Creative Writing Dean R Koontz Writing Popular Fiction (2004)

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or lose his life. Also, he should be pursued by more than one man; otherwise, if he were a true hero, he
would not run but would turn about, confront his lone opponent and deal with him at the first
opportunity. The use of several implacable villains not only strengthens the protagonist's motivations for
flight, but makes his situation all the more perilous. (How will he foil six determined men? He hasn't got
a chance against those odds!)
Each step of the chase should build suspense by making the hero's hopes for escape grow dimmer. Every
time a new ploy fails to lose the chasers, the hero's options should be narrowed until, at last, it seems that
each thing he tries is his only hope, each momentary reprieve from death looking more like his last gasp
than the reprieve before it. This narrowing of options can be created in two ways in the chase story. First
of all, the distance between the hero and villains should constantly narrow. When he stops to rest, the
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villains should go on; every trick he tries to throw them off the trail should only slow him down and give
them a chance to get nearer; when he thinks he has lost them and stops to rest a few hours, they should
pop up unexpectedly, nearer than ever. Second, options may be narrowed if the villains drive him out of
places where he moves with relative alacrity, into landscapes he is unfamiliar with and where he
becomes further alienated from hope. For example, a tough city hero might be less formidable in wild
country. Likewise, a country man might be forced to flee into the city where everything seems hostile
and dangerous to him. A rich man may be driven from the halls of power and wealth into the city's slums
where he can find no succor and make no friends.
Few suspense novels generate narrative tension exclusively through the chase. A rare exception is Alan
Dipper's modern chase story, The Paradise Formula, which seems to have been modeled on the more
famous but inferior The 39 Steps by John Buchan. The new suspense writer is on more solid ground if he
augments his chase sequences with other tension-generating techniques.
THE RACE AGAINST TIME
Setting a time limit for the events of the story creates an urgency that adds to the suspense page by page.
For example: "Unless he located Hawfield in twenty-four hours, the girl would be killed," or "He had six
hours to reach the rendezvous point, and if he did not make it, he would be left alone behind enemy lines
without resources of any kind." As the minutes tick by, each obstacle to the hero's progress is magnified
and made more (pleasantly) frustrating for the reader.
Two novels which make superb use of the time limit are John Lange's Binary (in which a federal agent
must find two hidden tanks of deadly nerve gas, in the center of a city, before their scheduled time of
detonation) and Michael Mason's 71 Hours (in which Secret Service and FBI agents have exactly
seventy-one hours to locate a hired assassin before he shoots the Russian Premier at a scheduled
diplomatic mission landing at a Washington airfield).
Be certain that your time limit is a genuine restriction on the development of the plot. Don't send your
hero racing towards a place when, in actual fact, there's no reason for him to be there in two hours instead
of two days. Something drastic should transpire if he fails to reach the place in time.
If you have set a time limit for your hero and propelled him into a breakneck journey, don't put more than
one accident of Fate in his way. If he is delayed by a long freight train crossing the road, don't repeat a
similar incident with a herd of cows, and don't confront him with a landslide across the highway after
those first two unexpected delays; the reader will stop believing your story. You must build obstacles
from the hero's own actions. For example, if he is reacting to the pressure of the situation by driving too
fast for the road conditions, it is logical for him to wreck the car. He will then need to find another
vehicle or continue on foot. If he is in a blind rush to get where he's going, he might steal a car that's
parked nearby with the keys in its ignition, and a confrontation with police might ensue, further delaying
him. The reader would not mind this sort of obstacle, for he can see cause and effect, which are missing
when the obstacle is a trick of Fate.
ANTICIPATION OF A VIOLENT EVENT
The third method of creating narrative tension anticipation of a violent event should be implicit in the
first two techniques. The man being chased is trying to avoid his own death or trying to keep information
from the antagonists which would allow them to wreak havoc on other people. The race against time is
entered for the express purpose of preventing some deadly, disastrous event. If this violent event is not
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his own death, it should be something that will have a grave effect on the hero such as the death of the
woman he loves.
The bestselling novel, The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth, builds narrative tension in all three [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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