Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop: Creating and Writing Suspense
Author of seven Margot O’Banion & Max Skull mysteries, Kit Sloane’s offbeat stories chronicle the intricacies of Hollywood filmmaking from the point of view of her protagonist, feature film editor Margot O’Banion and her significant other, director Max Skull. She was the first fiction editor of Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine from 1996-1998. A longtime member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and Mystery Women of the UK, Kit graduated from Mills College, Oakland CA with a degree in Art History and was named one of Mills College’s Literary Women for 2007.
My favorite comment about contemporary suspense comes from Alfred Hitchcock, the great film director. When Mr. Hitchcock was asked how he makes his movies so startling and scary, he replied: “It’s not the murder, you know. It’s the waiting for the murder.”
As thinking human beings, we prefer to be in control of life’s situations. We prefer to avoid catastrophe. We lock our car doors. We observe the traffic lights. We know better than to walk down dark alleyways alone. We use our heads. But we can’t control everything in our lives. Suspense is everywhere. It’s in the waiting for the punch line of a joke. It’s in waiting to hear the answer to “but then what happened?” when a friend is whispering juicy gossip to us. It’s in the air when we go to the mailbox-—will that letter be there today? Will I be accepted/rejected today?? Suspense is in our social makeup.
These feelings of not knowing what is going to happen next created the buzz words, “the suspense is killing me!”
The origin of the term suspense, from the latin verb suspendere, meaning to suspend, has nothing at all to do with mystery, per se. Suspendere simply means to hold something up physically, like suspenders, or as in chemistry where solids that haven’t dissolved are suspended in liquid.
Now in literature the terms mystery and suspense are joined at the hip. “Waiting for the murder,” we are suspended in the mystery story we’re reading—anxious, watchful and fearful, anticipating when the other shoe will drop. We are in suspense. We are waiting to see what will happen next. Even that old standby, “It was a dark and stormy night,” evokes suspense. Atmosphere counts!
But I believe it is the CHARACTERS in a story who create and provide most of the suspense we feel when reading about them. For, if we don’t care about the characters—if the characters are unreal or unappealing to us—we won’t care what happens to them. If we DON’T care about these people, there can be NO suspense.
In some books (and action films), there are attempts to create and sustain suspense at a consistently high level. I was once on a panel with three male thriller writers (don’t ask me what I was doing there!), but I managed to hold my own with the boys and even suggested that suspense has peaks and valleys, as in real life, where we don’t or can’t sustain incredible peaks of energy or emotion, constantly.
The author sitting next to me sniffed and said he created suspense at the highest level from beginning to end, period. I just thought how exhausting that must be, both for writer and reader. It turned out the guy was also an extreme sports enthusiast and I guess he needed that outpouring of adrenaline constantly but that is not my reading or writing style. To me, suspense, to be convincing, must be lifelike, something that the reader finds credible. Most of us do not live on the razor’s edge from day-to-day, and, for that, I thank the forces that be.
My female protagonist, Margot O’Banion, is a successful, shy and retiring film editor. How she reacts to disquieting events creates the suspense in my stories, along with some good, creepy descriptions. I put myself under Margot’s skin and anticipate how I would react to the problematic situations I place her in. Like us, Margot doesn’t seek out calamity. Unfortunate events come her way, just as they do to us in real life. We meet great characters. We meet troubled, troubling people. We find ourselves in problematic situations making cautious decisions.
So, it is my job, as writer, to make my readers CARE what happens to my protagonists, to want them to succeed, to breath a sigh of relief when and if they finally do. Because, like my characters, none of us ever know what’s going to happen next!
April 6, 2010
Posted in: Guest Blogs
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5 Responses
Kit is so right that good mystery and suspense is carried on the backs of Character; if you can create fully realized characters that readers can’t help but care about, then they will be willing to follow you anywhere. I loved Kit’s book for its characters and atmosphere. Enjoyed the tour and reminders here from Hitchcok to the tried and true advice from you, Kit. Thanks!
I could not agree more (or less, as my six year old says the phrase
with Kit’s definition of suspense. The ebb and flow must be exactly what the Master (Hitchcock) was talking about…we gear up waiting for what we just know…eek…is…coming. And as a reader of Kit’s series, I know that she utilizes delaying tactics to perfection, making her books all the more suspenseful as we are suspended in her world.
Despite what your male co-panelist said, Kit, most thrillers/suspense novels have lulls. I’ve often read reviews that described a book as having “non-stop, breathtaking suspense” only to discover it had many quiet moments when characters interacted one-to-one or the protagonist wrestled with inner demons (yet it was still suspenseful!). Creating compelling characters is absolutely the only way any writer can hold my attention. All the car chases and ticking bombs in the world won’t keep me reading if I’m not desperately concerned for the welfare of characters I love.
Hi, Kit, great post!
I do hope we get to run into each other one of these days.
Marilyn
While I believe in most of what you post, there are some items I would handle differently. But, I appreciate your being able to make clear a great deal of my feelings on the subject.
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