Getting to the good stuff: Act 2 Writing a suspense is all about the adventure, romance, suspense and disasters that happen in the middle of the novel. A great suspense should pick up speed as the hero/heroine launches into the second act. All the great stuff happens during the Guts phase – confronting fears, reaching out in the darkness for the girl’s hand, stealing a kiss, failing big, learning something new about yourself and summoning your courage. The overall concept is Make it Worse. At the start of every chapter, the character will have choices. He’ll contemplate these choices, weigh them against possible outcomes, consider his motivations and then move forward into the danger, during which something bad will happen he didn’t expect, and will cause him […]
Read the RestArchive | General Topics RSS feed for this section
Writing a Suspense: The basic elements
Over the past four months, we’ve been covering the basic elements of Act 1 of a Suspense. Before we take a little romance rabbit trail (for all your romantic/suspense novelists!) let’s review the basic Act 1 elements: The first act consists of the setup, or what I call: The Game: Players, the Goals, the Rules, Board/Playing field. G = Let us meet the Guys and Gals. Who are they? What makes them common/sympathetic? What makes them extraordinary? We’ll be talking in coming weeks about developing the romance of a romantic/suspense novel, also, but for now, there are a number of elements a suspense hero/heroine should have. If you took my plotting class, you’ll know I spend a lot of time on developing my characters, and making a […]
Read the RestThe Big Event…examples.
Yesterday, I said I would use some Big Events from popular books and movies… I changed my mind. I think it might be easier to explain if I applied the Big Event to my own work. That way we can see if I did it correctly. So, just to summarize…the Big Event must be: Believable, Compelling, Immediate, Terrifying. I’m going to use examples from my current suspense series…The Missions Of Mercy Series … Point of No Return An American boy and a warlord’s engaged daughter have disappeared-together-in an Eastern European border country. Only one man can find them in time to prevent an international meltdown-Chet Stryker. But Chet is taken aback when he realizes the boy is the nephew of Mae Lund, Chet’s former […]
Read the RestThe Big Event…make it personal!
The last two weeks we talked about the key to creating a suspense is the big EVENT that awaits the characters – either a positive or negative event that looms at the end of the story, one they either know about or don’t, but that has the effect of raising the tension as they draw closer (or are kept from it). Think about it – if we didn’t believe there would truly be an invasion of aliens, then we would have laughed our way through Independence Day. If we didn’t believe the Russians and the Americans could wage World War 3, then we would have never had the cold war (and the Hunt For Red October). If we didn’t believe that Buttercup might not marry Wesley, that Prince Humperdinck […]
Read the Rest
