Plot of the story 2
Certainty of threat.
The first basis of suspense is the foreknowledge that something bad is going to happen. The reader has to anticipate some event for there to be suspense associated with that event. A surprise bombing creates no suspense beforehand, but leads to suspense if it creates an expectation of future bombings. Often, in stories relying heavily on suspense, the reader will be given information that the characters don't have. The reader will be told that a character's car is wired to explode, and then will be given the time to think about the fact as the character walks through the parking garage.
Uncertainty of outcome. The author as evil bastard.
Suspense can be defused completely if the reader is convinced that the author is going to figure some way out for the characters in trouble. This why it is difficult to work up suspense over the fate of a character in any ongoing TV series. (How many times, for all the threats it endured on the show, was the Enterprise really in danger.) If you wish the reader to feel real suspense, you have to convince the reader that you, the writer, are an evil bastard that will, occasionally, follow through on your threats. This means allowing bad things to happen to good characters. If you let the car explode at least once, you let the reader know you could do it again.
Coincidence, Mystery and Surprise.
Coincidence shouldn't make things easier.
Sometimes you can get away with using an accidental confluence of events in a story, such as having otherwise unrelated characters be at the same place at the same time. You can get away with this in two cases. The first is when the fact of the coincidence is one of the initiating forces of the story. (The whole story is the consequence of this chance meeting in an airport.) The second is when the coincidence makes things worse for the protagonist. (The protagonist is trying to sneak out of the country, and the guy he bumps into is a reporter who recognizes his face.) Coincidences seem contrived and false when they're used to help the character. (The guy in the airport is an old college chum who's more than willing to loan our hero the two grand he needs for an airline ticket.) Remember, it's not a coincidence if it is a logical consequence of prior events in the story. (Our hero's at the airport because he has an old college chum who's an airline pilot.)
Lay groundwork for your revelations.
To paraphrase the last point, most events should be a logical consequence of prior events. Mysteries should not be mysterious once solved, and surprises should not be surprising in retrospect. The solution of mysterious events (as in a classic murder mystery) or the surprising revelation, should be— as much as possible— the result of the bringing together of already known information with some final crucial element that brings the whole into focus.
Never withhold information the reader should know.
Withholding information from the reader is annoying. The reader should always have the following information unless there is a overwhelming reason not to provide it; the identity of the point of view character, where that character is and what that character is doing, and all the relevant background information known to that character that is needed for the reader to understand who the character is, where the character is, and what the character is doing. Holding back these basic elements of information does not create surprise, mystery, or suspense. It creates confusion on the part of the reader, and annoyance when the reader realizes there wasn't a legitimate reason for the writer to be coy.
The payoff and the appearance of inevitability.
A problem resolved is a climatic event.
Whenever a major problem is resolved in some way, you have a climatic point in your story, a point of high tension and drama. When the problem is a major one, or the central one, the climax is comparably major. These events need to be given weight within the ************ comparable to the weight the characters give them. They need to be dealt with in fully developed scenes. There is nothing quite as dissatisfying as having a major problem in the story be dealt with off-screen.
The resolution should feel inevitable, even if it surprises.
This is the same point as "Lay groundwork for your revelations," only more so. The resolution of your story can be thought of the ultimate surprise, the revelation of the central mystery. Even more than the smaller mysteries and surprises, the primary resolution of your story should be the logical coming together of facts and events known to the reader. Inevitability comes, like suspense, from foreknowledge.
Don't dangle threads without dealing with them.
Lastly, when you raise a question or a problem in a story, do so with the intention of eventually dealing with it before the end of a story. Dealing with it can be as simple as an acknowledgment that the problem isn't going to be solved within the space of the story, but the acknowledgment needs to be there or the reader will feel as if the writer simply forgot about it.
A four step exercise in Plot development:
1) Create a character.
2) Give this character a problem to deal with.
3) Imagine at least three different ways this particular character might possibly deal with this particular problem.
4) Pick one (or more) of these options, and imagine at least three different ways it a) wouldn't work, and b) would make the character's situation worse. (Short of killing off the protagonist and ending the story.)
By doing this, you have evolved from a character dealing with a problem, to a character dealing with a worse problem that's directly and causally linked to the first. This is all plotting is; the evolution of the character's difficulties, through the story, until a resolution is reached
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16-10-2007, 11:31
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