Creating Suspense

With the release of The Boxer and the Spy, his second book for children following Edenville Owls, award-winning mystery writer Robert B. Parker shows once again why he’s a master of creating suspense.

Parker introduces the mystery in the first chapter, showing readers how a nameless boy comes to his untimely death. But Parker doesn’t show the murder itself. Instead, he lets the reader eavesdrop on the scene.

Here’s what you’ll hear as the first chapter ends:

“You,” the man said. “You were there...”
The boy was frozen. He could hear the heavy rasps of the man’s breath.
“You heard everything,” the man said.
“I didn’t hear anything,” the boy said.
“Yeah,” the man said. “You did.”

And so the story begins with the reader wondering who killed the boy and why.

In the next chapter, the body washes up on shore, and we learn the boy’s identity. And when the boy’s classmates learn the “official” reason for his death–suicide caused by an overdose of steroids–two of the children, Terry (a ninth grader learning to box) and his girlfriend, Abby (who eventually helps him spy on the murder suspects), find it hard to believe the explanation and are told to stop asking questions.

For Terry, though, it’s as if the unsolved murder has upset the moral fabric of his universe. Only by fighting for justice can he help the universe regain its moral balance.

He must pursue the killer, if only to maintain his own moral equilibrium, even when a host of people–the school principal, the school’s top football player, his girlfriend, and his coach– warn him to stop investigating his classmate's death.

At every turn of the plot, Terry’s willingness to take risks heightens the drama. Each time he places himself in danger while getting closer and closer to the truth, the momentum of the story quickens, pulling the reader forward at a faster and faster pace. (It doesn’t hurt that Parker uses sharp, crisp dialogue to advance the plot, as well as short, snappy chapters.)

The pacing intensifies, especially in the fight scenes, each time Terry refuses to back off.

Here’s one of the fight scenes:

Terry went into his stance. Left foot forward. Hands high. He heard Carter laugh. It wasn’t about Carter now. It was about him and Gordon. They circled each other. Gordon seemed a little stiff in his movements, Terry thought. Maybe he’s a little scared too. Gordon lunged at him. Terry put a left jab onto his nose. It stopped Gordon. Terry followed with a straight right, again on the nose, torquing his forearm, turning his hip in, keeping his feet under him, breathing out hard when he threw the punch. Gordon yelped. The blood spurted from Gordon’s nose. Gordon put his hands to his nose, and Terry landed a heavy left hook on his cheekbone and Gordon fell down.
My nose,” Gordon said. “He broke my damn nose.”

When this attempt at intimidation doesn’t send Terry scurrying for cover, Carter takes things into his own hands. How could a puny freshman, after all, stand up to a varsity letterman with a full football scholarship to the University of Illinois?

Here’s how:

Carter tried to grab him with his right hand, but Terry stepped into him, which Carter didn’t expect, and turned and blocked the right hand hard with both of his forearms. Then he drove his right elbow up and across, catching Carter on the cheekbone. Carter staggered. He followed with his left forearm, turning with the natural torque of the movements, and Carter staggered backward. His arms dropped and Terry, his feet still under him, holding his stance, hit him in the middle of the face with a straight right. And Carter went down. A kind of sigh went up softly from the circle of kids.

Terry refuses to shy away from these challenges, despite finding himself overmatched again and again. In the end such scenes, as well as Terry’s courage and determination to keep to his plan until he finds the murderer, contribute to the story’s suspense.

Parker has learned over the years how to wind a story tighter than a tensely coiled spring.

If you want to learn how to create suspense in your story, you might take a look at The Boxer and the Spy to study a master at work.

For more on creating suspense, visit:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/177667/how_to_create_suspense_in_fiction.html
http://www.fictionfactor.com/articles/keepthemreading.html
http://www.writerswrite.com/fiction/michelemartinez.htm
http://www.sff.net/people/saswann/text/plot.htm#Suspense
http://www.writing-workbench.com/suspense.html
http://www.thrillerwriters.org/2007/01/ten-rules-for-suspense-fiction.html

Tightening The Wire

The suspense in Graham Salisbury's new novel, Eyes of the Emperor, is strung as tightly as a high-tension wire.

It's an amazing, white-knuckle drama, with scene after scene revealing deeper, more complex problems for Eddy Okubo, a 16 year old Japanese-American who enlists in the U.S. Army to prove his loyalty as an American in the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, when anyone with "the eyes of the Emperor" is looked upon with suspicion.

Salisbury continues to explore themes that are at the heart of his earlier works (Under the Blood Red Sun, Shark Bait, Lord of the Deep). But in Eyes of the Emperor he develops these themes further, probing into the awkward relationship between fathers and sons; the difficulty of fitting into a crowd while still preserving one's dignity; and the struggle to earn one's self-respect.

His newest story is a testament to the courage and perseverance of the Japanese-American soldiers who served in a top-secret mission after Pearl Harbor. It was a mission that tested not only their resourcefulness and character but, ultimately, their allegiance to the oath that each soldier took when signing up to fight for America against their parents' homeland.

What makes the story so memorable is partly Salisbury's exquisite use of language, with sentences like this that feel like poetry: "Out to sea, the ocean breathed slow and soft, a body sleeping under silk."

But it's also the dramatic events that Salisbury portrays with typically powerful descriptions, such as this passage as Eddy and his pals race back to base as the Japanese bomb the harbor:

"Just then, sweeping in from the mountains, a single fighter came down on us with snaps of flame flickering in its gunports. Dusty puffs of red dirt and weeds jumped out of the ground in twin trails racing straight toward us. The SP hit the dirt by the left front tire. Jack gaped at the machine-gun tracks. Cobra and Chik piled over me, all of us diving to the floor and covering our heads with our arms as bullets ripped across the hood--thwack-thwack-thwack!"

And Salisbury has an uncanny ability to imagine himself in the shoes of a 16 year-old Japanese-American boy fighting against prejudice, as in this scene when the derogatory words come from the mouth of Eddy's commanding officer:

[Sweet] gazed up at the mainland guys and sucked his teeth, like some old Kaka'ako guy watching a card game.
"If the Japs land on this beach and you hesitate to shoot them, or if you even turn around and think about leaving your post, those men back there have orders to shoot you. You understand that? If the Nips come ashore and you take one step out of this hole, you're dead men, because I don't trust you. Am I making myself clear?"
Chik's jaw dropped. Slim wouldn't even look up. Blood boiled into my brain. We were soldiers in the United States Army! Americans! To say what he said was insane.
My fist opened and closed.
Wait, wait, wait, I told myself. Calm down. Do something stupid, you get court-martialed.

This deepening mistrust, and the struggle of the Japanese-American soldiers to earn the respect of their fellow soldiers, is the primary source of the story's unrelenting tension, with Eddy's heart at the core.

It's this tension, which rises incrementally from chapter to chapter (each chapter a gem of a story in itself), that drives the main narrative forward in an ever-tightening arc toward the conflict's climax.

How does Salisbury do this?

First off, Salisbury places Eddy between a "rock and a hard place."

When Eddy decides to enlist, even though he's underage, he does so against his father's wishes. By going against his father, he knows that he may have jeopardized his father's love and respect. But he doesn't see any other way to prove to Americans harboring anti-Japanese feelings that he and his friends are as loyal Americans as anyone else.

Then, Salisbury places Eddy in a situation where his loyalty as an American is questioned by the Army, the very organization that Eddy has joined as a way to defend his country and prove his point.

What does the Army do? It ships him and his pals across the country to undertake a mission that is based on the flawed and perverse premise that Japanese men have a different scent than white men. Eddy and his fellow Japanese-Americans are ordered to serve as "dog bait" to help train dogs to seek out and kill the enemy.

Each chapter raises the stakes for Eddy, threatening his self-esteem and feelings of self-worth until, ultimately, his life itself is endangered. With each successive turn of the screw, Salisbury tightens the wire until it nears its breaking point, placing Eddy in greater and greater physical --and emotional--danger.

The question that Salisbury plants in his reader's mind from the beginning is this: will Eddy survive these ordeals... and will he emerge with his dignity intact?

To surmount each obstacle, Eddy must discover his own inner resources--his faith in himself and in his ability; his loyalty to a cause greater than the poorly conceived mission; his oath of allegiance to the army; and, even more importantly, his desire to make his father proud and not shame his family.

It's only once he finds that place deep inside himself--the place where he can trust himself--that he can find the strength to persevere under the most trying conditions and earn the respect of his fellow soldiers, both white and Japanese-American.

In the end, Eddy can't eliminate his own fear of war or death. But he can work to prove that beneath the surface of a man's skin, regardless of color or physical appearance, each soldier is the same: an American, willing to risk his life for his country.

If you're wondering how to create tension and suspense in your story, take a look at Eddy's struggle across this tightly strung wire.

Few writers turn the screws better than Salisbury.

(For more information on Graham Salisbury and his work, check out his website at www.grahamsalisbury.com. An interesting interview with him that appeared a few years ago is at http://www.cynthialeitichsmith.com/auth-illGrahamSalisbury.htm.)

[Full disclosure: I must admit that I'm a biased fan of Graham Salisbury. I studied with him at Vermont College, where he was a member of the founding faculty of the MFA program in writing for children, and count myself lucky to have been one of his students. Not only is he an amazing writer, he's a remarkable teacher, as well.]