Alfred Hitchcock once described the following scenario. Suppose there's a bomb hidden in a room and it's set to go off at one o'clock. If the audience doesn't know the bomb is there, it explodes, there's a big boom, and the audience says, "What the heck was that?"
But if the audience does know about the bomb—if they know exactly where the bomb is hidden and exactly when it will go off—that's when you create suspense. Someone goes to open the cupboard where the bomb is hidden...but at the last moment, someone else calls the first person away. Someone comes in and invites everybody to go outside to play croquet...but nobody's interested. A dog starts sniffing about the cupboard...but the dog's owner says, "Bad boy!" and pulls the dog away. The tension builds each time it looks like someone might find the bomb, or convince everybody to leave the room safely. By the time one o'clock rolls around, the whole audience is on the edge of its collective seat.
This demonstrates an important principle about
suspense:
| Suspense is not created by keeping secrets from the audience. It's created by telling the audience everything...except how events will turn out. |
When the audience knows what's going on (or most of what's going on), they know what there is to worry about. If you withhold information from the audience, you usually ruin the suspense (and make the audience mad at you).
What is true for movies is also true for stories: withholding information from the reader is usually a mistake. I'm not saying murder mysteries should begin, "This is the story of how Hercule Poirot discovered that everyone on the Orient Express was guilty"...but it's a well-known rule of mysteries that you must not hide clues from the readers. If Poirot finds an object in the hand of the murder victim and the story doesn't reveal what that object is, readers will go ballistic. The writer isn't playing fair. The writer is cheating. The writer is being a jerk.
I've seen many stories written by amateurs where the writer thought it would make for a cool surprise ending if some crucial piece of information was withheld until the very end. ("And by the way, the murderer was really a bacterium, and the cops were white corpuscles in a person's bloodstream!"...or even worse, "And the man and woman who crashed on this strange new planet were named Adam and Eve.") Such surprises are not cool; such surprises make readers want to vomit copiously, preferably into your face. (Many times such tricks aren't even surprises—SF&F readers can often see bilious twists coming far ahead of time.)
I'm not saying twist endings are bad—I liked The Sixth Sense as much as anyone. But twists are tricky, and when they're created by jerking the reader around, you won't win yourself any friends.
Be extremely wary of withholding information—especially information that would be obvious to the viewpoint character. For example, suppose the VPC talks to a guy named Gabriel...and ten chapters later, you reveal this Gabriel was nine feet tall, had bright white wings, and carried a golden trumpet. Readers are likely to be pissed off that you didn't mention this at the time. After all, the VPC could see all those things about Gabriel, so hiding the facts is a cheat. Not only did you jerk the readers around, but you screwed up the viewpoint.
It's important to contrast this with the situation where the VPC doesn't clue in to something:
I saw something on the floor. It looked like a piece of fur from my dog—poor Fido had been shedding for weeks. I told myself to write a note to the cleaning woman and went back to my work.
This is perfectly acceptable, even if the narrator finds
out in a later chapter that the thing on the floor wasn't
dog
fur. The reader is given everything the VPC sees and knows
at the time. Therefore you aren't arbitrarily withholding
information—you're giving an honest and complete
picture of the VPC's perceptions.
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Copyright © 2001, James Alan Gardner