Tag Archives: Novels

Literary Comfort Food

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In early March I was searching the shelves at a Barnes&Noble for a mystery for Mary’s birthday, when I spotted a treasure – one of Tony Hillerman’s Navajo Tribal Police mysteries neither of us had read.  The Shape Shifter (2006) is the last of the 18 titles in this series that won Hillerman (1925-2008) numerous awards both as a mystery writer and as a friend of Native Americans.  I will review The Shape Shifter when I finish, but starting it today reminded me of other stories that represent pure reading pleasure to me.  Books that carry me into another world.  Books that I read because I like to hang out with the characters, almost regardless of what they are doing.

I realized this morning as I sat down to coffee with Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, and officers Jim Chee and his new wife, Bernadette Manuelito, that the greatest pleasures I’ve had in reading, bar none, are books in which I just want to be with the characters, almost regardless of whether they’re solving mysteries or buying groceries.  In addition to Hillerman’s tribal officers, other examples come to mind:

  • Frodo Baggins and friends.
  • Holmes and Watson.
  • Amelia Peabody and family in Elizabeth Peters’ Egyptian mysteries.
  • Rat and Mole and Toad in Wind in the Willows.
  • The sometimes annoying but always brilliant, Hercule Poirot.
  • Lirael and the disreputable dog in Garth Nix’s Abhorsen Trilogy.
  • Hamish Macbeth, the irrepressible Scottish detective in M.C. Beaton’s series.

I have also spent way too much money and time reading second rate fantasy series in the often vain hope of recapturing the Tolkien experience.

It’s important to realize that in stressing the importance of characters, I am not referring to the contemporary buzzword, “character driven.”  That has little or nothing to do with my list of comfort-food books, since with the possible exception of Wind in the Willows, these titles all belong in the “plot driven” category;  most mysteries begin, not with the detective’s quirks but with the discovery of a corpse, and problem of the Ring of Power was independent of Frodo.

As I said – these fictional people are friends, whether they are solving mysteries, dodging orcs, or sitting down to second breakfast.  This is a real clue for me, something to remember as I juggle plot elements.  Even though that is critical work, I find myself anxious to get back to the characters, both the heroine and the villain.  That, more than anything else, tells me I am heading in the right direction.

But now, before that or anything else, I have to get back to the The Shape Shifter, where storm clouds, both literal and metaphorical, are gathering over the reservation.

True North

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In December, 1975, my sister sent me a small wrapped box with a note attached.  Our mother had died suddenly the previous May, but my sister found a small package, wrapped for Christmas the year before, at the back of a closet.

Inside was a compass.  I’m sure my mother intended it as a pragmatic gift – I was spending a lot of time on back roads and camping out in the southwestern deserts where you really want to know where you are and where you are going, but ever since, that particular compass and compasses in general, have carried a lot of symbolic meaning for me.  Finding true north.  Finding one’s way.

The earlier name for a Compass Rose was Wind Rose

My ideas have changed since I got that compass.  I used to imagine “one’s way” as “one way.”  As if our lives were like trains, and we are either on the track or off.  Now I imagine something more like “possible futures,” (a classic sci-fi term).  Not a single track, but an ongoing dance between ourselves and the world, of choices and unfolding events.

***

Recently I posted that I am rethinking the plot of the novel I’m writing because my forward progress had slowed and a step back showed there were flaws and gaps in my core conception.  Later I realized some of the story elements had become so common as to have already become cliches.  I understand how fast that can happen; Thomas Edison used to speak of times when “ideas were in the air,” and I’m sure there were far fewer inventors in his day than young adult writers in ours.

I’ve taken my own advice recently, and done a lot of free-writing, easily filling up single spaced pages with several alternate plots that seems fresher to me, but remain similar in setting and character to the story I was working on before.  One in particular sparked my excitement.  Then I spotted a review of a recently published, YA novel that had features strangely in common with my current conception.

Conventional wisdom urges us not chase popular stories, but these days, my impulse is almost the reverse – it almost seems harder to run away from what other people have done!  Something else we are told often is, “tell the story that only you can tell.”  To me, this sounds a lot like the “true north” idea.  Our thoughts, our emotions, our memories are not stable, so why should our stories be?  That kind of imagined fixity  is something the conscious mind loves, but the unconscious or whatever you wish to call the wellsprings of our creativity, does not share in such linear thinking.

I used to admire an Arizona man named Frederick Sommer, who took hauntingly surreal photographs in the desert.  Once an interviewer asked him why he photographed, seeming, from the tone of the article, to want some kind of deep philosophical rationale.  Instead, Sommer shrugged and said, “You’ve got to do something during the day.”  I’ve always loved the irreverence of his response.  I remember it in moments when I begin to take myself and work too seriously.  As ego involvement grows, I risk mistaking what I do for what I am.

Frederick Sommer

In retrospect, I learned a lot when I was writing software.  I learned that when something isn’t working, you look at it closely, and if necessary, try something else.  I may have missed schedules but I seldom missed sleep.  The years that I spent writing software convinced me that I can solve problems – that if I keep looking long enough, I’ll find a creative solution that was there all along, overlooked.

I write for a lot of reasons.  One of them is that I have to do something during the day.

Four Key Ingredients – Part Two

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Wrestling with Originality:  A real-life Example.

It’s easy to talk in the abstract about things good fiction needs, but “originality” is an issue I have been wrestling with for real lately.  Recent “market research” – checking book jacket blurbs in stores and online – revealed a mass of new titles in the fantasy sub-genre where I have been working, in a two steps forward one back fashion, for several years.  Now that even the diehard fans are satiated with vampires, many hopeful writers have trooped to Faerie.

How many?  Well, two of the first half-dozen titles I sampled featured half-human/half-fairy protagonists – like mine.  A few discoveries like that throw the very possibility of being original into question.

I noticed something else too – several of these new books reuse a plot that was common in 1980’s adult fantasy – a war of good and bad fairies in which a human participant somehow tips the balance.  What I suspected then, I am sure of now – that storyline originated in the world of Dungeons & Dragons and online role-playing games.  It is simply not present in the original sources.

Given this seeming recycling of recycled plots, my choice seems fairly straightforward – give it up or dig deeper.  Donald Maass’ writing is full of encouragement for the latter choice, and I’m getting excited about some of the new ideas welling up since I started this process.  Here are a few of my current thoughts:

  • Go back to original sources.  In traditional fairy stories, there are no “good” and “bad” fairies – all encounters are problematic for humans.  Maass’ criterion of “inherent conflict” is built into the old tales and ballads of the relation between humans and the fey.
  • I’ve found a simple way around my heroine’s ancestry, since being half-fairy is now a cliche.  I like this even better.
  • I am probably going to rename the fairies and Faerie the way Sharon Shinn did in her 1995 YA story, Summer’s at Castle Auburn.  There the land and people are called, “Alora.”  Everyone gets it in “quack like a duck” fashion.

The point of giving these personal details is to underscore my belief in Donald Maass’ suggested lines of digging deeper.  “What if?” is a good question for any storyteller.  I have a long way to go, but I am enjoying the process again, and confident that I am on the right track.

Gut Emotional Appeal – Donald Maass’ Fourth Criterion for Really Good Novels:

There’s a formula for this:  create a likable character who must struggle to achieve something important.  Good as far as it goes, which is not very far.  And never mind that someone like Jonathan Franzen can throw out the advice and still win critical acclaim – the rest of us should not try that at home.  Most writers I know really care about their characters; the problem is how to make an audience care.

At a recent conference, a presenter used the Michelangelo analogy – chipping away what doesn’t belong – for the writer’s craft as well.  I think this is pertinent to the character breakthroughs I watch others make – they keep working, and eventually come to characters who somehow embody some of their own deeper truths.  In practice it isn’t nearly as weighty and ponderous as it sounds.

One critique group friend has long been enamored of Raymond Chandler type hard boiled detectives, with a dash of James Bond thrown in.  My friend worked and worked, creating better and better versions of characters we have seen before.  Recently, his own humor and mischievousness got into the mix, and a hero emerged who parallels, in my opinion, the tongue-in-cheek charm of the chick-lit detective who curses the bad guys if she breaks a nail while taking them down.  My friend’s character, Jonathan, a wastrel ex-Royal Marine, returns fire when assassins attack him on the golf course, furious that they ruined his score.  The battle had me in stitches as it caught up a foursome of startled ministers who realize the Lord moves in more mysterious ways than they had imagined.

Another critique group friend, writing about a troubled teen, made a quieter but equally profound breakthrough.  You see it in a little shift.  The bravado falls away, and the character is quietly real and telling her truth beyond any stereotype.

We have to start with characters and situations that matter to us, and then go deeper into ourselves that we expected – this much I am sure of.  How and when that happens is a mystery.  None the less, I find Donald Maass’ criteria:  Plausibility, Conflict, Originality, and Gut Emotional Appeal valuable questions to ask of my own or anyone else’s writing.

You can’t always say what or how but you know writing that has these things.  And if they are missing?  It simply means there is more chipping away to do.

Four Key Ingredients – Part One

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Stories begin with ideas and these can come from anywhere. For some writers, some of the time, they may arrive fully formed, but I suspect that for most of us, they show up as seeds which we have to nourish and grow, in acorn-to-oak fashion.

Since I have allowed myself to drop back to the “acorn stage” of my own story, I turned once again to Donald Maas who has a lot to say about brainstorming and the care and feeding of story ideas as the critical first step in writing what he calls, “the breakout novel.”

Another name for that is simply “publishable novel,” because according to Maass, good is not good enough anymore.  I see antecdotal evidence to support his claim.  I still find the phrase “breakout novel” a bit high-falutin, so I just tend to think of “really good novels.”  Really good novels begin with a really good premise.

Maass uses the word “premise” both for the initial seed idea (“What if there were a whole other world at the bottom of that rabbit hole”) and for a more polished, high level description (“A girl named Alice follows a talking rabbit and…”).  He insists that really good, breakout ideas can be made.  He gives many useful examples of brainstorming and suggests that a key skill is learning to ask “what if” questions and then throw away one’s first responses which are likely to be obvious and cliched.

In the second chapter of Writing the Breakout Novel, he asks the reader to go find their three all time favorite books – the one’s we have read so many times the bindings are cracked.  The ones that have nourished our hearts and spirits for decades.  Maass suggests that four elements common to our favorite stories are likely to be, Plausibility, Inherent Conflict, Originality, and Gut Emotional Appeal.

Plausibility is perhaps the easiest of these concepts to understand and build into a story.  Avoid the extremes of the obvious and the impossible; according to Maass, we want our stories “surprising yet credible.”   As a fan of fantasy and science fiction, I would add that this applies to alternate universes as well.  Google on “world building” and you find a ton of information – much of it coming from gamers – on constructing internally consistent fantasy or extra-terrestrial worlds.  The internal consistency is what matters.  Orcs are all right in Middle Earth, in fact we expect them; Martians would be over the top.

Inherent Conflict:  If the story is set in an era and world where conflict is part of the situation, it aids the writer, but with craft, we can find or create conflict anywhere.  The nominally placid suburbs can be battlegrounds according to John Updike, and now Jonathan Franzen.  Anywhere you have teachers and students, parents and children, boys and girls you have the raw materials for conflict and tension.  Even better, according to Maass – you have conflict between groups or individuals who both have a claim to be “right.”.  It is our job as writers to find the conflict and keep in in the spotlight, for this is the stuff that generates excitement.

Originality:  This is one of those magical qualities – we know it and applaud it when we see it, but can we set out to deliberately be original?  To a degree, I think we can.  If we can allow ourselves to brainstorm or play with ideas, and are willing to reject our first (and usually obvious) solutions, we put ourselves in a place where something new can emerge.  (strictly speaking there may not be any “new” stories, but in practical terms, there are books that make us think, “Wow, I wish I had thought of that”).

I assume we all have practical ways of generating ideas – taking a walk, sinking into reverie, listening to music, keeping things silent, free writing, or some combination of methods like this.  The next step is to apply it.  If one can pull an entire plot out of ether, like a magician pulls an endless string of scarves out of a hat, bravo, but at some point, we’ll get stuck or have decisions to make.  I cannot remember where I got this piece of advice but I find it effective.  Ask an important plot question.  Write down 20 solutions.  Throw out the first 19 and the one that is left will be something original.  Twenty or ten or pick a number that works, as long as it doesn’t make things go too easy.

NEXT:  A real-life example and the fourth ingredient

Water for Elephants: A Movie Review

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There surely has been a drought this spring of movies worth venturing out to see, so I was pleased when Water for Elephants, based on a best selling novel, hit the theaters.

The story is narrated by ninety year old Jacob Janowski after his family forgets to show up at the “home” where he lives to take him to the circus.  He relates how a personal tragedy interrupted his plans in 1931 and sent him out on the rails where he joined the Benzini Brother’s Circus as a vet.  Times were tough and circus life was gritty and often violent.

Jacob falls in love with Marlena, wife of August, the ringmaster, whose brutality sparks the biggest disaster in circus history.  Jacob and Marlena survive, rescue Rosie the elephant and a Jack Russell terrier, and after a successful stint with Ringling Brothers, settle down to raise five sons who forget about Jacob when he is 90.  The circus boss he tells the story to offers him a job, and Jacob feels like he’s coming home.

It’s a decent story, but…

The “but” is that I never really engaged with the characters.  What is the magic that causes us to bond and identify with a character in a movie or a novel?  You can’t say what it is, but you know it when it happens and you know when it doesn’t.  I actually felt worse when Rosie the elephant was beaten that when the goons beat up Jacob.

In contrast to Water for Elephants, my heart was really gripped by another movie about an old man who loses his wife and home but reinvents himself at the end of life.  This was the animated feature, Up (2009).  Up required a surreptitious kleenex in the theater.  Water for Elephants?  Not even close.

I would be curious to hear a response to the movie by someone who read the book first.  In retrospect, I feel like the movie made unsuccessful attempts to manipulate me.  Take August, the villain.  At one point during the movie, Mary leaned over and whispered, “bipolar.”  I said, “alcoholic.”  On the way home we agreed on a dual diagnosis, and now, on Wikipedia, I read that in the book he was pegged as a paranoid schizophrenic – not that circus roustabouts in 1931 knew what that is.  And regardless, if understanding of the villain’s bad behavior depends on a diagnosis, something is missing from the story.

I’m not sorry I went to see this movie, but unfortunately, I have to suggest that others save their money.

A Conference and a Resolution

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“If we had more stories as children, we would need fewer psychiatrists as adults.” – James Hillman

On Saturday, I attended the Spring Spirit Conference of the North/Central region of the SCBWI – Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.  This all day event took place in Rocklin, just 20 minutes from home.  It featured seminars and critiques by writers, editors and agents, aimed at people who write for children and young adults.  I had registered at the end of December, but as the day rolled around, I wasn’t that anxious to go.

Part of it was simple fatigue, the after-effect of this spring’s flu.  Part of it was a kind of burnout.  Earlier this week, as I was reviewing a manuscript for one of my critique groups, I caught myself writing a comment out of habit – a knee jerk response I was not even sure was true.  I’ve found myself doing that several times recently, and as a result, I was feeling an impulse to step away and sort out some ideas that didn’t feel like mine.  I wasn’t sure I needed a professional gathering where I was likely to pick up more.

I was pleasantly surprised by the keynote speaker, author and teacher, Bruce Coville.  “Take everything the presenters say with a grain of salt,” he said.  “Your job is to find your own truth.”  Those words turned my day around.  They set the tone of the day, as did his later seminar on writing fantasy, a genre he notes is snubbed by some literati as less than properly serious.  “Tell that to Homer, to Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare,” Coville said.

“Sometimes I write fairytales because it’s the best way to tell the truth.” – C.S. Lewis

As I went through they day, an ongoing problem that is really mine came into focus.  I’ve been stalling out on my current book because several key plot elements need to be re-imagined.  Slogging away is not going to do it this time.  I’ve known I need to take a break, take a step back, but that isn’t easy for an A-Type, yankee-ingenuity, roll-up-your-sleeves mentality.  I needed some kind of plan to make it okay to take a break.  And I found one.

When in doubt, read, read, read.  That in itself is a great idea, but I find it hard to study really compelling books when the great ones sweep me into the story from the start – I’ll do the objective stuff later, and later never comes.  I happened to flip through the first book I ever bought specifically to help with plot and structure, called (would you believe) “Plot and Structure,” by James Scott Bell.

Toward the back of the book, Bell addresses that whole issue in a section called, “How to Improve Your Plotting Exponentially.”  It involves getting half a dozen novels, ones you have read or new ones.  Read them first for pleasure, then read them again with a stack of 3×5 cards and note the events, characters and purpose of every single scene.  Review them when done (like “forming a movie in your head,” says Bell).  Finally, lay out the cards and see how the scenes fit into the traditional three-act structure.  Where are the key plot points?  Where is “the door of no return?”  Where is the final battle joined?

This will take eight to twelve weeks, Bell estimates, but because of all that I earlier learned from him, I’m willing to test his estimation that during those weeks “you will jump ahead of 99 percent of all the other aspiring writer out there, most of whom try to find out how to plot by trial and error.” Trial and error has always been iffy for me.

So I’m giving myself permission to take a reading break.  I’ve already downloaded three books to my Kindle:

1)  The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, an acclaimed, post-apocolyptic story for young adults.   I started it yesterday and found to my delight, a YA story I can’t put down – I haven’t come upon too many of those recently.

2)  Gone For Good, by Harlan Coben.  This violates Bell’s instructions to stick with the type of book I want to write, but I’ve meant to read this ever since I saw Donald Maass praise the story in his Breakout Novel Workbook.  Besides, I really enjoy action/adventure and believe the genre contains elements that can improve any sort of writing.

3)  Hollowland by Amanda Hocking.  About time I read something by her!

From time to time I will report back on how this goes and probably review at least some of the titles, but right now, I have to get back to  The Hunger Games!

More About Tension

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In my previous post, I considered literary agent, Donald Maass’, statement that “tension on every page” is the key ingredient of successful fiction.  I proposed an experiment:  open a few of your favorite books to random pages, (avoiding the obvious chills-and-thrills moments exemplified by the poster) and see if there is tension on that page.  I said I would try it with some of my favorite novels.

I’ve posted about all four of these books before.  The first two are YA fantasy novels I have read and enjoyed three or four times.  The last two are recent reads, adult fiction, that I’ve only read once but found compelling.  So here (drum roll) are my results:

Lirael (2001) by Garth Nix.

Lirael is the story of a seeming misfit and washout from a magical sisterhood, who is actually destined to spearhead the defense against an army of zombies.  Although the climax comes in a sequel, Nix breaks all kinds of rules by devoting the first 450 pages to the coming of age of Lirael and her cousin, Sam.  Three-quarters of the book passes before the battle is joined.  So why have I read this book so many times, and why do I still enjoy dipping back into certain sections?

For one thing, even Lirael’s lesser battles matter and carry public as well as private consequences.  Nix also gives us regular updates on the bad guys, so we know a storm is brewing.  For the “tension on every page” test, I opened to one of many instances where Nix reminds us of the growing menace and Lirael’s nagging self-doubts:

“It’s not so simple,” interrupted a stern-voiced Deputy, bearing down on them like a huge white cat on two plump mice.  “All the possible futures are connected.  Not being able to See where futures begin is a significant problem.  You should know that, and you also should know not to talk about the business of the Watch!”

The last sentence was said with a general glare about the room.  But Lirael, even half-hidden behind a huge press, felt it was particualrily aimed at her.

As a how-to tidbit, we have a fine example of Maass’ comments on the power of threatening images to ramp up the tension in “quiet” moments.  The Deputy does not just “approach” the girls, she “bears down on them like a huge cat on plump mice!”


The Dream-Maker’s Magic (2006) by Sharon Shinn

I reviewed this favorite here on December 10, 2010.  This randomly chosen passage really needs no additional comment – it is a great illustration of Maass’ conviction that disagreement is the factor that most easily spices up dialog:

“She thinks of him as her brother,” Sarah murmured to me one day as I paused in the act of wiping down a table to frown over at Gryffin and Emily.  “There’s no need for you to be jealous.”

Now I was frowning at Sarah.  “I’m not jealous,” I sputtered.  “I’m – what?  I don’t care if they’re friends.  Jealous.  That never occured to me.”

Sarah was smiling a little.  “Oh.  I’m sorry.  Well, maybe you’re frowning because you have a headache or something.”

“I’m not frowning,” I said, giving her a fierce smile.


The Cypress House (2011) by Michael Koryta

If I had to classify this book, I would call it a supernatural thriller, which makes its inclusion here a little unfair.  After all, thrillers have more chills and thrills than other genres, by definition.  Still, we are talking of “tension on every page,” not adrenalin on every page, which is impossible.  My criteria was, tension in a spot where “nothing is happening,” and this is what I found with a random flip of the pages:

He sat there for a while and looked at the stone.  No words of sorrow or love marked Isaac’s stay in this place.  Just those dates, and too short a time between them.

That was all right, though.  It wouldn’t have troubled Isaac, Arlen knew that.  This life was nothing but a sojourn anyhow.  A temporary stay, that of a stranger in a strange land.

“Love lingers,” Arlen said, and then he straightened, put his jacket back on so that it covered his pistol, and left the graveyard.


The Forgotten Garden (2008) by Kate Morton

Donald Maass devotes an entire chapter in his Workbook to the problem of backstory as a tension-stopper, and suggests various ways around it.  One of them is to open with a minimal amount of needed history and sprinkle more in later.  That is exactly what I found when I opened this book to Chapter Fourteen, with the heading, “London, 1900,” where we meet the third of three major characters:

Despite its meanness, the room above the Swindells’ shop was the only home Eliza Makepeace and her twin brother, Sammy, had ever known, a modicum of safety and security in lives otherwise devoid of both.  They had been born in the autumn of London’s fear, and the older Eliza grew, the more certain she became that this fact, above any other, made her what she was.  The Ripper was the first adversary in a life that would be filled with them.

It was interesting to happen upon this passage as it reminds me of several writing friends who are quite averse to narrative.  I think it has to do with a misunderstanding of the advice to “show rather than tell.”  There are times when skillful telling is exactly what a story needs.  In Morton’s hands, it is hard to imagine a more economical way to paint the initial sketch of a girl who constantly battles to rise above difficult circumstances in a difficult time.  Morton later shows us in detail what she tells us here, in a scene where Eliza and Sammy play the “Ripper game” to try to deal with their fear.

***

I tried this experiment with other books too, and found the very same thing – some sort of tension, mystery, anxiety, discomfort, or unease everywhere.  Maass supplies a name for a factor I never quite saw in such sharp relief before.  Sure, I knew a page-turner when I had one, but I didn’t quite know how the magic was brewed.  Here is a concept and a field guide that makes it easier to spot the quarry, like when you suddenly notice a lizard hidden on a pile of rocks.  Maass tells me it’s simple, and in these examples, it is.  Now it is just a matter of creating this page-turning tension, one word and one page at a time..

What Is Tension?

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No, I am not playing Jeopardy; I am trying to zero in on what Donald Maass considers the make-or-break element of all successful fiction.  I posted a general appreciation of Maass, agent, author, and writer-about-writing in December: https://thefirstgates.com/2010/12/07/donald-maass-and-the-breakout-novel/

In his Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook, Maass says:

Tension on every page is the secret of great storytelling.  Everyone knows that.  Practically no one does it...It’s so simple, really, and yet so many manuscripts that arrive at my office go right back to their authors in their self-addressed stamped envelopes.  Why?  The number one reason is insufficient tension.

Tension on every page works, says Maass, and low tension does not.  Good to know, but as I have considered the subject, I’ve come to think there is much misunderstanding of what tension really means.  Especially with the rise of digital special effects, you see it in movies all the time – the delusion that enough explosions can make a good story.  At the other extreme, I know writers who don’t understand that, according to Maass, tension is independent of the fictional situation:  it can happen – or fail to happen – in any situation, be it a battle or a walk in the woods.

At its simplest, tension results from anxiety over the wellbeing of a character we care about, and in the best fiction, identify with.  The Latin roots of “tension” and “attention,” are very similar, which is interesting, for as our bodies know, attention always follows tension.

One of the most interesting sections of Maass’ Breakout Novel Workbook is Chapter 22, “Low Tension Part I:  The Problem With Tea.”  In his workshops, Maass tells writers to cut “scenes set in kitchens or living rooms or cars driving from one place to another, or that involve drinking tea or coffee or taking showers or baths.”  According to Maass, “99.9 percent” of such scenes never make it into print because they:

“…lack tension.  They do not add new information.  They do not subtract allies, deepen conflict, or open new dimensions of character…Typically scenes like these relax tension, review what has already happened, and in general, take a breather.  They are a pause, a marking of time, if not a waste of time.  They do not do anything.”

Maass spends the rest of this and the next three chapters showing examples of authors who make such potentially low-tension scenes work.  How?  But creating “a mood of unease.”  In dozens of ways, conjuring “small anxieties [that] keep us on edge,” even when nothing appears to be happening.  “Mere talk does not keep us glued to the page,” says Maass, but, “disagreement does.”

***

If tension on every page is the secret of page turning fiction in any genre, I ought to be able to find it in my favorite books, the ones I have read more than once.  I have devised a little experiment I am going to try for my next post, and I invite anyone who is curious to try the same thing and comment on what you find.  Here is what I am going to do:

  • Take a half-dozen of my favorite books, especially the ones I have praised here.
  • Flip them open at random and carefully read the page I land on unless something “exciting” is going on – I want to avoid a fistfights, gunfights, or car chases, and the action-adventure genre in general.
  • See if there really is tension on that page, if that is one of the factors that makes these books so special.

In the past, I have studied these favorites for things like characterization and dialog; for descriptive language; to see how the authors deal with backstory, but I have never focused tension.  If Maass is right – and I bet he is – then this something to look for!

To Be Continued.