(This is the third installment of our series on bringing suspense into your writing. The series starts here.)
Novel-readers and movie audiences are not passive recipients in the storytelling process; as the movie or novel unfolds before them, they are constantly at work, piecing together clues, reading characters, weighing the relative importance of the various facts and events presented, and anticipating what is likely to happen next. Their minds are continually working, always trying to get one step ahead of the novelist or filmmaker.
And thank God for that, because this is how we frighten them.
Because no matter how terrible or horrific the events we might lay on the reader, no matter how bad we can make things for the protagonist, no matter how worst-case our over-the-top worst-case scenario could possibly be, we can always count on one thing:
The reader's imagination will come up with something even more awful.
Bless them. If we play our cards right, the audience will go out of its way to scare itself.
This is, of course, the essence of suspense. Set the story in motion, keep feeding them cues to get their minds running crazy, and watch them trip all over themselves in terror.
In the posts that follow, we'll focus on the following ideas and techniques:
- Shock, awe, and disturb: Creating a foretaste of the horror to come.
- Hobble the hero.
- Precursors to fear.
- Hitchcock and the guilty conscience.
- Who lives? Who dies?
- Oops! I forgot to mention the axe-murderer in the closet! Silly me!
- Sensory overload and the agitated camera.
- Narrative pacing and the rush of adrenaline.
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