”

“If you want to hold your readers, give them something to worry about.”

E.M. Forster again, “The element of surprise or mystery — the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called — is of great importance the plot. It occurs through a suspension of the time-sequence; a mystery is a pocket in time, and it occurs crudely, as in ‘Why did the queen die?’ and more subtly in half-explained gestures and words, the true meaning of which only dawns pages ahead…. To appreciate a mystery, part of the mind must be left behind, brooding, while the other part goes marching on.”

Philip Gerard puts it this way, “Many books derive their suspense from the reader’s anticipation of convergence: the sense that all these disparate characters, scenes, and themes will come together in an interesting way later in the book. We assume there must be a logical connection — they are in the same book aren’t they?”

Who then wraps this up with, “Suspense is made up of a crucial question and the delay in answering that question.”

Happy writing.

© Wolfstuff