Unlocking the Mystery of Suspense: A Discussion by Three Writers Overheard
By K. Allen McNamara
Suspense. That thing that keeps you reading, sitting on the edge of your seat, unsure of what comes next, of wanting to know, or maybe not wanting to know. How do writers do it? How do they craft novels of suspense? What is the magic?
The Boston Book Festival’s session entitled: Keep Us in Suspense and featuring: Malin Persson Giolito, Dennis Lehane, and Peter Swanson with Amy MacKinnon as moderator sought to shed some light on the art of suspense. The authors and moderator took their director style seats on the stage and began a relaxed and engaging round table. What follows are from my detailed notes on this discussion overheard.
Moderator, Amy MacKinnon, author of Tethered and an essayist, effectively and efficiently guided these three authors with a series of questions which dealt with setting, writing, and genre fiction known or labeled as suspense. Individually and collectively, they also swatted at the old debate of genre fiction vs literary fiction, took on the question of which came first: plot or character and shared some insight into their own writing methods or choice of subject matter/theme.
All three of the authors recently wrote books which centered around the loss of space or rather the freedom to walk with ease in the external world. They shared brief sound bites about their novels and the issue of space.
Malin Persson Giolito: Quicksand, deals with a student who is involved in a schoolyard shooting and her subsequent loss of the external world due to incarceration.
Dennis Lehane: Since We Fell, focuses on the loss of the external world by a prominent reporter who suffers a an on air breakdown and no longer trusts herself to navigate the outside world because she no longer trusts herself.
Peter Swanson’s: Her Every Fear delves into the anxiety and dread a young woman experiences trying to face her fears of the outside world when suddenly she can no longer feel safe in her home.
Clearly these novels of suspense hinge on the sense of space and comfort or confinement each character experiences when her space is limited. Additionally, all three feature female protagonists who are all of comfortable means.
Lehane took the most direct method of confronting the label of genre fiction. He presented that ALL fiction is predicated upon suspense. Without the element of suspense - of not knowing but only of thinking what might happen - this keeps the reader reading. Swanson and Persson Giolito agreed that without suspense there is no fiction, because there is not a reason to keep reading.
To paraphrase Lehane, just as there are different levels of literary fiction so too there are different levels of suspense fiction. Some are like amusement park rides - fun to do because you’re at the on vacation or traveling and you just need something to read and entertain you. And who doesn’t enjoy a good amusement park ride? Other suspense/thriller novels make you think and pull you in a deeper way than the amusement ride one did. These ones get you thinking and flipping over the events of the book as you go about your day and you are eager to get back to that world of the book the way you are eager to see the end of a good movie or play or hear the whole song through until its end.
MacKinnon deftly guided the group back to her questions knowing all too well perhaps that this genre labeling is an ongoing debate. She asked all three: what and where did they draw their inspiration from to produce these works?
Lehane: This is his 12th book and as he usually does he decided he would pay homage to Hitchcock this time with a protagonist who suffers from agoraphobia and when she finally is brave enough to venture outside again thinks she sees something that becomes hard to dismiss - a case of Vertigo? Did his protagonist really see what she thought she saw? The theme of is being isolated from the larger world. It is set during the Haitian earthquake which is when his protagonist (Lehane’s first female protagonist it should be noted and his first protagonist who is a person of privilege) has her breakdown while reporting on the devastation. Lehane noted, Marx was the one who pointed out that the more disassociated we become the smaller we begin to feel. His novel takes the universal and attempts to make it personal - the devastation of a natural disaster is the backdrop to the possible loss of a sustaining relationship for his protagonist. Ultimately this novel, as all of his novels do, came down to the creating character.
Persson Giolito sees her work (while she is in the writing process) as a jigsaw puzzle that she is trying to put together upside down and only when she has finished and flipped it over does she realize what the novel is about. Quicksand is Persson Giolito’s first written novel in English; she has written several others in Swedish and she was practicing lawyer in Sweden for several years prior to writing. This novel centers on a high school girl who has lost control over her world and is trapped, or in this case jailed. Persson Giolito said the one thing good thing she did do with the plot of her novel was to confine her protagonist. By confining her character, she limited her character from being caught up in the minutia of social media and search engines etc…
Swanson said his plot is in homage to Rosemary’s Baby. The setting is a large apartment and his protagonist is essentially caught in an apartment swap gone bad. Given that she is already afraid of the outside world, when her inside world becomes unsafe, it becomes a question for his protagonist of: where else can she be and be safe? She is caught like a deer in headlights.
Here MacKinnon interjected and said that one thing that struck her about Swanson’s Her Every Fear was that his character admittedly states she is always living in the next moment. She (protagonist) is always seeing the worst and the next moment is always, always worst than the present moment therefore she’s never at peace. Swanson concurred and stated this is why he believes for him it is creating the character beyond his one loosely based plot concept of an apartment swap gone bad that propelled this work and in truth, drives all his works.
As all three emphasized crafting character as the driving force behind their work. And the conversation shifted toward the kinds of characters they write about and how they write. In Swanson’s novel the protagonist is a very anxious. Anxiety, managing anxiety, and dealing with anxiety are issues Swanson feels he is strongly drawn to and are to a degree personal for him.
Lehane said that he largely doesn’t have a method when it come to writing. He reiterated that it is all about the character and where the character goes within the story. Further, he said all books should be dramatic and compelling. Consider the Maltese Falcon (spoiler) it’s not really about the Maltese Falcon; it’s about the need for the falcon not the want of the falcon.
All cautioned against plotting to far out when writing the first draft. If you plot too far out then you wind up sticking to something that is no longer true to what your character and plot have become and it feels added in or tacked on to the novel when you insert this plot point simply because you planned it. This is jarring for the reader.
Swanson stated that one thing to remember when writing is that for your character this is JUST A MOMENT in their lifetime so you have to surprise your character with this moment. Surprise the character then you’ll surprise the reader.
Persson Giolito said that in Quicksand she set the novel in a high school, a jail cell, and a courtroom. She considers that the courtroom is the theatre by definition this is the theatre where we as a society set out to solve the criminal conflict. It is where the dramatic action gets resolved.
MacKinnon used this segue of settings by Persson Giolito to ask Swanson why he ventured to London for Her Worst Fear. A self-admitted Anglophile and a lover of London coupled with the fact that his works do well in the British market made him think why not a Boston-London apartment swap gone bad? So he went with it.
Lehane’s settings, of course, are largely based in Boston. Sometimes in a made up neighborhood as in Mystic River or the Boston Harbor Islands (Shutter Island) and the North End in The Given Day. Since We Fell is set in the Back Bay. He maintains that each of his novels has been a love letter more or less to a particular place or a neighborhood. He has also set novels in Florida where he went to college. Lehane stated that he cannot do cookie cutter novels which is why he wrote Shutter Island, admittedly a Gothic tale, while The Given Day is in essence a historical novel. For him the excitement of writing a different type of suspense tale makes it a challenge.
MacKinnon asked them to again consider the plot of their novels - how much did they know when they started writing them?
Lehane: stated he always knows nothing - that he’s just not smart enough in the first draft to see what his novel is about.
Swanson: In the first draft I’m telling myself the story and it is only in the revision that he sees how the novel is organized.
Persson Giolito: She pretends to know. She writes the last chapter first but largely by the time she gets to the end she needs to rewrite it because the story has morphed and the last chapter needs to be tweaked. She spoke of how she puts sticky notes up on the wall in her office which is also her guest bedroom and when one of her children asked if she were worried about their guests figuring out her story - she said she wished they would so they could explain it to her!
The conversation then zigzagged into insights about human nature through the confluence of character and history.
Lehane: Not shy about current events stated with a laugh that one can’t make up what is happening in the world today. Life truly is stranger than fiction, which is why when he gets asked why he doesn’t write about nice people his answer is simply there aren’t any. And yes his books have sex in them because there is sex in real life in even in those states that want to pretend there is not. (more laughter)
Swanson: his novels tend to be apolitical - Hitchcock-like in that the reader is aware of the time period and the influences of the political that are occurring but he tends to focus on the fact that psychotics walk among us daily as surgeons, CEOs, politicians…and most of these are held largely in check.
Persson Giolito: as an author you are not a realist trying to understand Real Life. Even if something you write can seem real - it doesn’t mean that it is and Real Life will always beat your ‘fictional’ real life.
MacKinnon did ask Lehane to address what was easier to write - novels or screenplays. (Persson Giolito's Quicksand has been optioned as a movie.) Screenplays was the answer. Because as he explained it: as a writer he needs to always paint the scene, set the stage as it were for the reader. But as the novel writer he must do so in a way that the reader can see the room the character is walking into. For example: If the setting is the Park Plaza ballroom in the 1920s in the evening he has to write a paragraph or two at least to get the reader there with him and the character in the ballroom and to do so without boring the reader; however in a screenplay these paragraphs get reduced to: 1920s ballroom-Park Plaza Hotel-evening. The rest is filled in by the set designer who has to get it historically correct.
The final question: What do they read and are they able to turn off the writer in their head when they do read?
Swanson: it takes him longer to get into a book but once he does then he is 10 years old again and getting carried away. He reads both fiction and nonfiction.
Lehane: Mostly newspapers and non-fiction because that is what lets him turn off and escape. He still gets starry eyed over movies but with fiction far less so. Loss of fiction reading is for him an occupational hazard.
Persson Giolito: reads differently now that she writes but she still able to get caught up and swept away and the walls still dissolve and she finds herself no longer in a closet but the woods.
The roundtable ended all too soon with a few questions from the audience and the session was followed quickly by an author book signing. People rose hesitantly from their seats and made their way to the door like guests at a dinner party who didn’t want to leave because the conversation had been so charming, witty and intimate.
So how do they do it? What is the magic wand they use or the pixie dust they scatter to conjure up novels that keep us in suspense? It would seem that suspense is really Schrödinger's cat theory played out across a novel's pages - you won't know if the cat is alive or dead unless you open the box. Or perhaps, suspense is a culmination of elements: character, setting and plot that fall into alignment and render a perfect storm that you as reader just need to ride out.
