The last few 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).
So far, the Big Event needs to be Believable, Compelling, Immediate…and now Terrifying.
See, we need to believe that his horrible Big Event will be…horrible. This is different from believing it can happen. It’s answering the questions — so what? If it happens, how does it affect me?
You make it terrifying by looking at two different perspectives – personal and public fears.
Personal fears are all about losing someone we love – a family member – a wife, child, something we all fear. In Bird on a Wire, the fear is that they won’t get to live happily ever after, that their one true love will die. In the Princess Bride, true love is at stake. (clearly, that is a common theme!)
Public fear is about how devastating the event is, and who is affected. (And if you can throw in someone in the personal circle, that increases the effect). For example, in Dante’s Peak, the grandmother is burned to death (basically) and now we know how horrible it would be for someone – anyone to die this way.
In one of my favorite suspense, Air Force One, Glenn Close explains the terror when she says, “if we give into this threat, we’ll have terrorists crawling out of the woodwork.”
The reader needs to understand why this threat is scary, and that if this Big Event happens, the world as we know it will be threatened. An author can do this in a few ways:
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Have the effect of this threat shown at the beginning of the book. (going back to making it believable…show the results of this event.)
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Have the effect of this threat shown along the way, early in act 2, so that the hero/heroine understand the significance, through a personal taste of this event/effect or through viewing it through the lens of others.
Threaten the children, take out a government, kill a granny, give an entire town a contagious disease, and then wipe it out. Make dinosaurs eat people…whatever you have to do to convince your reader that really…they don’t want this to happen.
Tomorrow, I’ll be looking at some popular suspense movies to dissect the Big Event for all the essential elements.
See you then!
Susie May
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