How to rite Killer Fiction (16 page)

They decide to escape to Mexico. Do they make it?
No, and furthermore
their car breaks down and they go in search of one to steal.

Do they get that second car and make their getaway?
No, and furthermore
they take hostages and kill a cop. At every turn, they dig themselves in deeper and deeper, which means they must take more and more drastic action that will keep the plot boiling.

Yes, but the robbers aren't the heroes. How do the Four Outcomes affect Jeff Talley?

After losing the hostage in the prologue, all Talley wants is a quiet life without major responsibility. Does he get it?

No, and furthermore
, a store owner and one of his own cops are shot,
and furthermore
, he's about to be dragged back into a hostage negotiation situation,
and furthermore—

This is only chapter one. The stakes will ratchet up throughout the book, and the mechanism by which they ratchet is the Four Outcomes scenario.

And if you think that's the end of the "yes, but" and "no, and furthermore" outcomes in this book, you'll soon find out that
every scene in the book ends with one of the two plot-moving outcomes.
Even the ones that look like simple
noes
and
yesses
will turn out to have hidden
buts
and
further-mores
lurking inside.

Suspense Writing

One more reason why this story moves so quickly: the pace of the writing.

What does that mean?

It means, first and foremost, that the prose is spare. Crais gives us just exactly as much information as we need to understand this moment in time and nothing more. There are no "extras" here, no long descriptive passages or internal monologues. We do go inside people's heads from time to time, but for the most part, they think about what's happening
now,
not what happened in the past. To the extent that the past enters into their thoughts, it's for a few short paragraphs and it's directly related to something happening in the present.

One decision is quickly followed by consequences that lead to a second decision, new consequences, a third decision, etc. There isn't much time for contemplation between events; one event happens right on top of another like a twenty-car pile-up on the Santa Ana Freeway.

The dialogue is crisp, which means that people say exactly what they think in no more words than it takes to get the idea across. Everyone is businesslike, speaking to the point, which fits because there is much at stake and no time for small talk.

Paragraphs are short, sentences shorter. All these devices working together create a sense of urgency.

We have our hostage situation and our reluctant hostage negotiator. So what could make things worse at this point?

• The robbers discover that the house is equipped with a lot of cameras and monitors, which allow them to see what the cops are doing outside.

• Then they find the money. Lots and lots of money. We're on page 57; still well inside Arc One, and our plot has thickened into cement. They don't make any decisions about the money yet, but we readers have a pretty strong sense that this information changes things in ways we have yet to understand.

• Ten-year-old Thomas manages to whisper to his sister on page 60, "I know where Daddy has a gun." This is our first hint that the internal dynamics of the hostage crisis won't be Bambi vs. Godzilla after all; it seems Bambi has a trick up his sleeve.

• We meet a mobster named Sonny Benza and learn that Thomas's daddy is his
accountant.
All of Benza's financial records are in the house, which is pretty serious because Benza is a big-time crook whose records could send a lot of people, including him, to jail.

• He doesn't want to go to jail.

Benza's records are in Smith's house and Smith's house is surrounded by cops. Once the hostage situation is resolved, cops will swarm all over that house and Sonny's enterprises will see the unwelcome light of day. Benza can see only one solution: to "own" the cop in charge of the case.

That's Talley. And that's the end of Part One. It's also Plot Point One and the end of Arc One. Let's look at the escalation process. We go from robbery to shooting to hostage taking to cop killing in very short order, and then we switch gears from the hostage situation to organized crime trying to cover itself by targeting Talley.

He thinks
his biggest problem is holding on until other cops arrive to take over the hostage negotiation.
We know
his biggest problem is whatever Benza is going to do to "own" him. That's why suspense rests on the reader being two steps ahead of the character. We anticipate the trouble Talley doesn't even know is out there, and it heightens our emotional response to everything he does.

Alfred Hitchcock's famous story about the bomb under the table is relevant here. The great director said that the way to create suspense is to show a bomb under a card table and then show four men playing cards. The game could be the dullest thing imaginable, the dialogue could be flat, the scenery boring, but the audience is on the edge of their seats because they know what the card players don't:
there's a bomb under the table.
Every time someone shifts in his seat or gets up from the table, the audience wants to shout: "
Get out of there!"

By showing Benza making plans to "own" Talley, Crais has let the audience know there's a bomb under our hero.

He detonates it in Arc Two.

Arc Two_

P.G. Wodehouse, who in addition to his wonderful Jeeves books wrote musical comedies in the twenties, gave the following advice about what to do in the middle of your story. "Never," Sir Pelham advised, "let anyone sit down in the second act."

And if you think of a classic farce—whether it's a play by Moliere, a Bertie Wooster/Jeeves novel, or a Marx Brothers movie—you see at once how effective that advice is. Doors open and skimpily dressed blondes pop out just when the gimlet-eyed aunt is visiting. The maid is found in the closet with the constable from the village. The pompous banker mistakenly believes the chorus girl is an heiress and treats her accordingly— and then mistakes the real heiress for a gold-digging chorus girl. Complications are set in motion that will cause the second-act curtain to come down on a scene of hilarious confusion.

Think of suspense as farce without the laughs. Something must be happening to your hero at all times; even moments of seeming safety must be fraught with possible danger. Will the peace last? Can this old friend be trusted? Will the police act, or have they been corrupted by the evil opponent? Can we cross the border into Poland or will the customs officials spot our phony passports?

The Pendulum

The middle of a suspense novel is a swinging pendulum of emotion. The hero veers wildly between trust and distrust, safety and danger. In the classic movie
Suspicion,
the wife alternates between blind trust in her husband and suspicion that he married her for money. The pendulum swings against the husband when she learns things that lead her to believe he is trying to kill her. He continually assures her of his love, but every time she relaxes into a normal, loving relationship, something else happens to rouse her suspicion.

The middle of a fairy tale involves tasks and tests the hero must perform in order to win the princess. The tasks increase in danger and difficulty until finally the hero emerges triumphant over his older, stronger brothers. The same pattern exists in the suspense novel; the hero practices for the final confrontation by overcoming challenges from lesser opponents or by escaping from imprisonment. In some cases, the hero fails the early tests and appears to be on the verge of failing the final test as well. A certain amount of trial and error makes an interesting middle-book as your hero learns the skills he will need to confront the opponent in the end. And of course, a hero who has failed once or even twice creates a great deal of suspense as he goes for the third try. (Note the magic number three, a powerful number in fairy tales.)

Isolate Your Hero

One of the tests a suspense hero must deal with is the increasing isolation from his or her usual support system. This is a vital element in a good suspense novel. Your hero can't go to the police; they don't believe him when he complains he's being followed by a man who is never there when they come around to check on his complaint. Your hero's friends and lovers tell her she has to "get over it" and refuse to believe that she's been threatened by a man no one else has ever seen. The hero's isolation may begin earlier, but it is deepened to the point where she is wholly alone in the middlebook. One by one, her supports fail her. One by one, the social structures she has always depended on disappear or turn actively hostile. Why?

Think about it. First, our hero needs to grow up, to make a transition from one stage of life to another. She must be forced to fall back on her own inner resources when facing the ultimate challenge. If she has too much help, we won't believe in the transformation. Second, our hero is on a quest for the elixir, and we won't think she's earned it if she hasn't gone through hell. If she has too much help and support, it's not hell, it's purgatory at best; and that just doesn't cut it, elixir-wise.

The most important reason to strip away all your hero's old supports: if all the characters inside the book are lost to her, who's left?

Clap if you believe in fairies.

That's the ultimate reason why our hero must face these tests alone: because the one person left who believes in her isn't in the book at all. It's the reader, and the close identification with the hero you want your reader to feel can only come about if the hero is truly alone. Surround your hero with friends and you lose the intense identification that makes true suspense so compelling.

Dick Francis does this to perfection in
Nerve.
The premise of the book is that a young jockey, Rob Finn, is suspected of losing his nerve— and as a result, losing races. The first time he loses a race, he is publicly scolded by the horse's owner. As his luck worsens, the rumor that he's lost his nerve flies around the track. Other jockeys avoid him, and bettors and owners castigate him. Finally, he loses the confidence of the owner he's been riding for; his dream of being a winning jockey seems all but over. As if that weren't enough, he is called a coward by a television commentator and his failure is gloated over by his enemies.

Hitting Bottom

But Francis isn't finished taking his hero down the path to hell, because the real hell isn't what other people, however influential and important to Rob emotionally, think of him. Rob hits bottom the day he looks in the mirror and questions himself: Are they right? Have I really lost my nerve?

The isolation brought about by others turning on him leads to that moment, for if Rob had the confidence of even one friend, he might never stand before that mirror. And for us, the readers, to have the full experience of hitting bottom, of facing our inner demons, we need to be alone with Rob.

Rob decides that, no, he has not lost his nerve. He is the same rider he always was—which means that his trouble comes from without and has been engineered by someone else. He makes a conscious decision to find out who that person is and pay him back. This is the turning point of the novel—and it happens in the middle of the book.

Rift Within the Team

Stories that involve confrontations between two organized groups use Rift Within the Team as a middlebook suspense generator. Each team has an overarching goal: win the murder case, for example. The prosecution wants to convict, the defense to prove innocence. The district attorney answers to supervisors who may have very different ideas on how to conduct the case, creating Rifts Within the Prosecution Team. The defense lawyer may have an assistant who's really selling him out to the D.A. or a witness who's accepted a bribe to change her testimony. Rifts Within the Team allow conflict, suspense, mini-arcs, and mini-goals to take place before the big confrontation between the two teams.

One example of Rift Within the Two Teams can be found in Tom Clancy's
The Hunt for Red October.
There are two major focal points: Red Sub and U.S. Sub. They are in potential conflict, and
inside each sub
there is internal conflict. The Red Sub conflict is that its captain wants to defect to the U.S. and some of his men aren't in sympathy with that aim. The U.S. Sub conflict is that its captain believes the Red Sub captain and wants to help him defect, while most of his men think the Red Sub is out to destroy them.

Red Sub answers to Moscow; U.S. Sub to Washington, D.C., creating two lesser focal points. In Moscow and in D.C. there are internal conflicts as well. Four focal points = four places for internal conflict, and that's
on top of
the essential to-the-death conflict
between
the Reds and the U.S. forces.