Suspense

[Pamela Jo]

An excerpt from a New Yorker article on suspense-which is too large to post here.

On the page, where silence per se is not an option, the smallest possible unit of suspense is a sentence. We don’t often think of a single line of prose as potentially suspenseful, but one of the essential jobs of a sentence is to encourage you to read the next one. (If it fails to do so, all the other possible aims of writing—explication, illumination, aesthetic pleasure, moral change—are irrelevant.) To that end, sentences must sometimes work like stories; they must make readers want to know what happens next.
Here is a successful example. Recorded in the archives of the author Carl Carmer, it is the opening line of a bit of Southern Black folklore: The knee-high man lived by the swamp. That sentence contains no action (the knee-high man did not flee from the giant) and no overt tension (the knee-high man did not feel the hammering of his heart). It contains only a character, plunked down in a setting. Yet it is full of suspense. When you read it, there is no way not to wonder: What’s up with the knee-high man? You might think that’s just because knee-high men and swamps are intrinsically interesting, but most of the suspense in this sentence comes from its structure. “The old man lived by the railroad tracks”; “Mrs. Octavia Antoinette Varnish lived on the sixteenth floor of an apartment building on Park Avenue”; “Benjamin Mooney lived in an old house on a dirt road just beyond the town line”: all of these create suspense. It is a great gift to authors that, given the character and setting of a story, the human mind naturally starts wondering about its plot.
Other sentences create suspense by different means. “At first, he counted the days by tying knots in a rope”: that one is plucked from a Wikipedia entry about Poon Lim, a sailor who survived the sinking of a British ship during the Second World War, then spent a hundred and thirty-three days alone on a wooden raft until he was rescued off the coast of Brazil. Showing up where it does, in the middle of an account of Lim’s ordeal, it is just a plainspoken statement of fact. But, if you make it the first sentence of a story, you’ve got yourself a killer lede: who wouldn’t keep reading, with that kind of opening line? After just twelve words, we are already deep in the narrative, curious about what has happened, curious about what will happen next.

 

[Pamela Jo]

In fiction, suspense is typically pleasurable no matter what occasions it. (Of course, there are some people who, finding it intolerable, avoid suspenseful works altogether, find spoiler-filled summaries, or skip to the end.) But in real life suspense comes in two varieties: a positive version, anticipation, and a negative version, dread. The positive version enhances our enjoyment of an experience by deferring it, much as a meal tastes better when you’ve waited until you are ravenous to eat it. That’s why hammy m.c.s will say things like “Drumroll, please” and otherwise find ways to delay any big reveal. Wilkie Collins, that great nineteenth-century master of suspense, famously advised his fellow-writers to “make ’em wait,” and we are often thrilled when life conforms to that wisdom. As the novelist Anthony Doerr once noted, “We want our games to go into overtime.”
We do not, however, want our misfortunes and miseries to go into overtime. Why opt into dread? At best, it is mild and brief—as with, say, the unpleasant interlude while awaiting the dentist’s drill—but at worst it is among life’s most acute agonies. No one should ever be subjected to the suspense of waiting for the radiologist’s report on an ambiguous ultrasound, or of waiting for a child who is not yet home long after curfew. Even happy resolutions to such situations do not compensate for the experience of dread, because relief, unlike suspense, is generally fleeting. You spend hours growing ever more convinced that the loved one who isn’t answering your increasingly alarmed voice mails has been killed in a car wreck; when you learn that the phone died instead, you get maybe two minutes of relief.
Curiously, though, despite the stark differences between anticipation and dread, they can feel remarkably similar. It is much worse to wait for the results of a biopsy than to wait for your crush to show up for your first date, but the experience—the nervous stomach, the inability to think about anything else—feels almost the same. Indeed, in some ways, the greatest determinant of how suspense feels is not what it is about but how much of it we experience. Like caffeine, opioids, and air pollution, it is governed by the rules of dose response.

 

[Pamela Jo]

Two factors affect the dose of suspense we receive: the importance of the event we are waiting for and the degree of uncertainty about its outcome. In situations of both high stakes and high uncertainty, our suspense will be extreme, no matter the source. It is vastly preferable to watch your daughter take her starting position for the four-hundred-metre sprint at the Olympics than it is to watch her being wheeled into the operating room for brain surgery, but both situations are maximized for suspense. Far-lower-stakes situations can also be suspenseful if their outcomes are sufficiently uncertain, while events with almost certain outcomes can be suspenseful if the stakes are sufficiently high. If you are ninety-five per cent sure that you know the answer to a question, you will not feel much suspense while awaiting the response—unless the question is “Will you marry me?”

Another factor in how we experience suspense is how long we experience it. Sometimes life, like Thomas Hardy, can supply a true cliffhanger, as you know if you’ve ever gone for a worrisome medical test on the Friday before a long weekend. In other words, real-life suspense, like its literary counterpart, is the product of a relationship between information and time. But that relationship is complex; although suspense does tend to increase with the passage of time, the change is not linear.
One final factor that determines how we experience suspense is wholly idiosyncratic: some people are simply more susceptible to it than others. I imagine that there is a smattering of souls in this world who are naturally incurious about the future; others have spent years trying to master the impulse to peer around the corner of the present, apprenticing themselves to one of the religious or philosophical traditions that encourage us to stay focussed on the here and now. That is surely sage advice, since thinking about the future can involve expending enormous amounts of energy on phantoms, but, for most of us, it is extremely difficult to follow. You can chalk that up to evolutionary exigency, because the act of prediction has always been central to our survival. No wonder we spend so much time speculating about what will happen next; we are built to be, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett once put it, “anticipation machines.”

 

[LJ Beck]

Interesting! Cool article. Suspense is actually very tricky to do well. Takes planning and the use of many tools.

I've been thinking lately about when suspense falls flat. There's one kinda of situation I've been calling "the author gotcha." When the author thinks something will provide a bit of suspense, when in fact, it confuses and might even frustrate the reader instead. I describe it as something the POV character would know, that's deliberately withheld from the reader by the author, for no other reason than to create (false) suspense and spring the reveal on them later. Even worse, when the mislead makes the read confusing.

Not sure if that makes sense. I'm still trying to find a good way to describe it. (For feedback/beta reading purposes.)