… I’ll tell you next week :-).

Ok. Various development in my little saga I can’t talk about. Something Napoleon said. But… not bad. It has taken my mind off writing a lot, which is bad, but there I am.

Suspense, however, IS a big part of writing. It’s a reason not to start with “My name Eirirk Thudson and this is story of how I survived the Dragons of Tulr and became King of Utgard.” It gets done, but you’ve turfed a lot of suspense and story in the first line. The reader might still be along for the ride, but they know the outcome.

Suspense has some common ground with… humor. It’s getting the audience’s expectations up, and keeping them there. The two diverge in that humor so often works when it is the wrong thing that happens, whereas in suspense, its usually the wrong thing that happens. Only in the former case it was the wrong thing you didn’t expect, in the latter, the wrong thing you feared might happen.

The thing is, especially from multiple points of view, one of your principal tools is that your reader knows what your character doesn’t, and knows what is coming is bad. This easily done when you’re interspersing different POV’s and one lot knows what your character doesn’t. It is very often managed by letting POV character 1 get to a cliff-hanger… and then switching to a scene from another point of view, which may have absolutely no bearing on the tension. Many authors keep repeating this, with the cliffhanger being pushed away again. Believe me, like most forms of teasing there is a limit, and most readers (well, me anyway) reach it quite quickly.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop is suspenseful. But if you wait three weeks it’s just tedious. Oh, unless your villain happens to be a one-legged amputee. Or ‘She heard the first shoe drop. She lay there in the darkness, as tense as a bowstring in the bed. Then after an interminable time… the next shoe dropped. Then, quite quickly, the third shoe dropped… at this point Cloe decided she would never seduce another centipede.’

The other comment I have to make about suspense is that it is seriously exhausting to the one watching and waiting. (The weeks of waiting to see if my bureaucrat Damocles would at the last minute spring free of a disaster that I could see them blithely walking themselves into. Napoleon was right about never interrupting an enemy while they are making a mistake — but he never said just how hard it was to keep a still tongue when you’re watching it with bated breath. I kept my silence, and they… just walked themselves deeper.) If you are writing it, plunging STRAIGHT from one suspense to the next risks two things: either the reader emerges from the end of the book so drained they never want to read another by you – or it just becomes tedious. Seriously, space them. Allow a recovery between, with the recovery getting shorter and shorter toward the end.

And now… until next week 🙂