When working on a mystery, what guides your decisions on allowing your characters to figure out answers? Do you have them figure out one clue just to present them with another?
Suspense occurs when an urgent matter remains unresolved. Four things can maintain suspense and reader engagement:
- Keep the matter urgent;
- Maintain progress;
- Keep key issues unresolved;
- Surprise the reader.
There's a lot you can do to juggle these. For example:
You can keep the matter urgent by either raising stakes, introducing new threats, limiting options (to just the dangerous ones), lighting a fuse and limiting time.
You can maintain progress by revealing information, dealing with new threats, opening new options (usually at some cost), or buying time (likewise, at some cost).
You can keep issues unresolved by the use of red herrings, introducing new threats, revealing new obstacles, or jumping locations to another through-line (e.g. while character 1 is trying to find the bomb-maker, character 2 is trying to find the bomb).
Surprising the reader just means doing the opposite of what is expected. E.g. if the reader expects to see a body, hide it. If it's meant to be a safe place, make it dangerous. If the hero needs a friend, introduce an enemy. Kill someone critical to the story. Give small actions big consequences. Make the consequences of failure worse than the reader expects. Have the characters take risks the reader didn't anticipate.
Which of these techniques to use when? My suggestion is to build a up a plot outline incrementally like this, and adding techniques in the following order:
- Design the adversaries and their major character arcs;
- Design the heroes and their major character arcs;
- Design key stakeholders and their relationships with the major players, and their stakes with key events; identify possible friends, foes and fence-sitters;
- Give the adversaries a clear plan, broken into steps;
- Add possible stakeholder reactions;
- Set the heroes in motion, and pick elements from the adversaries' plan that will cause the most interesting, worsening problems;
- Add reactions from stakeholder foes/fence-sitters to confuse/complicate the issue, introduce new threats and increase stakes; ensure that the adversaries react to the heroes' actions too;
- Ensure that your story either limits the heroes' options to the worst possible choice, or lights a fuse as it heads toward crisis;
- Add the assistance of friends when you think that the drama needs respite, or the heroes need assistance or reflection;
- Find places where you could split the action to add to the suspense, and split it;
- Find critical points in the story where you can surprise the reader, and introduce those surprises;
- Resolve the story, then review to see whether all character arcs are ended, all outstanding questions are resolved, everyone who is introduced to the story also exits the story, and whether there are long periods of rising tension and growing climaxes, with brief periods of respite between.
I'd suggest writing a plot outline at one line per significant action or decision for each major character (heroes and adversaries).
In location, facing situation and seeking goal, major-character attempts activity, but trouble intervenes, resulting in outcome.
Or:
In location, major-character faces a dilemma: choice1 with cost1, or choice2 with cost2? Major-character resolves to pursue choicex.
With one hero and one adversary, if your final manuscript contains 75 scenes say, then you'll probably have a 100-150 line plot outline. With more scenes or more major characters it might be longer.
From the plot outline you can produce a scene outline by just ticking the lines that contain a viewpoint character. Or make two columns: one for on-camera and one for off-camera. Any event lacking a viewpoint character happens 'off-camera'.
If you want the heroes to discover clues about the off-camera action then you can list any clues found under each scene, and mention what off-camera event they come from (e.g. by numbering those events).
From there you should be able to write a story scene-by-scene in which all the character arcs develop as you want them to, all the clues make sense, it has rising tension and suspense at the proper moments. In other words, you shouldn't have to do heavy redesign on your first draft unless you introduced some sort of logic-hole along the way.
I've used this method and it works pretty well as long as you have good characters, strong arcs and a good knowledge of setting. If your characters are weak then lack of motive and passion can lead to weak plotting and low tension. If their arcs are murky then the plotting can waver around and lose direction. If your setting research is weak then you can get bogged down finding the right location for each scene.
Hope it helps.
I tend to give it all away as I figure it out (no, I'm not an outliner). Mostly because I can't keep a secret.
