THE SUPENUSE!!!0.0 IT’S MIND BOOGLEING!!!

(If you’re wondering about the title, Google it. I dare you.* In other news, HAPPY FATHER’S DAY and MY DAD IS AWESOME.)

Once upon a time, there was a teenager named Sarah. She was part of a student Shakespeare-in-the-Park training program. Among other roles, one of the parts she played in The Two Gentlemen of Verona was that of an Outlaw. Late in play, the Outlaws encounter one of our heroines, Sylvia, wandering alone in the forest. Naturally, they kidnap her and take her to their leader, not knowing that he is, in fact, her True Love Valentine, and everything will work out happily ever after.

In one performance of the kidnapping scene, our friend Sarah thought that, as a skeevy lecherous Outlaw, she would pretend to try to, um, grab Sylvia’s rear, counting on the performers playing the other Outlaws to snatch away the actress playing Sylvia before this could be accomplished. However, the timing of this particular scene being slightly different, Sarah just ended up standing there with her hand outstretched, wondering whether she should go through with it and disrupt the scene.

The point isn’t how the scene eventually ended up or whether this was a bad idea on Sarah’s part (it was). The point is that, after the show, the director, who’d been watching from the tech booth, laughed and said she’d noticed and thought, “What now, Sarah?”

This is the lesser kind of suspense.

More precisely, it’s one of two kinds of suspense that can occur when one is watching or reading a story. Both kinds are usually present, since the act of consuming a story is a double experience: on one hand, you’re experiencing this imaginary world with characters about whom you might care as though they were real people. On the other, you’re interpreting the world of these characters through knowledge gained by the constant awareness that this is a story, constructed by individuals to evoke certain patterns of emotion and thought.

So, when something suspenseful occurs in a story, it can worry the reader or viewer on two levels. There’s the in-story level of the story-world: how will this character come out of this situation okay? What choice will this character make? And there’s the out-of-story level of the real-world: how will the writer get the character out of that situation? Can the actors and writers pull off having the character make that choice?

When the real-world suspense outweighs the story-world suspense, that’s when the writers or performers have a problem. Unless you’re doing experimental work, you usually don’t want the experience of consuming fiction to intrude upon the fiction itself. For example, in the theatre or a movie, you want the audience to be concerned about the characters, not the actors. That’s why stage fights are designed with an element of deliberate fakery — you want your audience to get the cues for “these people are fighting with swords! The characters Hamlet and Laertes are being wounded and killed!” without them having to worry that the actors playing Hamlet and Laertes are actually getting hurt in real life.

You can’t avoid an element of “how will the writer get out of this one???” in literary or TV cliffhangers. When you’ve boxed in your characters so thoroughly that it seems impossible for them to escape — when the Borg have assimilated Captain Picard, and Will Riker orders the crew to fire, or when Louie the Lilac has Batman and Robin tied up, helpless, and about to be consumed by man-eating flowers — the audience wonders not only whether the characters can pull off their daring escape, but also what that escape could possibly be. How on earth will the writer write them out of this one? And a healthy dose of this type of worry can indeed help scenes like this; if viewers or readers have a strong in-story sense of how high the stakes are but still can’t, either in or out of the story, even begin to imagine how the characters might achieve their goals, that makes their anxiety about what’s going to happen next even bigger.

Contrariwise, it’s unfortunate to end with the kind of cliffhanger where the biggest unresolved question has to do with the storytellers instead of the story. Suppose you’re a TV writer who ends with the season with the main character(s) of your character-focussed show dead, and it’s been hitting the news that the actors who play them have all quit. Sure, your next season may be a great work of art with even more awesome characters than the ones you just bumped off, but that’s not what your audience is going to be looking forward to all summer. Instead, they’re going to be wondering — if they don’t, in fact, decide to stop watching your show — how on earth you and your fellow writers are going to make this work the next season.

Obviously, different people will experience the same tense moments in stories as suspenseful in both ways to different degrees. It depends on what each reader or viewer feels is important about this particular story. For example, I’m not much interested in watching Star Trek: The Next Generation without the same familiar crew I care about; you might not care which characters populate the Enterprise as long as it continues to seek out strange, new worlds and new civilizations. So if the situation I described above happened on that show, you might not feel this to be a problem, while I might wonder how the story could ever be interesting again.

In the end, the question most writers care about is: how can I get the majority of my audience to experience  in-story suspense without getting distracted by the other kind?

Part of it has to do with the quality of the story up until the suspenseful points — it’s easier to wonder how the writers are going to get out of this one if you already have reason to think they have talent lacunae. Another part of it depends on the other artists involved; there’s nothing, for instance, Shakespeare could have done to fix the very much out-of-story suspense of an actor forgetting his or her lines.

But the theory I’m working with is that the most difficult part has to do with the imagination and courage of the artist. First, I have to be brave enough to face the second kind of suspense myself.

For example, in the first draft of my fantasy/mystery MS Bad Light, the actual bad guy was an annoying jerk and the red-herring suspects were obviously good dudes. Part of the reason for that was because I didn’t yet fully understand what I was trying to do with the themes of the book. But it was mostly because writing scenes where your protagonist’s view of certain characters (like an up-until-now-sympathetic bad guy) suddenly changes is really tough. That second kind of tension got to me before I was even finished writing the darn story.

I read an agent’s blog (sorry, forget which) in which he or she was dissecting query letters and pointed out that, when summing up their story, a lot of writers include questions like “Will Joey give in to peer pressure or do the right thing?” or “Can Leslie solve the mystery before the time runs out?”  where in 99 cases out of 100, the answer is obvious. No, Joey won’t give in to peer pressure; yes, Leslie can solve the mystery. Duh.

Because it’s obvious the writer isn’t going to take this story** in the other direction, asking these rhetorical questions, which are supposed to pique the reader’s interest, actually achieves the opposite effect: they cement the idea of what’s actually going to happen in his or her mind. No suspense.

This obvious-single-track mode is the reason why the first version of the mystery in Bad Light wasn’t much of a mystery — and also not very suspenseful, either in-story or out-of-story. It was tough for a reader to imagine any ending other than the one I’d chosen.

Obviously, I’m a little biased about my own stories, but with the help of some great critiques from fellow writers, workshop mentors, friends, and others, I think I’m finally at a place where, if I wanted, I could swap the red herrings and the bad guys in the last chapters and still have an interesting ending. A different interesting ending than the current one — if all I had to do was CTRL+F for the characters’ names, I’d have story problems of another sort — but one that would feel just as satisfying and thematically appropriate.

Facing the out-of-story kind of suspense (“how will I, the writer, get out of this one?”) gives me, with my writing process, the tools to handle the in-story kind. Because real in-story suspense comes from characters we care about in actual could-go-either-way situations. And those are scary to write***, because it’s both tough to trust your reader or viewer to put everything together and tough to trust yourself to pull it off.

Facing my fears as a writer isn’t a guarantee of good in-story suspense, let alone good art in general, but it’s a push I often need to get my work to the next level.

* But be aware you will probably find the results more amusing if you’ve read the Harry Potter series.

** Okay, I’m sure some of you are already imagining exciting stories in which Joey does give in to peer pressure and Leslie can’t solve the mystery. It’s true that some of these questions are obvious only given the context in which they’re asked — the hook paragraph surrounding them that makes it clear what kind of story this is and at whom it’s aimed. But throw me a bone here.

*** As is writing something that straight-up ends the long-running kind of story, like a TV show or comic series or book series. But I don’t have experience there. (Yet?)