I have the basic plot outline for a sequence in one of my unpublished series entries plotted out, and the mid-point crisis struck me as a good example of how to manipulate the reader’s feeling of suspense by hoarding information. I didn’t design the plot mechanics deliberately this way, but rumination on the elements of it finally settled on a structure that I think is useful for me to understand — it feels right this way. Maybe this will be useful for others to consider.

(My example precludes the presence of an authorial narrator.)

The general structure works like this: something is planned/expected to happen (ideally foreshadowed in advance) and then… (surprise!) that something happens. The three observing audiences are:

• The person(s) to which it happens (in this case, the primary character (hero))
• One or more characters who observe or hear about what happens
• The reader

The person to which it happens knows (privately) immediately (in fictional world real time), but you get to choose the order in which the events are made known to the other audiences. Since your only tool is the written word (and direct authorial narrative voice is disallowed), what you are trying to do is control the reader’s suspense by way of the information revealed through/to the three observing audiences.

My example is the midpoint crisis in book 5. Something happens, and it is gradually discovered afterwards that the hero is missing. Everyone worries about what has happened to him. It takes quite a while before the reader and everyone else finds out. The suspense of the accident and the final explanation of the consequences frames the midpoint crisis.

• Accident — Lab accident causes evacuation. The hero is discovered not to be among the evacuees. He might be injured (biological contamination or physical harm from the accident). Inexplicable disappearance.
• Where did he go? various reactions/worries — extended (The audience of Characters doesn’t know, and so the Reader doesn’t know.)
• The hero reappears elsewhere — he is rescued by strangers from physical distress: damaged, uncommunicative. What has happened? (Characters (and Reader) don’t know.)
• The hero hints at the devastating emotions experienced during his crisis (his reactions to the lengthy peril, not the events themselves) to his wife (without much detail) while still under initial care. (This one character (and the Reader) get their first clue about what might have happened.)
• The hero reports an official undetailed story for public use. (The characters and the Reader hear only these bald facts, but their knowledge of the details and the impact on the hero is superficial.)
• After he is brought home, the hero explains a little about the events of the initial accident (but not what happened to him afterward) to the students at his Academy. He stresses his gratitude that no one else was harmed. In the subsequent discussion of why that “responsibility” is important to him, he lectures them about responsibility being what makes a man. (The characters and the Reader get some insight into his own character/personality). We still have not had the hero’s POV on the whole incident.
• The honest discussion/personal privacy exposure of his views on responsibility sparks a nighttime rumination for the hero on his first night home, where he (finally) relives the full harrowing peril of what he has survived. He may never share the details of that with anyone in the story, but the characters may observe the consequent differences in his behavior in the future, and the Reader now knows. Only now is the suspense resolved fully.
  

Building on this, the next major plot action has the hero firming up his own responsibilities for the future. This is what he has learned in his crisis. In other words, he will settle his own suspense about what he will or ought to do by having learned something he needs to change in order to move forward.

So, in this particular instance, the unwrapping of the whole mid-point crisis is contained in the satisfactions of the suspense resolutions and its fitness for the continued character growth of the hero.

Once I had fabulated the above, I wondered what made it feel structurally satisfying to me, at a story craft level, and it was the balanced wrapping of suspense creation in order to unwrap it to the different audiences that made it work for me. So I thought I’d share that.

Anyone else have any interesting models of construction tidbits they’d like to share?