Tag Archives: fiction

I Published a Book in 10 Hours

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Jimmy the burgler

I did it!

Families inspire us and intimidate us.  Jimmy’s mother, father and brother are all members of the Burglars Union Guild (BUG), and he is expected to follow in their footsteps.  Jimmy has slippery fingers and not in the slick, pickpocket ways; he drops things.  That lack of dexterity is just the start of his struggles to gain entrance into the most elite thief organization.  The story of his life is now immortalized in electronic bytes.  I published a book.

I didn’t do all that writing in one day, as I proposed in my original challenge.  I also spent more than 10 hours writing Jimmy the Burglar.  Regardless, I completed the challenge.

I feel really good about that because this is my first fiction piece in a long, long time.  Fiction is easier to write than memoir because I could make up whatever stuff I wanted.  Fiction is also harder to write than a memoir because I had to make up whatever stuff I wanted.

This is my third self-published book, and I learn new elements with each effort.  This time, I experimented by writing the first draft in longhand.  At 2 hours and 56 minutes of writing, I hit a wall: great story elements, but no tension.  Typing that first part in gave me time to think about the story I wanted to tell here and now and in 10-ish hours.  I initially focused on the entire family history as related to the evolution of the Guild, but in that writing, I developed incredible backstory fodder for future Jimmy short stories.  The tale worth telling today is the evolution of Jimmy’s final exam for BUG membership: his MOTH (Modus Operandi Thesis Heist).  After the humiliation he experienced working with Big M, it is vital that Jimmy’s MOTH get all the details right.

At 7 hours and 42 minutes, I was having Too Much Fun writing. So much fun that, I forgot to reset the timer at one point.

After 16 hours (approximately) and 5100 words (23 pgs.), you can read Jimmy the Burglar’s first adventure on Amazon.com.

How did your story turn out?  If you completed the challenge, post your link below.  If you didn’t, share your thoughts now about the experience for all of us so we can learn from it.  And for me, I’d love to know your thoughts about my book. Whaddya think?

If you’re looking for some inspiration and encouragement to complete a book like this, there is a day-long workshop planned for early 2015 in the metro Detroit area.  Stay tuned for the details.

Even if publication isn’t your goal, doing a challenge like this is immensely satisfying. I have typed “The End” on a piece of my writing and am now moving on to “The Next.”

Minutiae

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According to Merriam-Webster.com, “Mystery” means anything that is not understood. Its origin pre-dates the bible. “Suspense” is defined as nervousness or excitement caused by wondering what will happen. It was first used in the 1500’s. “Minutiae” means trifles, details and smallness, and it dates to 1782, making it the new kid on the vocabulary block. The elements of minutiae can enhance both mystery and suspense, but they are used differently in each genre.

In a mystery, you don’t know who done it; that’s for the protagonist and the readers to figure out. The author plants clues throughout the story, and those clues are often in the minutiae, the small details in the beginning that have large consequences in the end. For example, break a fingernail in Chapter 1 and have that fingernail show up at the scene-of-the-crime in Chapter 7. Mystery readers need to be on their toes, constantly asking themselves, “Why did the author choose this minutiae to express that scene?” Readers won’t fault the author if they figure it out before the end. Instead, they will think of themselves as very clever for having done so.

In a suspense novel, the reader knows who did the dastardly deed, often from the opening chapter. There is no mystery to the story itself. Instead, there is plenty of mystique in the characters, and the readers are left asking, “Why does she always do that?” Readers don’t fault the author if the character’s mystique is double-handed or morally corrupt, so long as the author explains the minutiae in a rational way for that character’s development.

In a mystery, minutiae mystifies the storyline, in suspense it mystifies the characters and their actions.

What you choose say is just as important as when you say it. Character traits are popular with authors because these small details pull double duty with character development, and they don’t have a “sell by” date, meaning you can bring them back in your next chapter or next novel.

One place where minutiae can play a part in your novel is when you want to slow down the pace. Never use minutiae to speed up the action, like: His fist floated into Fred’s flabby gut. He heard him go oomph and gleefully watched Fred double over in pain. Instead say: He hit Fred once and watched him double over. Only use minutiae to slow down the action: The wine’s robust aroma floated in the air and competed with her perfume. He inhaled deeply, slowly; this was a night he had to savor.

Entirely new scenes and romantic moments can also benefit with a sprinkle of minutiae, to let the scene breathe. But this minutiae is only used once to full effect, then condensed for any revisits. Case in point: here’s a “first” scene from my upcoming novel Knock Softly (working title). The characters make several visits to the park and dog run with our protagonist, Edvard, and his two dogs, Rufus and Pudge, throughout the story. The dogs weigh 75 and 25 pounds respectively. (The novel goes into more detail on the dogs, too, but here such detail would only be minutiae.) This scene involves only a small portion of the 1.2-mile walk. Knock Softly is told in present tense.

Long before they arrive at the dog run, Ed has to walk the dogs past a family of oaks that proves to be home to an entire community of squirrels. The trees are a magnificent cluster whose matriarch stands dead center and at least 80 feet tall. The grounds under the oaks are well shaded and almost barren of other trees or tall vegetation. Their broad branches and long, fingered leaves steal all the sun’s rays leaving this part of the walk always cooler, darker. Rufus lifts his ears in eager anticipation and starts pulling on the leash. Ed wraps the leash around his wrist and braces for impact.

Readers revisit this part of the path again in another scene several pages later, but in the second scene, the pace is much faster and it is dialog that sets the pace. The scenery is just the canvas:

They’re getting closer to the oaks and both Ed and Rufus know it. He wraps the leash around his wrist before they get to the shadows and gives it quick jerk to let the dog know who is boss. Ed tells Jane… And the dialog follows.

All the minutiae from the first scene are present in the second, just not on the page. Left in the readers’ thought bubbles are the cluster of trees, the squirrels, and all the other previously established minutiae. To put all of that on the page again would only bog the story down when it wants to run.

And never use the same minutiae twice – that’s worse than marrying your brother-in-law in the same wedding dress.

Next Month: First Impressions
They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression, but much of fiction is character development. Development means change, and suspense means changing those first impressions. To write a great first impression in a novel, you have to first think about what your characters are going to develop into. Then figure out what kinds of darling details, social settings and backstories you need to get them there. Next month we’ll look at how to make a good first impression on the page.

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.”

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.