EXERCISE: What's the punchline?

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Original Posting August 21, 2013

I was reading a fantasy novel recently, and the protagonist got to laughing about threesomes walking into bars. Here's the beginning of the joke he didn't finish:

A vampire, a zombie, and a mummy walk into a bar.

Go ahead and fill in the middle -- what do they say, what do they ask the bartender, what do they tell the other people in the bar? What happens, as the set up for...

What's the punchline? Blood and brains and sand on the wind? No, you can do better than that.

Go ahead, make a joke.

Sure, if you don't like that threesome, feel free to substitute nationalities, occupations, or whatever hobbyhorses you'd like to ride. Just make the punchline a good one.

And yes, I was irritated that the author tossed in this light diversion without finishing the joke. I think the protagonist could at least have given us a punch line!

Write!

TECH: Kill Your Readers? (A moldy oldie!)

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Original posting August 24, 2013

The October 1997 issue of Writer's Digest on pages 35 to 37 had an article by Carol Davis Luce with the title "Writing Suspense That'll 'Kill' Your Readers." The left-hand description reads:

"Write it right and you'll give 'em fits -- and keep them wide-eyed 'til dawn. Write it wrong, and they'll be able to get a good night's sleep. Use these four techniques to keep readers up all night."

Keep your readers awake all night? Now that sounds like something we all need to do. Carol focuses on scenes that should make your readers' hearts race. Suspense scenes!

She points out that before you get to a suspense scene, you should lay the groundwork for conflict using dialogue, narrative, and actions so that readers expect a confrontation of some kind, somewhere and some time.

So what is tension? "Tension is the act of building or prolonging a crisis. It's the bump in the night, the ticking bomb -- it's making readers aware of peril. (A baby strays from its mother and toddles onto the railroad tracks. Tension begins when, in the distance, a train whistle is heard. High tension occurs when the baby plops down in the center of the tracks and begins to play.)"

Effective suspense doesn't mean menace in every corner -- that's melodrama. But you need the potential threat of menace. You and your readers need to set the scene, feel the danger, and anticipate a disastrous outcome. All right? So here are four ways to make your scenes suspenseful -- brimming to the edge with tension and suspense.

1. The Big Bang technique. Use the element of surprise. Start with an innocent scene, deers frolicking, the protagonist enjoying a carefree walk... Bang! Disaster strikes. The meteor strikes, the bobcat eviscerates the deer, the protagonist is a quivering bundle hiding from the sudden terror. Everyone jumps with the sudden attack. "With the Big Bang, the big moment begins and ends with the bang." This doesn't have genuine suspense, which is more of a slow building effect. However, big bangs can be very effective used sparingly. Don't overdo it, readers get bored with explosions, and want something else. So that's when you use...

2. The Jack-in-the-Box technique. To do this, you take the readers slowly and steadily along a building of suspense, giving them sights and sounds and smells of pending peril. Tighten attention, stretch the reader's level of stress, get the string of tension so tight it sings -- THEN POP! The key to this is the critical moments before the Jack-in-the-Box. Turn the crank, play the music, build uneasiness, apprehension. You need to vary the pace, to give readers a chance to get excited, and to keep them guessing as to just when the Jack-in-the-Box will appear. Hint: it's usually good to have the protagonist feel that something is wrong, that there is some danger.

3. The shifty eyes technique. Scene shifts and viewpoint shifts are good ways to build tension. Start with the antagonist, hiding in the bushes. Then switch to the protagonist, whistling and wondering why the bushes are shaking. You've set up a conflict, and the reader is sitting there waiting to see it unfold. Usually these should be short scenes, and mostly used to set up a conflict before a direct confrontation. Normally the action, the confrontation, is carried out in one scene from the protagonist's viewpoint.

4. The through your eyes only technique. For strict first-person viewpoint or limited third that is sticking to the protagonist, you can build suspense by planting clues. A click on the telephone line, a breeze through a window that shouldn't be open, minor objects that are out of place... Just what's going on here?

"Suspense is a state of mind." It's up to you to build that suspense, so that your reader stays up all night.

What fun! If you want to practice, take a work in progress -- that summer story that you are playing with, and consider whether there is a good place to put a Big Bang, to wake up the reader and make them jump. Is there a Jack-in-the-Box, and do you have enough hints and suggestions to make the reader wonder just when Jack is going to pop out? Is there a confrontation that could use shifty eyes leading up to it? And of course, there's the tried-and-true trail of clues, starting with little hints and building to doors... Swinging... Shut.

Bang!

"To maximize the suspense, you must emphasize the tension; you must stretch readers' stress and emotions."

Keep us reading, whether we want to or not.

TECH: Endings! (A moldy oldie)

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Original posting September 1, 2013

The September 1997 (wow, 16 years ago? No wonder the paper is brown :-) Writer's Digest on pages 10 to 14 had an article by Nancy Kress with the title "Little Endings." Or as the subtitle announced, "How to end scenes in ways that keep readers reading."

Nancy starts out by talking about graduation speakers, and the repeated theme that commencement actually means beginning. "Graduation, they intone, is not the end of schooling but the start of whatever comes next..." Of course to the graduates sitting in the audience, commencement is an ending. The graduation ceremony marks that, and provides a bridge to whatever comes next.

"And so should the endings of your story scenes."

You don't want to end the scene with whatever happens last, exactly. You want scene endings that have little tension, a little kick -- an emotional punch. Not as big as the climax, but still something to keep people going. Nancy provide six different ways!

1. Up the stakes. When the end of the scene reveals a little bit of new information that makes the situation more serious, you're using this. For example, a line of dialogue indicating that something has happened, someone is dead, something important has changed, often acts as a revelation and a cliffhanger. This may seem melodramatic, but upping the stakes is a dramatic scene ending.

2. Reverse the character's perceptions. Like upping the stakes, adding some new information that changes how the characters view things can be a good scene ending. A last paragraph reversal raises tension, introduces another layer of meaning, and makes the characters and the reader think again about what just happened.

3. Sneak preview. Instead of looking back, try looking ahead. Give the readers a hint of what's coming. You can foreshadow dramatic events or subtle ones.

4. Use contrasting actions. Sometimes just doing something different is enough to make the ending attractive. If the character has been doing something difficult or active, switch over to simple, everyday events for a contrast. This also can illuminate the character.

5. Emote all over. Sometimes you just want to let the protagonist rant and rave. It's an emotional kick, both for the protagonist and for your reader. Do be careful to make it motivated, and reduce the theater by having it just before the ending, with a quieter paragraph or two to relax with.

6. Heighten the prose. Try using more figurative, richer language. Perhaps with some rhetorical devices, a metaphor or two, some purple prose, rhyme and rhythm? Even a rhetorical question :-) This gives the close of the scene a little more importance. It's like a decorative frame. If you going to try this, you need to be able to write heightened prose -- not flowery, melodramatic, overblown, but really rich. Second, it needs to fit into your story. A sudden outbreak of prosody in the middle of a thriller isn't likely to work. In a romance already full of theatrical drama, well, a little more may be just what the writer needed.

At the end, Nancy reminds us that you need to have variety in your scene closings. Try one of these and enjoy it, but then try some of the others. Avoid monotony. Experiment a little!

Sounds like fun. If you want practice, take a work in progress, a particular scene, and try using one of these techniques. Raise the stakes, change the perceptions, provide a sneak preview, add contrasting actions, emote all over, or enrich your language. You may even want to try writing it a couple of different ways, just to see which one works best for you in this scene.

Or you could always take something you're reading, and see if you can identify how that writer ended his or her scenes? Did they use one of Nancy's techniques, or perhaps something else?