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Welcome to Terry's Place. I'm an author of mystery and romance, happy to share what I'm learning, both about writing and anything I find interesting.
Showing posts with label Suspense. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Suspense. Show all posts
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Romantic Suspense or Romantic Mystery?
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Mystery or Suspense..or Romance?
What I'm reading: The Sentry, by Robert Crais
Often we see the two genres combined—it's not unusual to see "mystery/suspense" as a category. But they're not the same. According to the dictionary, suspense is a state of uncertainty, enjoyable tension, or anxiety. A mystery is something you cannot explain, or don't know anything about. It's easy to see how they overlap. But there are distinct differences.
Let's take a look at both:
In a mystery, the reader follows a step behind the detective/protagonist as he or she solves the crime. The reader doesn't know anything until the protagonist does. Normally, the crime has already happened, and the detective has to figure out who did it. Mysteries are puzzles.
Monday, September 05, 2011
Using Multiple POV Characters
I hope you're having a safe and happy Labor Day weekend. A reminder: Today's the last day to take advantage of my e-book giveaway.
And another reminder that I'm hosting a month-long discussion of characters at Coffee Time Romance. It's free, and you can drop in any time. And thinking about characters leads me to today's post.
When authors put a character on the page, they've made a decision as to whether or not it will be a POV character. In my opinion, if you're going to make a character a POV character, there needs to be a good reason for it.If the only reason you're adding a POV character is to show his thoughts, then you should probably re-think it and see if there's another way to get that information to the reader. We live in a single POV world. A POV character has to be critical for plot advancement, not author convenience.
In romance, it's a 'given' that there will be two POV protagonists: hero and heroine. There might be more, but there are always at least two.
Mysteries are another genre. Most mysteries I read feature some kind of crime-solving detective, and often, they're part of a series where the same character heads up the entire series.
And then there's suspense, which by nature, requires more than one POV character, because the reader needs to know more than the protagonist—hence, the suspense.
A recent read falls into the suspense category (the back cover calls it a thriller, but I disagree with the recent overuse of the term). As someone who definitely prefers to connect with characters, I tried to step back and examine why the book works for me.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Ramp up the Suspense
What I'm reading: Finger Lickin' Fifteen, by Janet Evanovich
On Saturday, I attended my first Florida Mystery Writers of America meeting, partly because they had a different venue which made it a 2 hour instead of a 3 hour drive, and partly because the speaker, Martha Powers, was going to discuss Suspense.
Although I'm still an avid fan of mystery, making the reader worried about what might happen next is always a worthwhile tool.
I will say I was heartened to hear her opening remarks where she differentiated between mystery and suspense, something I've gone into here several time before. But she also echoed my feeling that the term 'thriller' is being bandied around too freely by publishers as a marketing ploy. A thriller is a suspense, but a suspense is not necessarily a thriller. A thriller should be a suspense on a much larger scale.
Martha Powers doesn't think she writes thrillers. She calls them page-turners.
Her guide to ramping up the suspense:
Keep Reading...
The elements that make for great suspense:
Something major to fear
A memorable character
A time limit (the ticking clock on the bomb – she did bring up the memorable point. Why do the bomb builders put the countdown clocks on the outside?
Methods you can use to crank up the suspense include:
Narrowing the time. If something has to be done soon, it creates more tension than giving the character an extended time period to work with. They'll execute a hostage every ten minutes. They'll release the deadly gas in two hours unless their demands are met.
Let the reader anticipate a crisis. The reader has to know what will happen if the character fails. (As opposed to mystery, where the protagonist is solving the puzzle, but the crisis has already happened.)
Forestall revelation
Appeal to universal fears
Scare, release, and scare. You have to give the reader a chance to breathe, to think things are okay, and then you hit them with another crisis.
Prepare the reader and do the unexpected. Johnny Carson said, "If they buy the premise, they'll buy the bit." So, you have to sell the premise early on. You can't stop to explain a skill set at the height of the action. You have to show the character using those skills (or fears) early on, in a 'normal' setting. Is your character going to have to survive in the wilderness? We need to know he was always going camping as a child. Even in non-suspense, this is an important point. When my hero was stuck with a couple of kids, and he braided their dolls' hair, it was established that he used to show his pony at the fair, and he learned to braid way back then.
As for fears – we know Indiana Jones is afraid of snakes at the very beginning of the movie. So we can fear along with him when he looks into that snake pit later. (And because of that opening scene, we know to expect something with snakes, which adds to the tension.)
Narrow the focus. Make it personal as well as global.
To break the tension (as above, scare, release, scare)
Take time for character development
Use descriptions
Reveal information slowly
Use humorous anecdotes
All of the above need to happen before the climactic ending of the book, where you shouldn't have time to back off. That's not the time to stop and smell the roses.
The end of your book will sell the next one. To that end, it must be:
The strongest scene in the book
Surprising but reasonable (again, the reader has to accept the character has the skill set needed to avert the crisis—Mel Gibson showed in a bar bet he could get out of a strait jacket. Thus, when the bad guys put him in a strait jacket and throw him in the water, we know he has the skills to escape. Otherwise, we're not going to buy how convenient it is for him to be able to do that just when he needs to.)
Over quickly
Worth the worry
Satisfy the reader (which, as with everything else, is subjective, of course)
thanks to Martha Powers for a most informative (and, of course, funny, presentation)
On Saturday, I attended my first Florida Mystery Writers of America meeting, partly because they had a different venue which made it a 2 hour instead of a 3 hour drive, and partly because the speaker, Martha Powers, was going to discuss Suspense.
Although I'm still an avid fan of mystery, making the reader worried about what might happen next is always a worthwhile tool.
I will say I was heartened to hear her opening remarks where she differentiated between mystery and suspense, something I've gone into here several time before. But she also echoed my feeling that the term 'thriller' is being bandied around too freely by publishers as a marketing ploy. A thriller is a suspense, but a suspense is not necessarily a thriller. A thriller should be a suspense on a much larger scale.
Martha Powers doesn't think she writes thrillers. She calls them page-turners.
Her guide to ramping up the suspense:
Keep Reading...
The elements that make for great suspense:
Something major to fear
A memorable character
A time limit (the ticking clock on the bomb – she did bring up the memorable point. Why do the bomb builders put the countdown clocks on the outside?
Methods you can use to crank up the suspense include:
Narrowing the time. If something has to be done soon, it creates more tension than giving the character an extended time period to work with. They'll execute a hostage every ten minutes. They'll release the deadly gas in two hours unless their demands are met.
Let the reader anticipate a crisis. The reader has to know what will happen if the character fails. (As opposed to mystery, where the protagonist is solving the puzzle, but the crisis has already happened.)
Forestall revelation
Appeal to universal fears
Scare, release, and scare. You have to give the reader a chance to breathe, to think things are okay, and then you hit them with another crisis.
Prepare the reader and do the unexpected. Johnny Carson said, "If they buy the premise, they'll buy the bit." So, you have to sell the premise early on. You can't stop to explain a skill set at the height of the action. You have to show the character using those skills (or fears) early on, in a 'normal' setting. Is your character going to have to survive in the wilderness? We need to know he was always going camping as a child. Even in non-suspense, this is an important point. When my hero was stuck with a couple of kids, and he braided their dolls' hair, it was established that he used to show his pony at the fair, and he learned to braid way back then.
As for fears – we know Indiana Jones is afraid of snakes at the very beginning of the movie. So we can fear along with him when he looks into that snake pit later. (And because of that opening scene, we know to expect something with snakes, which adds to the tension.)
Narrow the focus. Make it personal as well as global.
To break the tension (as above, scare, release, scare)
Take time for character development
Use descriptions
Reveal information slowly
Use humorous anecdotes
All of the above need to happen before the climactic ending of the book, where you shouldn't have time to back off. That's not the time to stop and smell the roses.
The end of your book will sell the next one. To that end, it must be:
The strongest scene in the book
Surprising but reasonable (again, the reader has to accept the character has the skill set needed to avert the crisis—Mel Gibson showed in a bar bet he could get out of a strait jacket. Thus, when the bad guys put him in a strait jacket and throw him in the water, we know he has the skills to escape. Otherwise, we're not going to buy how convenient it is for him to be able to do that just when he needs to.)
Over quickly
Worth the worry
Satisfy the reader (which, as with everything else, is subjective, of course)
thanks to Martha Powers for a most informative (and, of course, funny, presentation)
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