These two photos illustrate the two basic styles of writing
I enjoy most. The first picture
exemplifies my all-time favorite—the second one stands for an approach I
occasionally throw into my stories to enliven the plot. Can you figure out the puzzles and guess the
two types of writing? Stay tuned, and
next time I’ll come clean!
Today I want to talk about several techniques I LOVE to use
when I write. The first one is called
TAPPING. New York best-selling author
Jodi Thomas was the person who explained this method of creating and building
suspense to me. Just touch or “tap”
something lightly in your story early on; later mention it again; the third
time you bring it up, do something with it, or your reader will be disappointed. For example, the maid is dusting her rich
employer’s desk. She opens a drawer to
put some pencils inside and notices a revolver. Chapters later, the wealthy man’s nephew is looking for paper in
his uncle’s desk, opens the same drawer, and sees the gun. By the time the third person catches a
glimpse of it, somebody needs to pick up the weapon and shoot a poor, innocent
victim with it. If not, the revolver
becomes a “red herring” or a misleading clue that goes nowhere and leaves the
reader feeling empty. But if something
DOES happen with it, your reader will find satisfaction in trying to figure out
beforehand why that detail keeps appearing.
Another thing I LOVE is dropping PLOT-HYPERS into my
novels. For example, a man goes to the
mailbox and retrieves a letter addressed to his wife, written in an obvious
male handwriting he doesn’t recognize from a city his wife visited several
months ago. Or a strange odor—the smell of seaweed—wafts through the
cabin in the forest where a young couple is playing chess. Or a dog that always barks when anyone
approaches a certain person’s front door does NOT bark, yet the visitor sees
him lying on the entrance floor. These
are called “plot-hypers” because they add an element of uncertainty and tension
to the story. We as authors can raise
our readers’ heart rates by sprinkling strange events such as these into our
novels, then leaving them unexplained until the end of the story.
Jodi Thomas informed me that one of the best movies she’d
ever seen was “The Sixth Sense” because of all the subtle clues the writer left
along the way that foretold the ending. However, most of us, when the shock was revealed, had to kick ourselves
for not picking up on the signs we’d been shown. Stories like this are the epitome of viewer (or reader)
satisfaction. If we hit our audience
with an ending that is a total surprise but doesn’t actually make sense, then
they’re upset with us. But if the ending
is totally cool, and we’ve given clues throughout the pages as to how it would
end—our readers just didn’t see them—then they’ll LOVE IT!
In one of my novels (I won’t say which one) I mention ever
so slightly that two young men’s voices are so similar, Person A hears one of
them speak and mistakes him for the other adolescent. But Person B doesn’t agree and dismisses Person A’s comment—most
likely the reader does too. However,
it’s a great clue, and if the reader notices it, he will immediately solve the
mystery.
It’s big fun to weave subtlety into a story. We mustn’t hit the reader over the head to
build suspense. We must simply create
uncertainty or drop unexplainable facts to raise the tension level.
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