Category Archives: -Phil Rosette

Plot, Plot, Plotting Along

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An architect needs a solid plot of land to build his house. Only a plot can render a view. All of the detailed plans and beautiful drawings are just pretty pictures without it. The same can be said about all fiction. No matter how well rounded and sympathetic – or just plain pathetic – the characters are, if the story isn’t built on solid ground, it won’t stand upright when finished.

Any story can carry tension, from a school girl’s pimple on a first date to a megalomaniac’s rise to infamy. What makes any fiction interesting is how events unfold, how the heroes conquer any obstacle thrown in their way. That’s called a Plot. Let’s build a simple suspense plot that anyone can relate to.

Our protagonists, Auggie and Clair Knight, have been filing taxes on time and more-or-less correctly all 15 years of their marriage. Our story is about the Knight’s audit.

We’ll use Gustav Freytag’s Narrative Structure and his five parts to a plot to construct our story. They are:

Exposition
Rising Action
Climax
Falling Action
Denouement

In the Exposition, we draw out the motivations and goals of our protagonists. We learn the Knights are just barely getting by on Auggie’s day job as a security guard at the marina. We get a sense of what might happen if he lost his steady income, or the home’s septic system backed up again. Exposition rounds out the main characters and gives rise to the inciting incident, that one event in the story that throws down the challenge.

In our story, the Rising Action begins when the Knights get an audit notice in the mail. Tension is introduced when Auggie can’t find some of the receipts the IRS has asked him to produce. More tension comes when Clair, an accounting grad who’s done their taxes all these years, reminds him that they’ve never reported his moonlighting income from helping friends sell boats on eBay. Some years, that amounted to $4,000 of extra, undeclared income.

The length of your piece gets determined right here. If you want a longer story, you could, for example, introduce an antagonist. Say, one of Auggie’s boat buddies or an old college pal of Clair’s. But we’ll keep this story short. You – the writer – continue to pull the threads tighter and tighter as Rising Action builds towards the day of the IRS audit. Let’s say you paint the protagonists in the beginning as mostly likeable characters. Their only real flaw is a little cheating on their income taxes. Auggie and Clair trod along, blissfully hoping the IRS doesn’t know about the boat sale commissions. The closer they get to that date, the more the Knights learn of the dire consequences they’d face – huge fines, penalties, possibly jail time and certainly a federal criminal record – if they got busted. None of which they can afford, and Auggie reminds her that he can’t hold his security job with a federal record. The Knights try to stay calm on the surface, but they worry and act nervous. Their tension increasingly rubs off on their relationship with each other, with their kids and the rest of your characters.

Freytag’s third element of plot is Climax. In our story, that would be the IRS audit. The Climax should be confrontational, a spell-binding scene that is both drawn out and shattered into sharp shards of action. This is not the end of your story, and far from the end of the action, but it should be your most realistic, best drawn scene in the story so far.

Then the author introduces the twist. Say, a slip of the tongue by Clair about how easy it is to sell stuff on eBay. This raises the IRS reviewer’s eyebrows, and both Auggie and the reader see it.

The Knights are only too glad to pay $124.50 for the few receipts they can’t produce and get out of there as fast as they can. Clair and Auggie high-five in the car and start to think they’ve dodged the bullet. They start laughing about it and bragging to each other how easy that had been. The reader feels for them, one way or the other.

What follows the Climax is called the Falling Action, and this where your story can take several twists and turns with the events you first brought out in the Exposition. Falling Action can take any direction the author likes so long as it advances the story forward.

This is the real fun stuff to dream up. Say, our heroes celebrate that night in a fancy restaurant and then get all lovey-dovey after the kids go to bed. Three days later Auggie comes home and tells Clair he’s just had the best day ever at work. Clair tells him that the septic’s just backed up into the kid’s sandbox again. Oh, and they got another IRS audit letter. This one for unreported income. Later that night, Auggie freaks out when he finds himself locked out of his eBay account. The Falling Action is the back-and-forth between winning and losing battles with all of these elements, with the ever-present IRS always looming. Our heroes fight on through the Falling Action to eventually claim victory over some, if not all, obstacles. Or they get their due comeuppance on every turn of the page, or Auggie gets very foggy and Clair becomes very clear, depending on which way you want to say goodnight to your readers.

Caution: don’t let any of your subplots take over your story. Resolve all of them, but always stay focused on the main event.

The last part of Freytag’s structure is called Denouement, or the finale. This is where all of the accomplishments of the story are summarized. If the author has done his job right, in suspense anyway, Denouement is reduced to a page or a paragraph. Why? Because all of the accomplishments will have already been shown in the Falling Action scenes. There’s no tension left, just afterglow. In our story, that would be Auggie and Clair sitting on the pier toasting warm beer under a starry night and saying it could have been worse. Period.

There’s one plot line, start to finish. Just flavor with mouth-watering prose, give it a tasty title and a satisfying ending. Let it stew in suspense for a few thousand words and you’ll have it.

Freytag’s formula is not parsed equally. In all my writing, Exposition is painted with a wide brush and is never more than 10% of the story’s length. The details of these broad strokes come out in the Rising Action, which is about 40-50% of what needs to be said. The Climax is about 2%. Falling Action is usually another 40-50% because all the Exposition and conflicts created during the earlier parts now need to be resolved. Anything not resolved by this point is Denouement.

Think of our architect friend presenting the keys to this great house when finished, after every detail has been polished. If the plot is beautifully landscaped, then what more could he possibly say?

Next Month, Minutiae. ‘Nuff said.

Note: from August 1st through August 7th, Amazon.com is promoting a sale on my two novels in their Kindle bookstore. This is a great opportunity for those who likes to e-read fiction to save a couple of bucks. Both Seoul Legacy, The Orphan’s Flu and The Freya Project will be available that week for just $0.99. (67% off Retail of $2.99) So, please tell two friends to tell two friends to tell two friends. You can read the synopsis (Amazon’s “Book Description”) by following the links above. Please note this sale is on e-books only. First edition print books are also available through Amazon. Since all print versions come from BirchwoodBooks.com, I’ll be happy to sign or personally inscribe any orders for print. Enjoy! –Phil

Print books:
Seoul Legacy, The Orphan’s Flu (trade paperback)
The Freya Project (hardcover, trade paperback, ltd. ed.)

Pace

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With the possible exception of cookbooks, dictionaries and encyclopedias, everything written has some sort of pace to it. From greeting cards to poems to speeches, each piece opens, gives a few high points and then comes to a conclusion. When done correctly, the reader takes no notice of pace. Getting a suspense novel to the point where pace fades into the fabric requires a lot of work. There are two aspects of pacing you will want to consider even before writing the opening scene: your characters’ traits and the conflicts your characters will face. More than anything else, traits and conflicts determine pace because they are the consistent threads throughout your story.

Character Traits.
Your main characters carry the story, so it is their actions that set the pace. Don’t be concerned with what your protagonist looks like at this point, just think of the conduct of your character. Think of how they act. Are they fast talkers? Are they methodical? Compulsive? Arrogant? Do they yearn for approval?

Get to know your characters personally, too. How far did they get in school? Do they have any military service? Are the married? With kids? Pets? Are they religious? What is their career, and how is that going? Any health problem that could slow them down? And, most of all, know their date of birth. All of this stuff determines your character’s psyche, and that determines how they behave. Spend one hour “interviewing” each of your main characters – like a reporter or detective would – and you will prevent a lot of future problems with pace, not to mention character traits. You’ll never use all the material garnered in an interview, but you will write more vivid characters and show truer action because you understand them better. At that point, your characters will tell you how gorgeous their eyes are, how slender their figure is, and all the rest of the eye candy.

Conflict.
The other aspect to consider before starting out is conflict. What has to be conquered to achieve your outcome? In lifelike fiction, you’ll need to consider timelines, material assets and the kinds of professional and emotional help your hero will need to succeed. You can’t have your protagonist globe-hopping conflict-to-conflict without allowing for enough time for him or her to get from hop-to-hop. The same can be said for how long it takes to build a boat out birch bark or to give birth to a baby. Lifelike fiction reads like it could really happen. Fantasy fiction, like Ian Fleming’s Agent 007, allows the author to play with things like timelines and history, facts and follies. So, for example, when Mr. Bond is dining in London at 10:00 p.m. and playing roulette in Monte Carlo at midnight – a distance of 641 miles – it does not take us out of the story. Fleming pulls this off because his character is immortal, but in mortal-drawn fiction, we have to pace ourselves to the dual drums of time and nature.

Opening scene.
Once you know you main characters and understand the obstacles they have to overcome, then you can write the opening scene. This sets the pace of your story. If you want to forecast fast and furious, then open with a tightly drawn scene that presents your protagonist already in peril. Show him witnessing a crime and then exit the scene with your character hastily being pursued by the bad guys.

However, if your story is going to evolve over several months or longer, you will want to open instead with a character-building scene, like a dinner with hubby, wife and family before he flies off to meet his fate. Then, when the lights go out in Scene Two, we care what happens to him. You’re pace is set.

In the first approach, you’re broadcasting to the reader, Hold on, this is gonna be some ride! With the second approach, you’re saying, Here’s someone you’re gonna like. Or dislike, if you choose to open on the antagonist. The difference is compelling.

Word choice.
As far as word count is concerned, the faster the pace, the shorter the sentences. If you want to broadcast a slower pace, then use more commas, and longer, compounded sentences, so you have to use even more commas. Really, it’s that simple.

Action should be consumed in small bites, but tension-building descriptions and internal reflections that lead up to the action scene should be drawn-out affairs. Action sprints across the page, and like a sprint it should be over in no time. Tension uncoils like a spring. That doesn’t mean the entire scene is completed in one or two paragraphs. It means the action is shattered into shards of short, breath-taking bits, and the tense descriptions into nail-biting disquiet.

In fast-paced scenes, use descriptive words by their first reference only, not their second or third meaning. Use words that are easily understood, or words that play on a previous scene or trait. Stick with simple character tags of he said and she said so as not to slow down the pace. Find the fewest words possible to keep the action moving.

Pause scenes.
Another strong consideration should be the pause button. After an action scene, give your readers a break. Use this time for your characters to reflect on what just happened; they need a break, too. Use this space to have them discuss how that last action scene changes what they need to do next. Pause scenes are excellent places for foreshadowing.

Read it out loud.
“Read your piece loud enough for the folks in the back of the room to hear you.” That’s the best advice I ever received involving pacing. If you read it in the same tone your character speaks, you’ll hear the cadence in their voice, too, as well as the meaning of the words. Does this “sound” like this character? You’ll pick up on idiosyncrasies like back-to-back tongue-twisting words, unnecessary adverbs or adjectives, and weak or overstated nouns. Reading aloud forces you to enunciate every word and hear every syllable through your outer ear. That shows you – the writer – what it sounds like to the reader’s inner ear. Now have someone else read it to you. Close your eyes and imagine that you’re someone who just bought this book and is hearing this for the first time. Did they stumble? Did they emphasize the right parts? Did your inferences come across? Does it sound like the same one you wrote? That’s the acid test!

Follow your plot line by alternating between action scenes and pauses. Sometimes, because of timelines and whatnot, one action scene will need to get dumped right on top of the last, or a longer pause will be needed to allow for time to catch up to your next scene. These deviations in pace need to be written with tender, loving care. You’re asking your reader to change cadence from the pace you set in the beginning. Where this does happen in your novel, try to connect the change in pace with a common thread or theme, to give it a pace of its own. Done correctly, your readers won’t even notice, but write it haphazardly and folks are going to trip up.

Subplots work nicely for pause scenes, especially in longer stories, providing they conclude with your story’s ending. Subplots need their own satisfying ending, too, so you’re effectively telling two stories at this point. Subplots need to be fully fleshed out and relevant to your main story. Subplots don’t need to be action-packed, but they do need to develop “in character” and in a timeline with your main plot. Ironically, the best subplots give rise and reason for dramatic character changes. Give subplots a lot of forethought because they are not easy to do well. Subplots not only take the reader out of the main story, but you as well, and a poorly developed subplot will only bog you down when you want to be at your most creative. And remember: What you put in your story, you must take out.

Next month: Plotting.
When Founding Father Ben Franklin famously said, “We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately,” he could have been talking about the fate of a story’s plot line instead of the fate of new nation. Plotting is a game that fiction writers play while conjuring up good ideas for their story. We’re the only genre of writers that plays What if…?

Changes throughout your story are the plot line’s development. And, like an architect’s set of detailed drawings, your plot line must conclude with a full rendering of your House of Cards if you expect anyone to buy it. Next month, we’ll look at how a plot line “hangs together.”

Information Dumps

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An information dump is exactly what it sounds like: a steaming plop of backstory. It includes facts about characters and events that are relevant to your storyline but predate the opening scene. Often times, these factoids are the very building blocks of your story, but to start with them at the beginning – which is where they belong according to history – would carry as much suspense as a three-legged-turtle race. That’s why most suspense novels start with the main conflict already in motion. The characters develop as they navigate this conflict and the backstory comes in as they do. There are seven tools novelists can use to fill backstory: prologues, flashbacks, dreams, nightmares, internal thoughts, conversation and revelation.

Each has their place, but when you examine the first four, you quickly discover conflicts with the first rule of suspense, which is action! The last three rely on quieter moments in your story, and the information arrives between the action scenes. If all dumps go into toilets, then the first four are outhouses and the last three are indoor plumbing.

Prologues and Flashbacks
A prologue is positioned as the first read in your story, preceding Chapter 1. It can carry on for several pages. Flashbacks deliver the same kinds of information, only doled out between chapters and breaks in the story. It is hard to hold suspense in either format because, by their very nature, both take the reader out of the main story to enlighten them. Full stop, dump info, now back to the action! Most readers will let you get away with this once, but if you make a habit of it you’re likely to lose your audience to a tennis match on television.

I recommend writing prologues and flashbacks in the present tense, even where the rest of your novel is in past tense. This seems like a contradiction, but present tense allow your reader to become the parrot on your character’s shoulder, quietly watching the prequel unfold in real time, which, in and of itself, can build tension from even the most mundane events. In past tense, the same information comes out like a midnight visit to the outhouse: it’s all business, you wouldn’t be here if it was necessary, and it’s not some place you want to hang about.

It is important that your characters, not the narrator, tell the backstory, even if the characters in the backstory are not the main folks in the novel. Narration ruins tension, pure and simple. Past tense narration is a big yawn.

Dreams and Nightmares
Where flashbacks and prologues tell of past factual events, dreams and nightmares show the future, and they are not real. Even where the dream relives some past event, the circumstances in the dream are always different from what really happened, and that makes them unreliable for information dumps. Dreams hardly ever work with tension, but nightmares can have a place if the information you’re dumping is traumatic. Fires, the tragic loss of a loved one, or the face of the killer the night of the pummeling can work very well in nightmares, providing that someone wakes up the dreamer. Suspense is intrigue, not mystery, and readers deserve a “true” meaning of it all. Without this “truth” conversation between two on-page characters, your readers are still in a dark outhouse – they don’t know what, if anything, they just heard is trustworthy.

Minimize your use of prologues and flashbacks, dreams and nightmares, and you will minimize your problems with backstory. Now, let’s look at who flushes properly.

Internal Thoughts
Internal thoughts allow your characters to quickly dispense past information and future schemes at the same time while staying within your main conflict. (Consider: He reads the email and thinks, First time I met Sluggo, didn’t have my gun. Won’t make that mistake again.) People do not have long conversations with themselves – or talk in complete sentences. One past fact, relevant to the story’s future, that’s what you want. Too much internal thought and your readers are going to go huh?  because with internal thoughts, you are not only inside the character’s head but the reader’s head, too.

Conversation
Far and away, the best place for your backstory is between the quotation marks. Just don’t make it sound like a witness’s testimony. Conversation is just that; it is two or more people conversing, not one character speaking to an audience of one or more. In filling backstory with conversation, usually one character will know the past event and the other character will draw it out of them, either intentionally or entirely by accident. You need to decide who’s going to be telling this prequel because you can’t be in two people’s heads at the same time. Think of our parrot jumping from protag’s shoulder to the other guy’s, back and forth, back and forth; poor bird will get so dizzy he’ll drop off the page. And so will your readers.

You can show some internal dialogue within conversation, but only if it is brief and it moves the action forward quickly. (“Sure, I was there. Hundreds of people was there when the lights went out. But I didn’t see who knifed’m,” Sluggo said with air of defiance, confident they’d never be able to identify him in the pitch black.) Now we know  that Sluggo did it; his “internal thoughts” just told us one thing while his “dialogue” told the questioner something else. Your reader knows more than this other character does!

It is always best to pull backstory out of your characters and avoid using narrative as much as possible. Some narrative will be necessary, like in the above example with Sluggo, but the more you let your characters tell your story, the stronger they will become.  Sweet-scented candles burning in the lavatory.

Revelation
Revelation is a surprise to both your readers and characters alike, and it hits like a thunderstorm. It can come in the form of a phone call from the doctor’s office, old letters found in the attic, or a sudden, unknown, rich relative, but it has to be a shocker. It has to be a turning point in the story. There is nothing gratuitous about revelation, and placement is just as critical as content. They don’t work in the very beginning or at the very end of your story (unless your protagonist is Sherlock Holmes). In the beginning, not enough has already been established; it’s all revelation. Plop it down right at the end and your readers are going to feel cheated. But incorporate it as a turning point in your story and a revelation can both explain the past and set the table for the rest of the banquet in an instant.

Imagine a different story… Back in Chapter 10, the sweet matriarch of our imaginary story died, leaving our hero, Andrew, without any benefactors. At the end of Chapter 15, we read how, Andrew has finally been evicted along with his new wife and infant from the home he’s grown up in all his life. The nanny’s son, he was, always helped out where he could. And now, the nasty niece, Nancy, and her troop of lawyers have taken over the estate and kicked Andrew and family out after 22 years, penniless and hopeless. Chapter 16 opens with Andrew’s wife pounding on the outhouse door and shouting, “The doctor’s office just called – DNA confirms that the letters in the attic are REAL! He was your father! The estate is yours, not Nancy’s!” Now that’s a revelation. The entire story turns at this point. Our hero who was destitute in Chapter 15 is now master of the house, and in the final scene of Chapter 21 we gleefully see Nancy on her knees scrubbing floors as Andrew’s five-year-old comes storming into the kitchen in muddy boots, demanding, “Where is my lunch?” Your reader gets up from your sumptuous table feeling full, and full of anticipation for what you’re going to cook up next.

Dump the dump
So if backstory always work best woven into dialog, why not just dump the dump? What if, instead, you scattered the information like a soft, spring rain. Now, the scat dissolves slowly and enriches the plot. For example, when getting into the head of your bad boy, what if you have one character in Chapter 1 tell how he was kicked out of Boy Scouts for fighting, and a couple of chapters later have another character, an ex-con, talk about how he was a model prisoner and released early. Then in Chapter 8, his first wife tells us how he battled alcoholism after losing his business to the IRS. We see this character’s evil development was years in the making; something not possible in one cognitive scene. In the end, the rain dissolves the information when and where necessary and the roots of our story grow stronger because of it.

Next Month: Pace
Suspense means action, and action demands quick movements from both your characters and your plotlines. However, a suspense novel is a marathon, not a sprint. Run too fast and you’ll burn out before the finish line – or your readers will. You want to keep a strong cadence, but there will be times you’ll want to back off just a bit and let your characters – and your readers – catch their breath. Next month, we’ll look pacing; when to trot, when to gallop, when to graze.

Six Sensible Rules for Suspense

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Amy stirs, half asleep and freezing cold with a putrid taste sticking to her throat. In the distance, her two dogs bark frantically. Much closer, the wind whistles in the fog and gently brushes her cheek, and that puzzles her…?

Amy wakes with a jolt and shivers with fear. “Glenn!” she calls, coughs and shoves the lump that is her husband. “Glenn! There’s a fire! Glenn, wake up!”

Glenn feels flaccid and clammy, and just snores through the thick smoke now rushing over them. She looks towards the dresser and the digital clock but sees only dark. “Glenn!” She turns him over, her voice hysterical, harsh. She swallows clawing smoke and stale booze. Glenn snores. Amy tries to get out of bed but the smoke and the heat beat her back.

“Brian! Bria! Jump!!” What was a putrid, cold fog only seconds ago is now an oven pouring out suffocation. “Jump!!”

She pulls the comforter over her head and thinks of her children as she clasps her throat. The smoke presses down and crushes all hope. She hears the roar of a locomotive drown out the dogs, and she whimpers with her last breath, “Please, jump!”

What did you see in this scene?

Did you see a cold, dark, two-story house on fire? Did you see Amy’s dogs downstairs barking to get someone’s attention? Her kids asleep, already dead, or hopefully jumping for their lives? Did you see fire roaring up the stairwell? A desperate woman trying to wake a drunk? Did you see Amy surrender to the sheer weight of her circumstances? In less than a minute, did you see what mattered most in her all-too-brief life?

If so, you’ve got a pretty good mind’s eye because the entire 60-seconds was clouded in smoke.

Amy couldn’t see a thing! She coughed the smoke, heard the dogs, the wind and the fire, felt and smelled the inebriated Glenn and the putrid of something toxic. Jump shouted that it was a two-story house, wind and roar brought smoke and fire rushing up the stairs. Stale booze gave you a taste of why Glenn was not waking up. Not one word was written for the eyes. If the only sense Amy had were her vision, she would have died in her sleep like Glenn. End of story. And that is exactly what writing to the other senses does – it wakes up your reader, it lets them see through the smoke.

The senses are five vital, but very different, utensils in the writing’s toolbox. Here are my six sensible rules for how to use them correctly.

General Rule: “Taste and touch follow what we see. Smells and sounds precede our sight.”
Where you can show better tension, wordplay becomes fuel for your fire and you’ll want to break the rules. That’s the fun bit, but that’s not the first rule.

First Rule. “Don’t stop to smell the roses in first draft, just get your hero to safe harbor.” In other words, don’t let the minutia bog you down; finish the scene. Finish your novel.

It is only natural for the suspense author to write through his/her eyes because we envision our story as we write it – We make this stuff up! In first draft, it is much easier to just paint the broad strokes while our fireworks are still in the air. Fair enough. But use your second draft to color in all the tiny, mind-searing, sparkling bursts with precision. Not just: “Stole a Jet Ski and zigzagged out into the storm dodging bullets.” (1st draft). Let your readers: “Inhale the salty air, feel the rumble of the engine through her thighs and hold on tight as the Jet Ski slams-hard-against-the-surf, while Sluggo’s bullets wiz past her ear.” (2nd draft). Save those salty, rumbling details for when you’re more relaxed and can take the time to study the scene carefully, with all five of your senses functioning freely.

Second Rule: “Cleverly, but clearly, break the rest of the rules where it adds suspense.” Do this where it adds more tension, comedy or calamity.

“Just slept on it funny,” he gruffed and limped away.

That works, in a lame way, because people don’t usually sound gruff when they are trying to be funny (or use the word lame when trying to be serious), and your actions or characters will become indelible.

Third Rule: “Hearing delivers more than just sound.”

Sound is the hardest of all the senses to fool on the page, so it should be the easiest “other” sense to write to. Be careful: sound is also the only sense that we rely on with impunity. The other four work in harmony, they confirm or cancel each other out, but sound is a lone actor in the dark. Because we have two ears, we also get a sense of direction and distance which adds to the tension. When a sound beckons your character, and before they turn their eyes in that direction, their mind has already played back memories of what that sound – or voice – meant. Just reusing that sound and response in a later chapter can recall all the trauma in the first scene. You can now draw comparisons to that first scene without saying another word, without compromising pace or tension.

“A shot rang out! He heard the cock of an antique Winchester and knew who was behind it.” (2nd scene – I’ll let you color in the first scene.)

Your character will trust their ears before their eyes. They’ll likely first crouch, scream or run, or smile, laugh or pucker up based on what they hear, then see if they’re right. Or horribly wrong!

Horrific sights should freeze your mortal characters to a point where they cannot move. Frightening sounds should have them running first, thinking later.

Fourth Rule: “Touch and taste are secondary to sight.”

These two senses always confirm what we see. Well, almost always. Walk, barefoot through a dark cave and stepped on something cold and slimy that went hissss, and clearly you see a snake. But that only works in a dark cave, and because our ears confirmed our worst fears.

Touch and taste we can take as one because we rarely use them together – popcorn being one exception; sex being another. But touch and taste only work in only a limited way on the page because these two senses are internal by nature. If what you write is out of sync with dear reader’s preconceived notion, your tasty words will not be enrichment at all. One woman’s yum is another’s woman’s yuck.

No vegetarian is going to agree with your “mouth-watering” response to the question, how was the beef Wellington? (1st draft) But what if your character’s response were instead, “She rolled her eyes, held her tummy and tongued her lips.” (2nd) Carnivorous readers might still salivate, but your vegetarian audience might see gag me and make me throw up from the same three motions. And you haven’t carelessly taken a segment of your audience out of the story. That’s what I mean by be careful with taste and touch.

Generic feelings (kiss, hold, hug), and tastes (salty, cold, hot) work best with strong adverbs like humongous and dainty. Unique feelings (itching, stinging, horrifying) and tastes (briny, zesty, spicy) work best on their own.

Fifth Rule: “When in doubt, follow your nose.”

Scent is a different breed of cat all together. In my piece at the beginning, it is the smell of smoke that awakens Amy, and she has full command of all of her senses within a heartbeat. We cannot ignore the scent of fear. If something foreign gets past our nose, our subconscious instantly knows that it can’t let anything happen to our breathing. Scent is the only one of the five sense that will wake us up from a deep sleep with our adrenalin already pumping.

Scents stick with us, too. Some, forever…. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and take in memories like: That wonderful aroma of Grandma’s kitchen; your wedding corsage; your dog after it caught the skunk. If the last one of these got you to blink or your nostrils to twitch, I rest my case. “Wonderful aroma” and “skunk” don’t fit. But, you knew that.

So the only trick here is to use scents correctly, by appeal. Fragrances heighten a sensual scene, or turn the screws on uncertain moments. Aromas can instantly cast light on the dark, or call forth a forgotten memory. Odors tell time’s passage, they foretell danger down the road and quickly time-stamp past, traumatic events.

Sixth Rule: “Men focus on the hunt; women gather on the periphery.”

Which brings us to the eyes. Writing descriptive suspense for the eyes is as easy as carrying on a conversation with a close confidant. Just vividly put on the page what your mind’s eye beholds and don’t hold back. If you’re writing in third-person, imagine your friend is telling you instead.

Only, it is important to remember that your men and women will see things differently. And that difference is primordial. And that primordial instinct is the very essence of believable suspense.

In pre-historic times, the male hunters depended on silence to sneak up on their prey. They used their two eyes together to fix on the distance needed to throw their spear and kill dinner. Another hunter knew exactly what this man was thinking by just following his gaze. Gatherers – the women, children and one-eyed old men – depended on making noise and using their voices to scare the wild things from the berry bushes. For protection, women used their two eyes to focus on two or more things at the same time. They learned to depend on their peripheral vision to spot movements off to the side. One wrong move and they’d be stung or bitten, or become the dinner.

Those two unique survival traits are still in our eyes today. Men still look straight into who or what has their mental focus, and women are still much quicker at spotting movement on the periphery while looking you in the eye.

That’s true about not only the lady’s deep, baby-blue, mischievous, sparkling, haunting, adorned, oval, cat-like, vicious, emerald, crying, smiling, laughing, sad, happy or otherwise adorable eyes that we can clearly see, but her mind’s eye, too. Her sixth sense is broad. His is keen.

Six Sensible Rules for Suspense
1) Don’t stop to smell the roses in first draft, just get your hero to safe harbor.
2) Cleverly, but clearly, break the rules where it make more suspense.
3) Hearing delivers more than just sound: direction; distance; friend-or-foe.
4) Touch and taste are secondary to sight.
5) When in doubt, follow your nose.
6) Men focus on the hunt; women gather on the periphery.

Next Month: Information dumps. Those lumps of facts and timestamps that precede your storyline are so often the hidden, root cause for your character’s actions. Until you get them on the page your story remains convoluted where you want to be clear. But factoids are just the canvas, not the painting. You can’t allow them to slow down the action and quick pace that is suspense! They’re essential, and, at the right moment, need to be clearly conveyed, but it doesn’t have to read like a rap sheet. Next month we’ll look at how to backfill your story without slowing down the action.

And Now, The 2050 POE Prize Winner For…

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By the middle of this century, the successful fiction novel is going to involve a lot more than just words-on-the-page. Already, graphic novels are becoming animated and eBooks are reading the stories aloud. It won’t be long before Harry Potter flies out of our tablet in a hologram while J. K. Rowling sits on our digital screen and read to us, her universal audience of one.

Actual printed matter — the stuff of ink and paper — in the future novel is going to be strictly cover art and internal illustrations suitable for framing. The Author’s contribution to this piece of art will be a caption of the very essence of the image itself; the words that created it. But, sadly, that’s the only text of the author’s we will read in 2050 ink. “Limited Edition” will lose all meaning, right along with “Remainder Bin.” Soon, “Deluxe Edition” will mean that very same artwork only signed by the author and/or illustrator(s), and also the animator(s), holograph artists and voice artists who will help produce the POE Prize (Pulitzer-Oscar-Emmy) winners in 2050. Print versions, where they exist at all, will be expensive pre-ordered Collector Editions bound in (by then) genuine Corinthian Naugahyde, or they will be biodegradable, print-on-demand paperbacks that, in a pinch, can double as toilet paper.

All of these added features take talents beyond what most of today’s writers possess, or want to possess. But collaboration of such talents will be the keys to the kingdom within a few years.

Why? Because it’s more entertaining! You can get a glimpse of the future now. Anomaly, has an app that produces short, holographic animations that jump off the pages of the printed book. It’s surreal. It’s half way to the future.

Unlike biographers and historians, fiction writers are strictly in the entertainment business. We don’t seek to teach or preach to a known audience, we must create our own. The better we entertain, the bigger the audience. Simple as that. Biographers and historians have no such concerns, but then, they don’t have their readers sitting on the edge of their chair, either.

Funny, if we look back in time we can clearly see our future. One hundred years ago, new fiction writers got their stories serialized in magazines first. Readers had to wait until the next issue for the next installment. The author was tasked with keeping their audience in suspense and caring enough about what happens next to buy the next issue. Both Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs got their start this way, among many others. The complete novel version would come out the following year, or not, depending on magazine sales. Only successful novels were then followed by a movie or play adaptation.

First you’d get a little and like, then you’d get a lot and love it, then you’d get it all in-your-face but sometimes want to spit.

Blogs, tablets, home theater. Same play, different stage. Today, if we want the wider audience to swallow our story and feel satisfied, we have to write to resonate in every format, else what the author sees is not what the wider audience gets.

And that’s the rub. Often, the audio and visual versions of novels do not resonate with those who have already read the book. The author has to take control of his/her works before this point. Inflections can’t be out of place in tomorrow’s digital novel. Liberties can’t be allowed that change what the author intended for so-called creative license. Authors had little care in the matter 100 years ago, when fiction was still in its adolescence. By the time the movie or play adaptation came out, they’d long since moved on, high on their next novel.

Only a handful of authors thought of their works in terms of perpetuity. Edgar Rice Burroughs did. Arthur Conan Doyle did not. Both were hallmark visionaries, yet history tells their personal tales vastly different.

Some of Conan Doyle’s adaptations have been spectacular, like the BBC’s Sherlock Holmes series of several years ago that starred the late Jeremy Brett. Doyle would have been proud of that one. But most other renditions of the world’s first forensics sleuth — and there are many — do Doyle a disservice, or at least the author’s intent, leaving the viewer who hasn’t read the original stories to wonder what all the fuss was about 100 years ago. The original Sherlock Holmes was a bipedal bloodhound, everything Doyle wrote centered on that singular aspect. It was Holmes’ superior intellect and cunning methods of deduction that kept readers clamoring for more. Yet, modern adaptations brush Holmes’s methodical pace, his creative thinking, and sometimes even his flair for the dramatic ending under the carpet. For the last 50 years, contemporary stories have centered on Sherlock’s lack of love life (Irene Adler; The woman in A Scandal in Belgravia), or his fetish with cocaine–legal at the time– in (The Seven-Per-Cent Solution). If you’d only read or watch the newer versions you’d think Holmes was just an insensitive, bi-polar drug addict with sexual hang ups, and Doyle’s estate has been unable to stop any of it.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, on the other hand, controlled all aspects of his writing: creating, publishing, distribution, artwork, and adaptations into other formats, by mid-career. Tarzan hasn’t changed one iota. Burroughs was honored with a U.S. postal stamp to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Tarzan, and the ape-man was still as handsome as he was in 1912. Some adaptations have been laughable, true, but Tarzan has gone agelessly into a second life in the funny papers and on the silver screen, and license was sold by Burroughs and his estate for every one of these versions. His estate enjoys that foresight to this day with Andy Briggs’ “New Adventures” of Tarzan stories, and a new, subscriber-based, weekly online comic strip of the man who had a six pack long before Budweiser.

Will fiction authors have the vision to get collaboration right this time around?

Will the Author — the Creator of the very essence of the story itself — finally get to conduct the orchestra in this land of digital perpetuity? Or just continue to play first violin?

Depends on what tale we tell I suppose, and how well we show it to the widest audience.

April’s Blog: Show Don’t Tell. It’s the first rule any new novelist learns, but it means more than just opening up the reader’s eyes. Next month, we’ll look at how writing to the reader’s other senses can often paint a more vivid picture than the eyes can see, and how that raises the temperature of today’s suspense novels.