Both are mystery-thrillers. The difference is that Airframe is a traditional mystery. It's told 80% from the protagonist's POV and 20% from an antagonist's POV (both are women). We only know what these two characters know, and neither of them knows whodunnit until the end. While the POV villain's goal is to destroy the hero, the hero has a bigger goal with higher stakes. This antagonist is not a suspect in the hero's investigation. The hero must defeat the POV villain, but she must also solve the mystery and save the day.

Clancy's Sum of All Fears is split more evenly between POV heroes and villains. As in Airframe, one POV villain is trying to destroy the hero personally, but in this book dozens of other POV villains are much worse: they're trying to destroy the world. Typical of Clancy's works, he goes through 30-50 different POV characters, sometimes changing in mid-paragraph, and spending only about 20% of the book in Jack Ryan's POV. This annoys me. Clancy's prose is choppy and his dialogue tags are childish. And because Clancy gets into the POV of every villain, the reader starts meeting villains by page 30 and knows whodunit by page 100. In fact, the reader always knows everything. It's the characters that Clancy keeps in the dark.

Airframe uses the unknown to build suspense, while Sum of All Fears uses the known to build suspense. Yet paradoxically, and despite its many faults, Sum of All Fears is one of the most suspenseful page-turners I've ever read. For nail biting tension, it blows Airframe clear out of the sky. Sum of All Fears takes about 200 pages to get going, but the last 800 pages of this 1,000 page thriller are a tense and exciting chess game. The bad guys make clever move after clever move . . . will the good guys figure out their plan in time to save the world?

By comparing these books, I've learned that revealing everything to the reader can build more suspense than holding things back. Amazing.

As a result, I'm embarking on an experiment with my novel. Instead of relying on the unknown for suspense, I'll try relying on the known. I'll show you what the bad guys are up to. Instead of slowly developing a cast of suspects, I'll create a more coordinated team of villains. I'm going to let you know whodunit before page 80!

Anyone else have experience with this?

Of course Clancy creates characters that the reader cares about. He also gives them goals that the reader cares about. That's essential to the plot.

I'm sure this is an elementary lesson that every writer was supposed to learn early on, but I only realized it last Saturday. A character that knows danger may lurk around every corner can build suspense. As the character finds the danger (and vice versa) the reader will feel thrills and chills. Your reader will enjoy sharing the suspense and solving the mystery along with the character.

quote:

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Your reader loses the opportunity to solve the mystery, but gains so much tension and suspense that it's well worth the price.

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Let's use another example. Why did Peter Jackson decide to add scenes between Gandalf and Saruman in the first movie? Why did Jackson show the Black Riders leaving Mordor coming for Frodo? Why did Jackson show Saruman creating the Uruk-hai and then sending them to find Frodo? He did it to create suspense.

But I think a good question to ask is this: why do we feel suspense while reading the LOTR even though as a reader, we're not privy to this information? In fact, the only time I think Tolkien gives us more rather than less is in RETURN OF THE KING, when we know that Aragorn is coming to Minas Tirith with the army of the dead, and so we're eagerly waiting for him. Tolkien bound himself by POV -- namely, the hobbit's point of view. So what is it about reading the LOTR that makes us want to read even thought we're clueless to the movements of Sauron and Saruman and the fighting Uruk-hai?

“Don’t talk about baseball, there’s a bomb under the table!”

When explaining suspense, he gave the example of two characters going into a room and a bomb goes off. Boom! You have about ten seconds of shock for the audience. But if you show to the audience someone placing the bomb under the table, then you can draw out ten minutes of suspense when the characters walk in and start talking about baseball. All that time the audience will be at the edge of their seats, screaming at the screen, “Don’t talk about baseball, there’s a bomb under the table!”

Wondering who done it is one type of suspense. Knowing what danger is in store for the heroes is another. Both can be useful to the story, but knowing there is a bomb under the table provides greater suspense at any given moment.

(Edited for atrocious grammar.)

Tolkein writes in imitation heroic epic narrative...based on his understanding of traditional narratives (which was extensive).

To an extent, Clancey involves our emotions by persuading us--with massive amounts of technical detail--that the story he tells might actually happen. Yes, we do become involved in the characters, but mainly we believe that this is our fate that is being decided. We live with the relalities of terrorist attacks, nuclear weapons, untrustworthy politicians, and all the things that Clancey discusses, and we believe that he is correct about the technical workings of these things, and how they might well affect us. His books would be less accessable, but not less thrilling, if they left out characters entirely (aside from an analysis of the psychology of the main actors) and concentrated only on the details of things we know to actually exist and how they might affect the world that we actually experience.

Tolkein imitates (with a great deal of success) the narratives that have traditionally formed in response to our desire to hear stories about heroism. It is hard to say why exactly we care about these stories...the original stories were not designed--they evolved. But they survived and were transmitted because people cared about them, and something in us recognizes the elements that mark these stories as mythic that has been passed down by generations of our ancestors. And Tolkein successfully half convinces us that his stories are true, that they really happened in some distant past that conventional history has forgotten. We care about them because they feel like the real thing, even though they are not.

And of course, in modern fiction we care about and believe in the character's because we live vicariously through them for a time.

So, what does this have to do with the subject?

We feel suspense because we care about the outcome.

We care about the outcome because we believe in the story (either we believe that the events of the story have actually happened, or may happen, or we believe in the characters).

We believe in the story because we are convinced that something in the story is true.

And we are convinced by the evidence presented by the writer.

Clancey presents technical details as evidence, Tolkein presents an authentic seeming narrative as evidence, and in most modern fiction we use convincingly drawn characters as evidence. But providing a lot of evidence is the key, and that means revealing lots of information. But be sure that the information you reveal is evidence. If you are trying to convince the reader that a nuclear war could really be caused by terrorists, telling us about horses probably won't work. If you want to convince us (at a visceral rather than intellecual level) that your narrative is an actual account from our distant history, lots of details about modern physics probably won't work. And if you are trying to convince us that the characters are "real", then imitating a translation from an archaic language shouldn't be your first priority.