Make A Scene (18 page)

The prologue of
The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi,
by Jacqueline Park, works because the entire narrative is a first-person account—essentially a series of letters to the protagonist's son—and the reader needs to know this information before the narrative begins.

In
Windfalls,
by Jean Hegland, the prologue works because the novel is a very literary, character-driven novel in which the major conflicts and crises don't happen immediately to the protagonists. But the prologue is full of strange, lyrical, odd images that invoke a sense of danger or tragedy, which remains in the undercurrent of the reading and leaves a sense of worry about what's going to happen to the characters.

If you want to learn how to write a strong prologue, study the novels of Jodi Picoult, particularly
The Tenth Circle.
Picoult has a unique way of framing a piece of plot information in a way that makes you curious and breathless and urgent. I wouldn't say that her books
need
prologues so much as she has just mastered the art of writing them.

FIRST SCENE MUSE POINTS
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• Introduce your protagonist and the significant situation simultaneously.

• Match your pace to the emotional content of the scene.

• Use thematic images to foreshadow an outcome. If your protagonist's life is in danger, set an eerie mood, and use setting objects that conjure up images of death or darkness—a knife, a raven, even a shift in light from bright to dark.

• Unbalance the reader's expectations through setting by employing what is not expected, such as featuring a monastery as the site of a violent crime, or a prison as the setting of a surprising revelation of innocence.

• Keep a tight pace—notice if you are using too much exposition or description that drags the pace down; and watch for lengthy, unbroken passages of dialogue or actions that push the pace too quickly.

• End with your protagonist in trouble or with an uncertain fate, setting up the next scene.

Suspense, at its most primal, is a state of uncertainty that produces anxiety. In fiction, no matter whether the condition creating the suspense is positive or negative—Will she say yes to the handsome rogue's proposal? Will he be flung off the cliff?—it tends to have the same effect on the reader: the heart races, nerves are tight, and an aura of apprehension hangs over the scene. This is a good thing. The way to get the reader to white-knuckle her way through a suspense scene is by delaying the inevitable outcome of the trouble your characters are in.

Suspense scenes can be found in almost every genre of fiction, though mysteries and thrillers capitalize on these scenes more than romance or literary novels. For a scene to qualify as suspenseful:

• The protagonist must begin in jeopardy or quickly get caught in the middle of trouble or danger

• The emotional, physical, or spiritual stakes for the character must become more complicated during the scene

• The emotional intensity must increase for the protagonist, and must not let up until the end

• The events of the scene, or fellow characters, must exert pressure on the protagonist to change or act in some way

Use suspense scenes to add emotional voltage to your narrative, to up the emotional ante for your protagonist, and to add complications to your plot that will require new solutions (half the fun of reading is following a protagonist as he gets into and out of and then back into trouble again). A good place for suspense scenes is after a contemplative scene or a dialogue-driven scene whose main purpose is to provide plot information; in those instances a suspense scene will get the reader excited again, and provide your protagonist with new challenges. Suspense scenes also have a feeling of pressing urgently forward, so consider using them before an epiphany scene, because they'll help drive your characters toward big conclusions and realizations.

Pacing obviously plays a large role in the success or failure of a sus-penseful scene. When building to painful realizations or inevitable outcomes, it's good to slow down the pace by focusing on small details in a scene or by using a few well-placed lines of exposition or interior monologue. Part of what creates suspense is the agony of not knowing what is going to happen next. Of course, a fast-paced scene can often add that much-needed surge of adrenaline that propels the reader forward. Generally, though, suspense is built upon slow and carefully measured action that builds and holds tension.

Suspense can get lost if you try to rush into it. Think of how nerve-racking it is to watch a ghost-story type movie in which a character is walking slowly down a darkened hall toward a room where he has heard a noise. If he runs down that hall, there's no time for suspense. But by walking slowly and fearfully, he allows the viewers to feel his anxiety. The same technique works to build suspense in your narrative—the more time the reader has to feel nervous, the more effective the scene will be.

OPENING A SUSPENSE SCENE

Suspense scenes should open in a way that gives the reader immediate concern for the protagonist. While your protagonist doesn't need to be dangling from scaffolding just yet, he might be starting the climb. Or you can create a more subtle uneasiness—the protagonist can simply feel that something is not quite right about the unusual silence or overly bright lights of a house or building. In a suspense scene, you want to give the reader an
uh-oh
feeling, a sense of trouble, which should begin to mount and reach a crescendo of pressure toward the end.

Let's look at a suspense scene from Paul Auster's novel
The Book of Illusions.
Though his novel is literary, he works in suspense masterfully. David Zimmer, a translator who is still trying to recover from the loss of his wife and two sons in a plane crash over a year before, has just arrived home after a harrowing drive and a minor accident in the rain. The significant situation of the plot was a letter he received, inviting him to meet Hector Mann, the elusive silent-screen comedian thought to be dead, about whom David wrote a book. David is not convinced of the veracity of the letter, and has written back demanding proof that Mann is actually alive. His proof shows up in the form of a mysterious woman, Alma Grund, sent to fetch him back to New Mexico. Notice how the scene begins fairly benignly, but causes a prickle of anxiety:

We found the keys with her flashlight and when I opened the door and stepped into the house, I flicked on the lights in the living room. Alma Gr-und came in after me—a short woman in her mid- to late thirties, dressed in a blue silk blouse and tailored gray pants.

The fact that the strange woman comes in after him is cause for concern. The scene takes on more suspense when, within a couple of paragraphs, David begins to act irrationally though Alma has done nothing threatening. (Aus-ter does not use quotation marks in his dialogue, so I have added them for clarity's sake):

"Just give me five minutes," she said. "I can explain everything."

"I don't like it when people trespass on my property," I said, "And I don't like it when people jump out at me in the middle of the night. You don't want me to have to throw you out of here, do you?"

She looked up at me then, surprised by my vehemence, frightened by the undertow of rage in my voice. "I thought you wanted to see Hector," she said and as she spoke those words she took a few more steps into the house, removing herself from the vicinity of the door in case I was planning to carry out my threat.

Here's the brilliant moment of this scene: the protagonist, David, starts out as the aggressor—the reader isn't afraid
for
him, but afraid he's going to do harm to this poor woman. But subtly, with a slight shift, Auster turns the tables when Alma "took a few more steps into the house." Those few steps are full of suspense. What does she want? Why isn't she afraid of him? Suddenly, Alma has taken the power. And the suspense has only just begun. David still isn't afraid, but the readers is, and rightfully so, for when David comes back downstairs from his bath and finds that Alma is still in his house, after trying unsuccessfully to convince him with words, she takes desperate action:

The gun was in her hand. It was a small silver-plated revolver with a pearl handle, no more than half the size of the cap guns I had played with as a boy. As she turned in my direction and lifted her arm, I could see that the hand at the end of her arm was shaking.

"This isn't me," she said. "I don't do things like this. Ask me to put it away, and I will. But we have to go now."

To build suspense, you don't need to throw in a gun or a physical altercation, though those will work. Suspense can be created by shifting the power back and forth between characters, letting the reader wonder if your protagonist is going to grab the ancient treasure out of the enemy's hands, or if he's going to fall into the burning pit of magma.

David later wrests the gun out of Alma's hands and shocks them both by putting it to his own head, jacking up the emotional intensity—the stakes— more and more until David finally pulls the trigger.

To create suspense at the beginning of a scene you can:

• Introduce a catalyst or antagonist whose intentions seem suspect to the protagonist.
David, and consequently the reader, does not trust Alma from the very start because of the manner of her arrival—sud-denly, without notice, and in the middle of the night.

• Allow your protagonist to feel threatened or pressured by another character or event, and to resist the ensuing demand or request.

David is tired, wet, upset, and just wants a bath. Alma's presence and her demand that he fly to New Mexico with her puts pressure on him—his family died in a plane crash, remember, and he's emotionally unstable.

• Allow your protagonist, under pressure, to react or act out in a way that causes unexpected conflict.
David becomes emotionally volatile with Alma. If he had just let her talk in the first place, it's likely she would not have used the gun.

Remember that suspense is about
delay.
The longer the anxiety-producing event goes on, and the more pressure you can put on your character in the scene, the more suspense you'll build.

MOOD, SETTING, AND SENSORY DETAILS

The mood you create also has a large impact on suspense. Mood, of course, is conveyed through the physical conditions, such as setting and weather, that your protagonist finds herself in. In Auster's suspense scene, he zooms the focus down onto the landscape of the characters' bodies—to the exclusion of the physical world around them—which keeps the reader's attention uncomfortably planted where the action is, in the distance between David and Alma.

Other authors very purposefully use the senses to create a suspenseful mood, as in this example from Harper Lee's novel
To Kill a Mockingbird.
At-ticus Finch's two young children, Jem and Scout, are walking home alone after a play on a very dark night, without a flashlight. What informs this scene is that their father, an attorney involved in a heated, racially divided court case in town, has developed some eager enemies. As they walk, the children hear what sounds like a person following them. At first Jem tries to convince Scout that it's nothing, but soon it becomes clear he's scared, too.

"Be quiet," he said, and I knew he was not joking.

The night was still. I could hear his breath coming easily beside me. Occasionally there was a sudden breeze that hit my bare legs, but it was all that remained of a promised windy night. This was the stillness before a thunderstorm. We listened.

"Heard an old dog just then," I said. "It's not that," Jem answered.

Notice how the simple use of the sensory details that come after Jem warns his sister to "be quiet" add up to a feeling that trouble is brewing, and build the suspense. The "sudden breeze" on Scout's bare legs. Her brother's breath coming "easily" beside her, and that eerie "stillness" before the storm allow the reader to enter right into the suspenseful moment. Sure enough, trouble comes soon after, in the form of a man intent on harming the children to send a message to Atticus.

Sensory details are tailor-made for suspense, because they lend themselves to metaphor and mood well, and through them, you can affect the reader's senses; sensory details help bring authenticity to the scene. A terrible odor, or the creepy slickness of a dank cellar, can turn an otherwise normal scene into a suspenseful one.