In a relatively famous interview, Alfred Hitchcock talks about suspense. He describes a five minute conversation about baseball around a table, which ends with a bomb going off. In this example, the audience experiences five minutes of rather boring conversation and five seconds of shocking excitement. However, he goes on, if the film were to inform the audience about the existence of the bomb at the beginning of the conversation, the baseball talk takes on a whole new meaning. In this example, we have five minutes of pure suspense. My latest book, Graffiti Creek, at its heart is a novel of suspense. In fact, Hitchcock’s North By Northwest served as an inspiration for the story in the book. While I do not, by any stretch of the imagination, profess to be anywhere near the level of Hitchcock at creating suspense, I can break down the way I approach writing suspense using the master’s own analogy.
And I can do it in four easy steps.
Step One: Put a gun on a table.
I love Hitchcock’s example of the bomb, but when I think about how I approach suspense, I think in terms of instruments of violence which are a little more in the control of the characters. It does not have to be a literal table nor a literal gun, mind you. It could even be an actual bomb placed on a bus. Think of the movie Speed. It was a bomb, but it was being controlled by a madman. Sometimes the weapon is not even a weapon. In the novel No Country for Old Men, one could argue that Anton Chigurh is “the gun.” And it does not have to be only one gun. In John Grisham’s The Firm, we have a gun in the form of information discovered by Mitch McDeere and another in the form of a series of accidents involving members of the firm. The suspense arises in watching who will pick up their gun first. A novel about a law firm becomes as suspenseful as a western where every character has a pistol hanging of his or her belt. Hitchcock, himself, probably illustrated this point the best in the 1936 film, Sabotage. He did it with only two characters, a literal dinner table, and a simple dinner knife.
Step Two: Bring two people to the table: one unpredictable and one afraid.
In the scene you (hopefully) just watched, we see this done to perfection. A very simple formula of a “bad guy” and the frightened woman. We need them both as an audience. We need the unpredictable character to keep us guessing about the multitude of possibilities surrounding this knife (or gun, or bomb, etc.). But we also need someone with a level of fear. Fear is a very natural reaction to a gun on a table. The frightened character gives us someone with whom to identify. We can watch the scene unfold through this person’s eyes and understand one very central emotion being experienced in the moment (no matter how far removed we are from the surroundings). The film Inception puts us through countless experiences completely foreign to our own. In this case, even “the gun on the table” is almost unrecognizable in its form of controlling the subconscious mind in dreams. What is familiar, however, are characters such as the unpredictable Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the frightened and inexperienced Ariadne (Ellen Page). And this is a great example of the fact that these two characters do not need to fit any mold of “good guy” vs. “bad guy.” Dom Cobb is clearly the protagonist, but he is unpredictable. We witness with tensed horror through the naive eyes of Ariadne as he continues to push limits and test the rules of this created world.
Step Three: Bring more people to the table.
Obviously, none of these rules are hard and fast. In the above Hitchcock scene, there are only two people. But, to be fair, it’s a three-minute scene. To sustain suspense throughout an entire book, I believe (most of the time) you need more people. The suspense must be complicated in some way. Three hundred pages of two people squaring off over a loaded gun makes for very predictable suspense. Sure, one of those characters is unpredictable, but given enough time, we as readers can suss out each and every possible scenario until our ability to predict what happens next waters down our sense of dread. We need more people to distract us. And this is not about having twists and turns. These people do not have to be red herrings. They simply have to raise the stakes and/or draw our attention away from the gun. In the film Die Hard, we have a whole building of people raising the stakes of our sense of dread. We don’t even meet them, necessarily, but we still bite our nails a little harder than we would if John McClane were scampering around an empty building. Or take any of the novels of Gillian Flynn. Flynn is continuously introducing us to another character, and each one plays with our understanding of the central characters. In Gone Girl, we are never sure which of the central two characters is the unpredictable one, and which is afraid. Each new character flips our initial concept and gives us more and more and more new context until we begin to forget a metaphorical gun was ever placed on the table at all.
Step Four: Fire the gun.
This is the simplest of steps, but the most complex concept. We have all heard the rule of Chekhov’s gun. Anton Chekhov famously said that if you are going to hang a rifle on the wall in act one, then you need to fire it in act two or three. Otherwise, it is unnecessary and should be removed. I firmly believe in that rule. However, it is not always so simple. In the video clip I started this post with, Hitchcock talks about making the early mistake of having the bomb go off. In the future, he was always certain to allow someone to discover the bomb before it goes off, providing the audience with a release for all their pent up suspense. I do not see any evidence, however, of the master of suspense ever stopping before the audience reaches a crescendo of suspense. For me, that means firing the gun. Whatever the gun may be, I think we want to see it go off. When I was a kid, a friend and I took a bag of fireworks out to a gravel parking lot of a baseball field and set it on fire. Watching that bag burn was one of the most suspenseful moments of my life. But if it had never gone off? I probably wouldn’t even remember it. Bottle rockets shot off in every direction. We had to duck for cover and run away laughing. It did not erupt in any predictable way, mind you. The gun of your story does not have to simply be lifted up by the “good guy” and fired at the “bad guy,” or vice versa. But it does need to go off. In some way. We can’t read about a burning paper bag for twenty chapters just to have it fizzle out during the last five.
So there you have it. My simple rules to creating suspense. They are not definitive or carved in stone. In fact, I never even mention the importance of characterization. Because if we don’t care about the characters, we probably won’t feel any suspense at all. But I didn’t mention it on purpose. Characterization, in my opinion, applies to any story. If I don’t care about the characters, I probably won’t even read far enough to know what “type” of book it is. The same goes for good writing and an ear for dialogue and a million other tenets of storytelling. But, when thinking specifically about suspense, I would ask you: what’s your gun? Who are those central two characters and how is one unpredictable and the other afraid? Who else is at the table? And how does your gun go off? What does your bag of firecrackers look like when it finishes its burn?
Matt Coleman is a writer of crime novels and comedy. His novels, Juggling Kittens and Graffiti Creek are available from Pandamoon Publishing. Learn more at www.mattcolemanbooks.com.