Ways of Maintaining Suspense

• Ticking clock/deadline
• Convergence – multiple pov characters and the reader’s knowledge that when two of them get together, something bad will happen
• Planet/damsel in distress
• Revelation of mysteries/connections/relationships
• Cost – the hero will have to pay something in order to find something out
• Weakness of character which the character will have to find out

Don’t use just one of these things. Keep your reader turning pages.

The richer your cake the better, but it’s still got to look like cake at the end. – Walter

Examples: Dorothy Sayers, who uses many red herrings and reveals; The Floating Admiral; the note at the beginning of Gaudy Night.

Raising Stakes and Reveals

Raising the stakes, also known as escalation, works at both micro and macro level. For example, in “Jumping Jack Flash,” we start with a small favor which is low stakes, and then things start escalating.

Raising the stakes serves to draw the reader in. A personal investment can get larger, or an interest, or an interest can become an obsession. Or a character can find out things about him or herself.

Examples:

• Pygmalion – not just a ball at the end, but must fool a language expert.
• The person who could tell you needed information is missing or dead.
• The walls of the trash compactor start closing in during Star Wars.
• The Millennium Falcon breaks down.

Escalation can occur by making the danger get closer as well as larger. For example, the Xeroxing scene in “The Nasty Girl”, in which she is Xeroxing papers while someone gets closer and closer to catching her, so we hear the slow grind and whir of the machine as the other person approaches and the tension gets higher and higher.

You can also raise the stakes by inserting a deadline. Things like weddings and courtroom scenes have built-in deadlines. These deadlines can be real or artificial, but artificial deadlines usually occur in comedies. Examples of deadlines: “Around the World in 80 Days”, “The Batchelor”, in which he must get married by a deadline in order to receive his inheritance.

Reversals occur when an action happens that sends the plot in a completely different direction. They change the question that the reader is asking. Reversals almost always raise the stakes. You can have double and triple reversals as well as reversals that take you off guard and set up the next reversal. The dinner scene in “Hello Dolly” is a study in one reversal after another.

J. R. R. Tolkein is the master of reversals that do something that is simultaneously good and bad. Bad events with a good consequence and vice versa. Examples include Gollum’s snatching the ring, going through the forest and getting attacked by Old Man Willow but escaping the Barrow-Wights, Eowyn’s almost death and subsequent meeting Faramir.

Reversals do not have to be bad. The Red Sea parting is a reversal, as are all miracles.

Reversals can occur at any point of the story. If they occur in the beginning, it’s part of the set-up. They most commonly occur at the end, as in the stories of O. Henry and Saki.

One way to plot raising the stakes and reversals is to make a smallest to the greatest chart. Hitchcock’s “The Birds” is a study in escalation.

Walter on Plots

Plots are like Musical Movements

This is the Sean Stewart description of plotting: the symphonic theory of the novel. You can’t have fortissimo all the way.

1. First movement is the sonata. Introduce the theme and then a variation on the theme in a second key, and then variations that blend the two.
2. The second movement is usually slow, passionate, emotional. Very different than the first movement.
3. The third movement is a lively scherzo or minuet.
4. The fourth movement is a new theme that blends with the rest and then finishes with a boom! Themes appear and reappear here.

Types of Stories/Narratives

1. The story of resolution, in which there is a problem, then attempts to resolve it, then either the failure or success of those attempts. Example: Nova by Samuel Delany.
2. The story of revelation, in which the character must discover something, often about themselves. Examples: stories by James Joyce, H.P. Lovecraft’s "The Shadow over Innsmoth", Bob Shaw's“The Light of Other Days”.
3. The story of character, in which the central character is put under pressure in order to show the reader what s/he is like. Example: “Lot” by Ward Moore.
4. The story of paralysis, in which a passive character is not in control. This is usually not seen in genre fiction.
5. Trick endings, which used to be a staple of science fiction.
6. The story of decision, in which a character must make a decision. The trick is to surprise the reader with the result.
7. The story of explanation, in which a character is puzzled until they figure the explanation out. Example: stories where the ending turns out to be “We are all living in a jar of Tang”.
8. The mystery story, where a character must find out something that is hidden.

Stories can fit into multiple categories – you can blend and mix these as the themes of one’s story.

Some additional types of plots:

• The “one damn thing after another” type story.
• Deliberately unplotted, a technique which is for experts only. Examples: The English Patient (book, not film); Course of the Heart by M.J. Harrison.
• An idea with variations. Examples: Heinlein’s juvenilia, particularly The Puppet Masters.

Avoid plot coupon stories: “First, get the Spear of Wanking, then the Cup of Congratulation, then travel to the Mountains of Metaphor for the Simile of Smiting." In a quest story, each stage changes the hero. You have to bring something to the formula that makes it unpredictable.

Ways of Plotting

• The Daniel Abraham method – he sets a word limit, figures out 14 chapters, in which each chapter is four scenes of 1500 words each.
• The Stephen Brust method – he doesn’t know what he’ll write, just starts and is charming and entertaining while he writes towards a big scene in the middle. If something is introduced in chapter three, it gets worked out three chapters from the end.
• The Walter Jon Williams method – Like a multi-stage rocket or multi-act play, with one huge reversal in each stage. Work out the three or four big scenes in each stage and write towards those. Lather, rinse, repeat as necessary, with the biggest at the end.

Mickey Spillane example with a reversal in the last word.

One reason to have multiple people on stage is because that creates many, many options. (Connie).

Plot whole-heartedly – “If you’re going to bump it, thump it when you bump it.” (Gypsy)

Get really close to characters and they will behave in the ways they should.