Cheap Suspense and Perhaps How Not To Do It

A few weeks ago I was complaining about cliffhangers. Because no one likes the guy who complains but doesn’t offer solutions, I have made a casual search for some solutions.

THE PROBLEM

The problem is the misuse of a very specific storytelling technique: when and how to cut between distinct, parallel storylines within, say, one novel. Say we have a chapter or sequence concerning Character Group A. That chapter comes to a climax and ends. Then the narrative shifts elsewhere, to Character Group B. Then their story reaches a climax point and their chapter ends. Maybe we return to Group A, or maybe we move to Group C. Rinse. Repeat. This technique is not a problem—lots of writers use it just fine—but it can also be tempting to use it in a cheap way to lure readers through a book. That's when it becomes a problem.

I was reading GAME OF THRONES years and years ago. I loved the first book. I loved how cruel Martin was to his characters. I loved how intense the story was. I enjoyed book one so much that I rushed to get book two. As the story went on, I noticed the rhythm of the scene cuts between chapters was started wearing on me. At some point I just started reading all of Arya’s chapters, then all of Tyrion’s chapters, and so on. I didn’t like doing this, but I felt like it was the only way to enjoy the things I did like about the book I bought. I didn’t want to listen to thirty pages of Littlefinger pontificating at length about royal lineages when Arya was in the middle of fending off a Wyvern with her bare feet (or something). After book two, I was starting to feel skeptical about the direction of this series, but with optimism I picked up book three… only to find that instead of following up on the dangling threads from the end of the previous book, I was introduced to entirely new characters. I don’t remember the specifics, I only remember being furious. I can’t go back to look for the specifics, because after a few chapters of book three, I took them all to the used book store, I was so mad. I liked what Martin was doing in a lot of ways, but I felt he was almost disdainful of my time and intelligence, parcelling out his story this way, not demonstrating any confidence that I might like his story enough to keep reading, instead stringing me along with cheap suspense.

GAME OF THRONES is not unique here. I've encountered the same feeling elsewhere, often in Prestige Television Series.

All I want is to not make readers as mad as this technique makes me (as a reader). I think what makes or breaks the feeling is dependent on how and when the scene cuts are made, and what the author gives the reader going into that scene cut.

“At the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.” - Maya Angelou, apparently. It's an evergreen idea, so I only partially apologize for shoehorning it in here.

A CAVEAT

I might have an unpopular opinion on this topic. I suspect that many readers either don’t notice this aspect of storytelling or are propelled and intrigued by it. It draws them in and keeps them hooked, and they don’t mind, or maybe they like it.

Yes, I’m asking you to not structure your writing like GAME OF THRONES, an extremely popular book series. If you take that advice to heart, you might be running the risk of not writing a similarly popular book or series of books. I’m not sure what the correlation is between being borderline-antagonistic with your readers and them wanting to come back for more, but I’m asking you not to do that.

The potential solutions below might work or they might not. I haven’t tested them myself and I haven’t done the scholarly work to analyze their presence in other works. I can’t even be sure that these ideas would produce a story I would like to read. I’m just thinking out loud. Your Mileage, as they say, May Vary.

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SOME IDEAS

Unpack every storyline at the start.

Lay out all your parallel storylines in subsequent chapters before getting too crazy with high-stakes cliffhangers. Open the suitcase of your story and lay out every piece of clothing on your reader’s hotel bed (and, if possible, confirm that there are no secret clothes in a hidden luggage compartment). Introduce us to your characters and make us like them. Give us a taste for their setting. Once you’ve shown your reader your complete palette of characters, then start cranking up the fury.

Specifically, don’t crank up all the stakes and all the excitement across three parallel storylines and then expect me to give one tenth of a damn about some new character you’re introducing toward the end of Act Two. Unless, of course, you can show your reader how this new character relates to the already-established scenarios.

Give your readers a parting gift.

Before your scene or sequence ends, please answer at least one question. Resolve something. Tie up a lingering thread. Give your reader something to show that you’re not just going to keep piling on question after question without any sort of resolution.

Know which question to hang on.

I’m reading Brian K Vaughn and Cliff Chiang’s PAPER GIRLS right now, and at the end of one scene, a girl says “uh oh I brought something through the portal with me” and we get a hint that there’s a super-giant creature looming over her. We cut to a few pages-worth of a mundane scene, and when we cut back, the creature is revealed to be an immense tardigrade. In this example, the cliffhanger question was, “what is the creature?” Before we cut away, that’s all we’re wondering: “what is the creature?”

Your reader knows (due to familiarity, if nothing else) that eventually, we’re going to find out what exactly the creature is and what it looks like. If you make the reader ask “what is the creature?” you have to tell us, and we know that the next time we cut back, you’re going to do exactly that. You’ve made it predictable.

IMHO, a more interesting question would have been, “what is the giant tardigrade going to do?” Before the cut, show us the creature. Reveal it. I promise that I am interested enough in what will happen that I will continue reading. Plus, revealing the giant tardigrade ends the scene on a big, impressive note. It feels rewarding. And then, the reader is left to wonder, “what is going to happen when we cut back?” suspecting that it will probably be interesting. (Note: make it interesting.)

Is it all about balance?

Is this whole thing about making sure that every storyline is at least as interesting as the others? So that when you steer the reader from one setting to another, they are enthusiastic to dive back in, as opposed to angry to have been taken away from something they liked? If so, how do you do that? It seems difficult and perhaps foolish to try to quantify that sort of thing.

I suspect it would be hard to intercut a storyline about “will the spy successfully escape the enemy compound, now that the alarms are going off” with a languid mood painting of the English countryside. Of course, having said that, that sounds so ridiculous that it might just work.

Humour fixes everything.

I bet you can get away with basically anything if you can make your reader laugh. If your reader trusts that wherever the story goes, you (the writer) will make them laugh, they probably don’t care if you cut from the highest-stakes situation imaginable to the dullest bedroom sit-and-think, because they have faith that you (the writer) will give them the joy of humorous writing. I bet it’s funny in itself if you cut from something high-stakes to something mundane (as suggested above).

Reading Terry Pratchett recently makes me think this might be true. I read Pratchett as much for the author’s voice at least as much as I do for the twists and turns of the story.

Show how the scenes relate.

Supposedly, the sole reason to go to all the trouble of juggling parallel storylines is so that you can bring them together at some point for some great effect that achieves your authorial intent. Are you able to show (or hint to) your reader how they relate as you’re going along?

A lot of the mystery and appeal of the story of Emily St John Mandel’s novel STATION ELEVEN lies in the question, “how could all these disparate parallel storylines possibly be connected?” The author presumably approached the project with the intent of creating that effect. I’m not sure why exactly it felt like it worked, but perhaps it’s because the storylines are so disparate that you can’t help but want to see how they will connect. They do seem balanced; the intensity is measured out and distributed well. No one storyline is much more interesting than another. Perhaps that helps.

If that’s not the effect you’re trying to create, if you’re not trying to build to some sort of crescendo of accumulated meaning, can you show your reader what unites seemingly-separate scenes? (Feel free to answer no or I don’t want to.) If upon encountering a new storyline, the reader wonders, “why should I care?” do you have an answer to that question?

In the DELILAH DIRK AND THE PILLARS OF HERCULES, we stay with DD, Selim, and the Newspaper Writer until we cut away to France, to show how a newspaper story about DD has enraged some cruel blonde-haired man. The newspaper unites the primary storyline with this offshoot, and it does so within a page and a half. The reader is not long left wondering why they have been snatched away from the primary storyline. At any rate, I cut from the primary storyline at a point that had lots of potential, lots of promise, but which wasn’t a dangling thread.

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My goal here is not necessarily to change how you write, but to encourage us all to think about how we make these storytelling choices. And look, there’s no need to be a purist about this: Chapter One of PRACTICAL DEFENCE AGAINST PIRACY ends with the cheeky line, “he [the ship’s captain] was the first to die [when the pirates attacked].“ But the reader (ideally) knows in their heart that the question of “will the ship’s captain die?” is not the focal point of the story. Instead, the little line plants a seed that (again, ideally) makes it more interesting when we spend a few pages in the next chapter seeing the elaborate island defences, building excitement for this inevitable attack that’s going to kill the captain.

Anyway, as a reader, all I want is to be shown some small degree of respect, and not get yanked around by phony-feeling storytelling tricks. I bought your book. Don’t trick me. Respect your reader’s time, their intelligence, their emotions, their wallet, and the faith they demonstrated by opening your book to its first page: that you, the author, have made something worth reading.