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a i m e e ’ s
T i p s
IN SUSPENSE By Aimee LaBrie I did something the other day that I’m not proud of. I was in the middle of reading a novel and I couldn’t stand it any longer—I had to know how it turned out. I had to know if the main character ended up with or without the man she loved. I had to know if her big secret was ever discovered. I had to know if she was left lonely and regretful or if she somehow managed to overcome her own fears to live honestly. So, I casually flipped to the last pages, as if just searching for a bookmark, all the while allowing myself to skim the words of the final chapter. I’m a good skimmer and I got my answer; it was something of a surprise, though it made sense overall. And then I was angry at myself for having ruined the satisfaction of discovering this as the author wanted me to, page by page, scene by scene. I will keep reading the book, because I love this author and he is a master of the first-person narrative, and a master of creating in the reader the all-important desire to know how the story ends.
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As fiction writers, how do we capture and maintain this level of investment? We certainly know that we don’t want to tell the story of the day that nothing happened—that slice-of-life story wherein we get an insider’s peek at a farm woman going about her day. At the same time, our readers may not care either if our stories are always end-of-days tales. Somewhere in the middle, we have to find the excitement needed to keep the eyes moving across the page. Do we need to start with a hidden explosive under the front tire of the John Deere tractor the main character will be plowing across the fields? Yes,
in a way. We need to give the reader the feeling that something important is at stake; it doesn’t necessarily have to be life or death, though it should be potentially life-altering. We find ourselves needing to invest again in character. What does this farm lady want more than anything? What stands in her way? What is she made of and how will she go about getting what she wants? What are her main weaknesses, the impediments to her desire, and will she be able to overcome them by the end? In her book on writing, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott puts it this way, “Find out what each character cares most about in the world because then you will discover what’s at stake. Find a way to express this discovery in action, and then let your people set about finding or holding onto or defending whatever it is. Then you can take them from bad to good to bad and back again. But something must be at stake or you will have no tension and your readers will not turn the pages. Think of a hockey player— there had better be a puck out there on the ice, or he is going to look pretty ridiculous.” One other key thing to think about is how the start and the finish of your
story relate to one another. A good ending in some ways returns us back to the beginning of the story, like a snake eating its tail. The two moments should speak to each other in some way to give the narrative a fullness—a sense that all is right in the world the writer has created. Not right as in good, but right as in justified; we can see now how the author carefully chose her first sentences, her opening image of the clapboard side of the barn, because she was skillfully setting us up for the final image of the cow standing still in the pasture (or something like that—always end with a cow, is my motto). If you have given your character something important to want, and if you have set her up properly to have to fight for that thing she longs for, then your readers will move along with you the entire way, experiencing twin feelings of anxiousness and pleasure as they are both worried about the ending and enjoying the ride there. Hopefully, they will also be more mature than I am, and able to delay gratification until the very last words appear.
Aimee LaBrie is an award-winning author and teaches a fiction workshop for Philadelphia Stories.
This new litmag from Philadelphia Stories publishes:
fiction * creative nonfiction * poetry * art a community of young writers
and artists from the Delaware Valley
JR.
Find out more at www.philadelphiastories.org/junior
