Relationships & Partners and Writing Skills Tips. (A Writing Advice Guide Book

Adding Supense and Withholding Information

Withholding Information and Suspense:
Because plotting seems so daunting to so many writers,, it is important to keep in mind that one of the fundamental principles of plotting is the withholding of information.
At the beginning of a plot, you want readers to know very little—just enough to intrigue them—but at the end you want them to know everything. (Lumna10's exception unless you're writing a series) We might even say that plotting is the mechanism by which the writer decides what information to withhold early on what information to reveal and in order to reveal it.

Because all books and stories are read over time and can't be imbibed all at once the most fundamental thing a writer withholds from the reader is how the story ends. In the simplest kind of stories, this is the main reason to keep reading: to find out how it all turns out. But there are other kinds of withholding that result in more subtle plots.

Consider, for example, Shirley Jackson's well-known story "The Lottery". It's about a small New England village that holds a lottery once a year among all the adult villagers; the person who "wins" the lottery is then stoned to death by the others. The main reason this story works is that Jackson introduces the concept of the lottery in the first paragraph her but withholds its purpose from the reader until in the end.

The surprise ending is a fairly simple kind of withholding yet another kind is the creation of suspense. In story that involves a surprise the writer withholds information from the reader and sometimes from the characters, but when a writer creates suspense he or she generally withholds information from the characters while letting the readers in on the secret.

Others kind of withholding have to do with rearranging the elements of the traditional plot. These techniques are perhaps not so much about withholding information as they are about simply presenting it to the reader in an unusual order.

As John Gardner points out in The Art of Fiction, exposition can take place at any point in the narrative, but in most cases, you want to save a good deal of your exposition for later. At the beginning, you want to say enough about the situation and the major characters to intrigue the reader, but you don't want to explain too much. Parceling out exposition only as needed is an approach that often feels more natural than dropping all the information on the reader's doorstep at once; in many cases, you are providing the information to the reader at the same time that the characters are learning it.

In popular fiction, the inciting action-the moment conflict is introduced into the story and gets the plot going often comes at the very beginning, before the exposition. A good example is the opening of the movie Jaws, when a young woman goes for a midnight swim and is eaten by the shark.
Only after that do we meet Chief Brody, the first of the three main characters, and learn about the island community of Amity. The traditional elements of the Freytag pyramid are present but in a different order.

In fact, you can even structure a story so that you give away the climax in the first few moments, as in James Baldwin's novel Giovanni's Room. If we lay out the events of this story in chronological order, the results look like the Freytag pyramid. But Baldwin shrewdly gives us the most dramatic element right at the start, which has the effect of intriguing us, makin us want to know exactly how things turned out so badly for th characters who have just been introduced.

-Professor James Hynes