).
In short, how does one create suspense? I foreshadow, somewhat, with my verb usage, but I don't think its enough.
Thanks for any help you can give. I've been asking quite a few questions here lately, you've all been a wonderful help.
Sympathy and suspense are the pushing forces that raise tension in a story. Sympathy in most story modes is a product of pity-fear resonance with a protagonist's predicament. In the case of a mystery, sympathy comes from involvment with the detective who's predicament is finding out who done it. It's no great stretch to figure out why in the 20th Century A Who Done It was a perjorative term for a mystery story.
Psychological thrillers' mainstay is finding out who done it and catching the malefactor by figuring out why it was done. Answering the why question is a primary driver of suspense in psychological thrillers.
Not mentioned in Wikipedia's suspense topic is a working, accessible definition of suspense; artfully delaying an answer to a question posed in a story, like who done it or why it was done. The gist is there though. The first question posed by either a mystery or a psychological thriller is what happened.
Mickey Spillane is an acknowledged master of mystery. Patricia Cornwell, at least one of many but one of the more successful psychological thriller authors.
[This message has been edited by extrinsic (edited January 19, 2009).]
I think in its simplest form, suspense has two elements. The reader cares what happens to a character and the reader either doesn't know what's going to happen or is afraid something bad is going to happen.
In the chapter of yours that I read, you had built suspense. I cared what was going to happen to Emmy and I was afraid it was going to be something bad. From elements you had given me, I wasn't even sure if this king wasn't going to turn out to be some kind of bluebeard, murdering his wives when he was finished with them.
Foreshadowing can lend a sense of impending doom, I guess. But I prefer to think of foreshadowing as a little trail of bread crumbs. The trail is left so that when I reveal something surprising, the reader hopefully says "Oh!" instead of "Huh?".
Suspense implies tension drawn out over time before it is resolved. There's also an implication that the stakes are increasingly higher as the story unfolds in the context of the suspense/thriller genre. Often this is achieved by increasing the complexity and strength of the obstacles to match the character's increased attempts to defeat them. At least that's what I glean from reading such books.
Jeopardy is where the reader knows stuff the characters don't (at least this is how I like to remember it). Tension is built in the reader as, forex. a woman and a child arrive home, not realizing that zombies have broken into the cellar. The reader will assume that the family will be killed (before it happens) and that creates tension until, of course, you show a way out at the last moment. Or kill them--depening which way you go.
Of course to achieve this you need either to have a few POV's or use clues that the reader will pick up.
Good point. I'll probably add that to my list of ways to create tension (or you can leave a comment on my blog describing your point so you can get the credit for bringing it up ).