 Action/Adventure: August 10, 2005 Issue [#501] |
  Action/Adventure
This week: Edited by: Vivian  
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As a guest editor for the Action Adventure, I thought I’d write about the need for certain components which build, add, and/or continue the suspense needed to keep the reader’s attention. What good is writing anything if the reader is lost?
Welcome to the world of Vivian Gilbert Zabel and her ideas for Action and Adventure.
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Suspense
The first place to build suspense needed in any writing is the first few sentences. According to Bill Reynolds, The Writer, August 2005, page 7, “A proper opening picks the reader up by his collar and throws him into the story.”
The art of suspense means giving the reader something to worry about. In Latin suspendere means to hang, thus suspense, which avoids boredom and losing readers. The reader is compelled to turn pages, the cure for boredom.
Suspense (uncertainly, doubt, anxiety) is a must for all fiction. It should start from the very beginning of a story or novel, should be built into the premise and structure of any fiction writings.
According to William G. Tapply, The Writer, August 2005, the essential elements for suspense are as follows:
1. State story’s plot as a question (not in the story itself), one that can be answered yes or no. Make a list of all the possible reasons why the answer could be “no.” Those “no” answers become the focus of problems and obstacles - suspense.
2. Create a likable and competent - but flawed - protagonist. (Protagonist = hero, good guy/gal)
If the reader doesn’t care about the protagonist, then suspense is meaningless. The flaw or flaws will help create needed suspense because the outcome will be in doubt.
3. Give the protagonist a powerful motivation. He/she must have strong desires, needs, wants. The basic and powerful human needs and drives are essential: Love, ambition, greed, survival are examples. Something vitally important must be at stake or readers can’t believe the protagonist would never abandon the quest.
4. Give your protagonist highly motivated antagonists (opponents, villains). “All stories need strong villains. Suspense rests on the possibility – even the likelihood – that the villain will defeat the hero.”
5. Keep raising the stakes and creating disasters. The formula for building suspense is a bad start that gets worse. Suspense is about problems and obstacles, disasters and failures, small triumphs and big reversals. As Tapply says, “Never make things easy for your protagonist.”
6. Choose your story’s point of view to maximize suspense. The objective POV allows the attention of the reader to shift from character to character. We, as readers, are allowed to interpret and imagine, to wonder and worry. We are drawn into the story by the changing of point of views from one character to another. The single POV limits only to one character’s experiences and thoughts. Anything else is speculation, imagination, and worry.
7. Wind up the ticking clock. Tapply’s words express this point best.
Suspense depends on urgency. Build a zero hour into your story’s arc:
Antagonists of all kinds – kidnappers, terrorists and assassins, of course
but also teachers and parents and editors, not to mention tides and storms
and seasons – create time pressures and constraints.
Your story’s momentum might build gradually at first, but soon it
becomes a race against the clock, and it accelerates as it rushes towards
its fateful climax.
The result of the use of suspense in any action/adventure story becomes a riveting story that the reader cannot put down until finished.
I hope I followed these ideas for developing suspense in my story but only a reader can really answer that question.
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Feedback
Since I'm just a guest editor, I haven't any feedback to share. However, if anyone sends any about this issue, I'll save it for a time when I guest-edit again.
Until the next time we meet in this newsletter, or until you visit me in the poetry one, I hope you find a way to have adventures in your life and writing -- and add suspense.
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