Suspense, False & Real:
Dispensing Information

71}FLIRTING WITH DANGER:
FALSE SUSPENSE

Writers abuse flashbacks for one of two reasons: 1) they don’t know where their stories really begin, or 2) they aren’t sure what story they’re telling. This brings us to false suspense.

A fiction writer’s job is to tell stories, not to hide them. This should be obvious, but isn’t. Often—as a workshop leader and as editor of a literary journal—I read stories where, within the first pages, I find myself asking: Who is this person? Is this a man or a woman? What is his/her name? How old is he/she? And—the ultimate question born of such questions: What am I reading, and why?

In effect the author is saying: Keep reading and I’ll tell you my heroine’s name and what country she’s in and who has just flung open the door to her boudoir and announced, “Vidor is dead!” (And who in blazes is Vidor? That information, too, will presumably be furnished in good time.)

The problem with such a strategy is that it assumes enormous forbearance on the part of readers. We do not read in order to learn information already known to the characters, but to share in their experiences and to learn, with them, the answers to more interesting questions, like: What will happen next? How will X respond? And what effect(s) will X’s response have on Y?

These, you’ll note, are plot questions.

While a writer may aspire to raise philosophical questions in his readers, plot questions are what keep them reading. And whatever else we do, we have to keep our readers reading—always bearing in mind that readers are rude. Unless they’re taking a required freshman course, nothing compels them to keep turning pages. The vaguest twinge of hunger, or bladder urge, or itch, may prompt them to table your masterpiece and never pick it up again.

Readers hold all the cards. They can be rude; you can’t. And one way to be rude is to tease people. Writers who capriciously withhold information are teasing. They do so for the same reason they abuse flashbacks: because they don’t trust their story, or they have no story to tell.

72}AND THEN SHE WOKE UP: CAPRICIOUS
WITHHOLDING OF VITAL STATISTICS

The classic example of a strategy based on withholding information is the “and then she woke up” story, where the reader discovers, at the last possible moment, that what he’s been reading was only a dream. All this time Pamela has been sound asleep and safe in her bed, with no giraffes chasing her after all!

That’s good news for Pamela, but a terrible way to tell a story, and a worse way to treat your reader, who invested in Pamela’s giraffe-plagued universe only to have it yanked out from under him. The perpetrator of this strategy might defend himself by saying, “Well, Pamela didn’t know she was dreaming, so I’m not withholding any information to which my character is privy.” She may not know she’s dreaming, but the author knows damn well, and if he’s being honest with himself and with his material he will provide clues to indicate that we are reading, not reality, but a dream. (He might also go fish for another plot.)

I call this strategy false suspense. If your reader is sufficiently patient or gullible, it may carry him along for a few pages, or even for most of your story. But sooner or later the jig is up; you have to show your hand. At that point, the few readers who’ve stuck with you will be disappointed and resentful. The longer this strategy “works,” the more resentful your readers will feel.

73}EEING RED: TRICK—OR TREAT?

A story whose strategy depends entirely on deceiving the reader is likely to fail, since readers don’t want to be deceived. This is why withholding information is usually a bad idea.

An author sets out to fool readers into thinking they’re reading a murder mystery, with the bodies of two children splayed out on a kitchen floor. No alternative reason is given for why the kitchen is in disarray, why the knife drawer is left open, why the bodies are lying in “red puddles.”

In fact, the blood isn’t blood but strawberry syrup. It’s Halloween, and the children have decided to pull a gruesome prank on their parents. Trick or treat?

Alas, for the reader, no treat, just a trick. The story doesn’t work—or if it does, the effect is merely annoying. To make the “trick” work, the author had to cheat on her point of view. She couldn’t tell the story from the children’s viewpoint, since that would give the game away by making it clear that they’re quite alive. And she can’t tell the story from the parents’ point of view without spilling the beans that it’s Halloween and they’d been out trick-or-treating an hour earlier. She can’t even employ a peripheral narrator: A bystander would instantly notice the family dog calmly lapping up the “blood”—which, incidentally, smells like strawberries. Any reasonable witness would guess within seconds what’s going on—but the author wants her effect to last a page and a half. To pull it off, she resorts to a sort of objective default omniscient point of view: i.e., no point of view at all.

False suspense often goes hand in hand with inconsistent or nonexistent viewpoint. Moral: Don’t trick readers, or they may see red.

74}BLACKMAILING PAMELA:
COYNESS VS. SUSPENSE

If there’s a line between false suspense and coyness, it’s a fine one. With false suspense, an author deliberately constricts the flow of information to keep readers disoriented, betting that—rather than jump off —they’ll stay with it until they’ve gained all the facts. A coy author withholds information more subtly, aiming not to disorient readers but to keep them on their toes.

Then there are authors who provide information as a way of teasing. I’m always telling my students, “Don’t withhold information.” However, when one student turned in a story that began, “Pamela was late for her meeting with the extortionist,” I had to question that advice.

In this case, a key piece of information was trumpeted in order to grab me “by the throat.” I would have preferred to be ushered into the story more subtly, with Pamela arriving late for her rendezvous with a man she knows only as “Mr. Smith.” We see Pamela running, checking her wristwatch, threading her way through Grand Central Station. Why is she running? She gets to the terminal, wipes the sweat from her forehead, searches for a man wearing a “wash coat.” Could that be him over there? What is a wash coat, anyway? By the time we encounter “Mr. Smith,” we’ll know this meeting isn’t casual or pleasant, and that Mr. Smith, whoever he is, is not to be trusted.

I hear you say: Isn’t this “withholding information”?

Yes, and no. To be sure, the reader is not being told everything. Who is “Mr. Smith”? What does he want? Why is Pamela so frantic to meet him?

But these are all plot questions, questions that keep us reading without frustrating our ability to appreciate what’s going on in the present moment. That Pamela is being blackmailed is not immediately relevant. She’s not thinking, I’m being blackmailed. She’s thinking, Did he say information booth or ticket window?

By writing such a scene from inside our protagonist, we find ourselves besieged by the present moment, rather than thinking in headlines.

75}DARK MATTER: TOO MUCH LEFT OUT OF
A STORY ABOUT CHILD ABUSE

By now it should be clear: One of a writer’s biggest challenges is knowing how much information to give to the reader, and when. In every story some information is given to the reader directly, through bald statement, and some through implication. By involving readers’ imaginations and intellects more directly and deeply, implication is usually more effective.³⁴

On the other hand, it’s possible to leave too much to readers’ imaginations. In a story about two children who have been abused by their father, the prose is swift and sure: The sentences flow, and almost every sentence carries action. The writing is tense, dramatic. But I have two questions:

  1. Who is the narrator (the unnamed girl) telling her story to?

  2. Why is she telling it?

The narrator knows something is wrong; she intuits that what has happened to her with her father in the past was bad and wrong, something that shouldn’t have happened. She sensed it then, and she senses it more clearly now that she realizes the same thing may be happening to her younger sister.

That much is clear from what’s written. What isn’t clear is just how much the narrator understands. If she understands as little as she appears to, why is she telling the story at all, and why now?

If the circumstances are dire enough, if the first-person narrator understands that what has happened to her may be happening to her sister—if, in other words, the story has some real urgency behind it—then the narrator’s sense of urgency should compel her to tell her story as clearly as she is able—not vaguely and hazily, as in the given story.

Maybe the narrator is writing a letter telling an outsider what has happened, trying urgently to convey what she has witnessed, to express her fears about something she only partly understands, something she intuits is bad but without knowing any of the technical terms or the exact reasons why. Yet she must make everything as clear as possible. That should be her motivation, and her author’s, too. Coyness has no place in a story where the stakes are so high.

What’s the difference between being coy and conveying information through implication? The difference is one of intention. If an author tells us either too much or too little in order to manipulate us, then she’s being either melodramatic or coy. But if she’s being true to the characters and their situation, then she’s not being coy, she’s being subtle; she’s not being melodramatic, she’s being direct.

Give your readers what they need to know to understand and appreciate what they’re reading. Nothing more, and nothing less.

76}TOO MUCH DIRECTLY STATED IN A
STORY ABOUT CHILD ABUSE

But of course, when it comes to writing fiction, no general laws or principles apply consistently to all cases—so I’m about to contradict myself (or seem to). That is the nature of art: Establish a rule and see it broken.

Another student turns in a story with a similar theme, about Katie, an eight-year-old whose father has been abusing her sexually. The story is written from the point of view of Katie’s slightly older sister, Lizzie. The chosen point of view makes the story as much about communication as about sexual abuse—about how anger, confusion, and betrayal are both expressed and suppressed in the same person.

By filtering the story through Lizzie in the third person, however, the author keeps the reader at a distance from the dramatic experiences that are at the heart of the story. It’s like watching a play through a gauze curtain. If the story is about what Lizzie understands and interprets based on the actions and suggestive utterances of her little sister, it might be more effective to write it in the first person, making Lizzie the “I” of the story (as a peripheral narrator/eyewitness).

Also, if the story is about the way a little girl communicates her distress in the face of trauma, the style should probably be as subtle and indirect as Katie’s limited means of communication. By having Lizzie question her sister directly about her father’s conduct, thereby making the subject of child abuse explicit rather than implicit, the story loses much of its potential power. ³⁵ It might be more effective to indicate the sexual abuse through implication— perhaps with the rocking horse in Katie’s bedroom serving as a symbol for her desire to escape.

As writers we always have to walk a thin line between giving too much and too little information. The trick is to suggest or imply (rather than state) as much as possible, but without being coy, causing confusion, or generating false suspense.

Suggested readings: Joyce’s “An Encounter”; D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking Horse Winner”; William Carlos Williams’s “The Use of Force” (about a pediatrician examining a little girl with diphtheria).

77}GENEROSITY: PROVIDE, PROVIDE

They say it’s better to give than to receive. It’s also better, when writing fiction, to be generous than to withhold. Here is the proof:

My father wanted to show me something, but he wouldn’t say what. He only said I should go get my gun, my thirty-six-aught-six, and follow him. This happened just outside Bend, Oregon, where we lived in a ranch house surrounded by ten acres of woods. I was twelve at the time: old enough to shoot a gun, young enough to fear the dark.

This opening to Benjamin Percy’s story, “Refresh, Refresh,” about a group of young men at loose ends in the Oregon countryside, following the deployment of their reservist fathers to combat in Iraq, is nothing if not generous.

Look at the amount of information given. The protagonist is a twelve-year-old boy who is afraid of the dark and whose father presumably hunts. The setting: Bend, Oregon. The passage is pure information, pure generosity. I think of that Robert Frost poem, “Provide, Provide.” That’s what the author does here: He provides his readers with information. He communicates; he shares, he gives. He is bountiful; he holds nothing back. So different from the author lounging in an upholstered chair, chatting us to death while swirling the brandy in his snifter.

Originally published in The Paris Review, “Refresh, Refresh” was subsequently selected for Best American Short Stories 2006, The Pushcart Prize XXXI, Best of the Small Presses, and the Plimpton Prize. It pays to be generous.

That’s what I try to teach my students, and what I try to practice in my own writing: to give everything away and hold nothing back, while leaving as much room for implication as possible.

78}MAKING IT WORTH THE CLIMB:
THE VIEW FROM MT. FICTION

When you ask readers to read a short story (let alone a novel), you’re asking them to take a journey with you up a steep climb of exposition, or rising action, to the summit, where a climax of some kind will occur. Following this climax, readers will stand alone on this precipice with an unhindered view of the world they’ve just experienced, and even, perhaps, of life in general.

As author you’re charged with equipping the reader with all the tools and information necessary not only to arrive at the summit, but to appreciate the view from there. That means withholding nothing crucial or basic, while at the same time providing nothing unnecessary or sooner than necessary: The journey is arduous, and every unnecessary bit of information makes it more so.

False suspense weighs your reader down with useless yet burdensome questions. It not only makes the climb much harder, it also spoils the view from the top.

The solution is straightforward: Have a story to tell and tell it. Never withhold crucial information. Eudora Welty said so, and she knew a thing or two about telling stories.