PLOTTING AND SUSPENSE WRITING

plot, formula, “the formula of no formula,” Blood Trip, suspense novels

PLOTTING AND SUSPENSE WRITING

I watched one of those Pirates of the Caribbean movies with my daughter years ago and we had to shut it off because we had no idea what was going on. Characters through all kinds of contrivances fell off boats, were picked up by others, were kidnapped, marooned on islands, resurfaced to fight, and McGuffins of all varieties were mishandled, lost, refound, stolen by the enemy, discovered again, and on and on. We realized after about forty-five minutes that we weren’t meant to track all the plot points, it seemed; just to feel the progression of a ludicrously complicated story sweep over us. This was fun, in the minds of Disney’s producers and writers. This was swashbuckling, right? Chaos and action that spins and hurtles like a ride at Disneyworld.

It made me sick.

We have an ambivalence toward plot these days. We judge the level of plot or lack of plot in our stories by a specific metric: how much does it seem to resemble life as we know it. People in some circles—popular, literate circles—shit on plot. In their minds, plot is the kind of thing that genre traffics in. A plotless story resembles life more accurately because life has no plot…or does it?

It could be that those who think life is a plotless story are not dividing up life into chunks of the right size. It’s a matter of scope and judgment. How one feels about plots in their stories can also be linked to how they feel about genres and therefore how they feel about the “mass market” appeal of narrative media like cinema, television, and popular fiction. Does it drive you nuts to see the way a storyteller gave a shape to their story, and how much it seemed to be cut from the same template as so many other stories in that category. “There’s only so many plots,” screenwriting how-to books will tell us. They go on to tell us that our story has to fit into one of the seven (or five, or four—the lower the number, the more maddening it is) plot lines they’ve figured out over the centuries of people telling stories.

I don’t have the energy to make a case for why plot matters by using examples. I get why many readers and writers (who are not dummies, by the way) prefer stories that have a meandering quality infused with a kind of modernist or post-modernist avoidance of direction and movement. Many people see life and its mimesis as a peregrinate, downbeat travelogue with no discernible shape and they write books as such. I just can tell you that as a writer, plot is not anathema to me. I think of stories and invariably I start thinking of how the events of the story can be rounded off and made into beats or split into competing streams which must rejoin later in the story at just the right moment. I like thinking of complications. That word “complication” also refers in timepieces to “any element beyond the standard hour, minute, second display,” such as an alarm, a stopwatch, calendar, etc. The complication may bespeak some larger, hidden movements in time. In plotting as I see it, it is anything beyond the standard action of the story, anything which makes the pathway from point A to point Z more convoluted and difficult. Obstacles are thrown up for both the character and the reader to get around, over, under, or to abandon for another pathway.

In a certain carefully executed way, the more complications and subplots you as a writer can incorporate, the more your story might resemble the granular complexity of real life. Life may be an absurd wandering from place to place but it is also often a sequence of problems to be solved and conditions to satisfy.

Then again, in another way, too much complication and you may have a Pirates of the Caribbean on your hands and whole sections of the audience may tune out.

So far, I’m a suspense writer. I think I watched too many suspense movies as a kid. It seems to match some inner anxiety in me to think of my nascent imaginary life obeying the rules of a thriller. I want readers to feel worried and to feel fear. I don’t know why. Maybe I’m just a repressed individual trying to express how I feel and pass off that emotion of suspense to readers like a hot potato: “Here, you deal with it!” The plot complications and intricacy if done well can heighten the suspense experienced by the reader, the way carrying a fishbowl with the beloved family pet swimming inside up a flight of stairs and then out a window onto the roof heightens the potential energy of the inevitable dropping. There’s an element of sadism to being a suspense writer. I believe Hitchcock in playing with the tension level of his audiences had some sadism to him.

One of my literary heroes, David Foster Wallace, talked in interviews about how people of his generation had come to distrust the formal conditions of storytelling such as the murder mystery when everything is sewn up at the end. They distrusted solutions. It didn’t match reality. Television and its conventions of storytelling—the syndicated sit-com, the whodunnit, the episodic drama—had lied to them after seducing them, perhaps. And yet Wallace could at times write unbearable suspense, suspense that often had no release or climax to relieve the reader and thus had a sort of “existentialist” content or message if you want to reduce it to something so crass as a content or message. But formally even though it was suspense, it was evading easy endings or resolution.

*

I’ve written several novels now, and most all of them have some tick-tock action within them of suspense. I wrote a novel called Blood Trip which was about a divorced man plotting the murder of his ex-wife’s new husband. They spend large chunks of the novel in each other’s company, one oblivious to the homicidal designs of the other in the car with him as they drive around on important missions which in the reader’s field of knowledge are subservient to the main plot of the story. I wrote the first half of the novel not knowing what would happen next, like a serial I suppose, just trying to think of ways to end each chapter so the reader would need to keep reading to find out what happens.

I won’t blow my own horn too much and act like I mastered that, but it was my goal. The second half of the novel was me trying to write my way out. I’d painted myself into certain corners plot-wise and I had to try to dissolve the knot (to mix metaphors). For this resolution I wanted to lessen the pressure on myself as the writer while ratcheting up the suspense for the reader. I had to plot out the second half more carefully than the first half of the book, to feel some satisfaction and control that I was doing my job as the suspense novelist by placing the reader over a cauldron of fear and yet resolving the situation by the time the last page was turned. Again, don’t know if I succeeded at doing that, and I can’t really ever know that for sure, but it was what I tried to do.

Another novel I wrote was a murder mystery where, as is fitting to the convention, the murderer’s identity is only revealed at the end. Along the way, the setting is articulated, characters are introduced, a mood is created. A gigolo in a ski resort town realizes he’s in trouble when one of his clientele has a car accident on her way to visit him and goes into a coma. Her estranged husband, a very violent and jealous man who had been out of the picture until now, comes to town to get answers about his wife. He brings some dangerous henchmen with him and it’s revealed that the husband is a crime lord from downstate. And then, only several chapters into the novel, a dead body of another one of the gigolo’s customers is discovered during the blizzard of the century and, although we as readers know he’s innocent, it looks incidentally like the gigolo is guilty: he was at the scene of the crime and suspicion swirls around him. The detective—who is incidentally a “trad-goth” from the 80s who reformed himself, put away his Sisters of Mercy LPs and black clothes before becoming a cop—isn’t brought in until well into the novel, after the “wrong man” scenario is set up. I’ve picked up through my understanding of getting a literary agent and selling a murder mystery to the majors that this slower pace is a no-no: the murder must happen on page one and the detective must make his appearance on page two, to put it into exaggeratedly blunt terms.

Maybe the novel will never get bought. But I felt like I had to set several large pieces of plot in motion before I brought in the detective to use his brain to restore order. It’s a formula, and I don’t know exactly what I’m doing. But I finished the thing. For this take you can hate me now: writing a well-plotted genre novel w/ decent characters and voice is harder than writing an autofiction “slice of life” book abt a suicidal gas station attendant w/ lotsa voice & zero plot. Not better per se, but more technically difficult.

At the beginning of the preceding paragraph, I said “Maybe the novel will never get bought.” Which brings the terrible specter of money into the world of art, if you can call suspense novels art. The gamble, the chips placed down on the table, is that if you write your book according to a formula and scratched certain familiar itches in the reader, they will pay you for it. Other readers, of the wandering slice of life novel sans plot I talked about earlier, want other less formulaic itches scratched and will pay money just as green for those (but under the right microscope might not those novels show something formulaic too? A self-conscious “formula of no formula”?).

Last note: I have a lot of visions of myself as a writer that I flicker through and wonder which one will come true. On one channel I’m a guy who writes crime novels on and on into the dusk as the sun of life sets. Changing the channel I write poetry. Another channel I’m writing non-fiction, and perhaps on that channel eventually there will be a book of essays and book reviews talking about this very subject. On yet another channel, and this is most interesting to me, I publish two or three or four crime novels, and I use that cluster of books as a base from which to smear my writing outwards, to explore something more literary. Balzac said something like he had to write seven novels before he got what he was doing as a novelist: one for character, one for dialogue, one for plotting, and on and on. Training exercises. The suspense novel for me is just the beginning of the superstructure. I might one day write something picaresque with a wandering life-model game piece moving here or there, or staying still in despair, that does not adhere to any plot. Plot is a matter of perspective. It’s characters swimming across the Hellespont and finally touching the other side, knowing full well that many humans get cramps and drown along the way. Plot is not “realistic.” It tends to go into a morphology which does not resemble life, but maybe it isn’t supposed to, maybe a plot is supposed to speak of something inward, not of life’s unpatterned patterns but of the mind’s way of organizing perceptions of life into a story or crystallized dream. I haven’t read enough to know what cutting edge writers are doing to elucidate this yet. I haven’t yet been hypnotized by all those foreign practitioners of literature who are pushing the novel’s forms and shapes and art. They’re writing something beyond plot, I’m sure. That’s a Matterhorn or an Everest and with my writing I’ve just come to the first promontory, the first observation point to even begin to glimpse upward at the mountain range of what a novel might do.