Keep Your Monsters Close

Trial-and-error lessons for suspense writers

A teenage boy who may have committed murder runs away.

Versus this.

A teenage boy who may have committed murder stays home. Denies. Obstructs. Hides things. Misbehaves. Seems suspiciously unbothered. Talks too much (to the police). Talks too little (to his mother who is one step away from complete meltdown).

Which is the better story?

I tried writing the first version about two years ago. The set-up was fun, especially creating the world of adults—parents and neighbors, all of them misbehaving in ways that would ultimately be connected to the intentionally confusing crime.

As far as the reader could discern from early chapters, the boy may have been guilty or innocent.

In either case, at the first sign of trouble, I sent the boy running away, with his girlfriend. (Cue the opening of Googlemaps, as I charted his escape route and followed the young couple mile by mile, away from their families.)

And that’s where I started getting bored, at around 100 pages, or approximately 25,000 words, for reasons I wouldn’t understand for many months. At 65,000 words—so near to the end, argh!—I set aside the manuscript.

But a year later, after putting the manuscript in a drawer (virtually) and finishing edits on this recently published book (shameless self-promotion. please buy a copy!), I understood my mistake. I had created a monster, or a possible monster, if the boy had done something wrong. And I had created a house. The house in which he lived. And the bigger “house”—the town in which he lived.

Photo by Alexey Malakhov on Unsplash. Not my character’s house, just a spooky house.

But then I had sent the monster far away from the house. And town. And everything else that grounded him in the story, criminally, physically, and socially.

With the boy far away, his mother Abby, the book’s main character, didn’t have to analyze her son’s expression as they sat through a sullen dinner. She didn’t have to decide whether to go through his backpack or confront him with a new question. She didn’t have to worry, late at night, if she heard the creak of an opening door and worried he might be sneaking out again—to do what?

By sending my antagonist away, I let the pressure out of the system. I didn’t think I was doing it at the time, of course. After all, the boy could be caught! And his mom and everyone else had plenty to deal with and puzzle over, even in his absence. But let me tell you, I sure got bored writing scenes in his POV, as he traveled and worried and evaded communications.

Later, with sufficient distance from the project, I had an opportunity to dig down and think about the scenario from the perspective of my main character, the boy’s mother. I also had more time to consult my own motherly intuitions. I realized that the worst possible thing isn’t knowing that your child may have committed a crime. The worst possible thing is having a child possibly commit a crime and then still be in your house, in your care, leaving his socks everywhere and taking too many showers and asking for more pizza as you struggle to determine his guilt or innocence and decide on an hourly basis what to do next.  

(By the way, this realization came to me in a flash when I was sitting on a plane, bored with whatever I was reading at the time, staring into space and thinking about nothing in particular. A constrained setting produced boredom which productively solved the problem of my boredom and inadequate plotting from one whole year earlier! Gosh I love planes!)

Not long after the plane ride, I started over from page one, keeping my main theme and only one of many characters, salvaging not a single paragraph from the original. Yet I kept the title. WHAT BOYS LEARN. Feeling confident about the reconfigured plot, I sold this second version on proposal—the first time I’ve ever done so—and I submitted a draft to my editor last month. (Hooray! And yes, I am taking a risk talking about a book that no doubt has many revisions to come.)

I wanted to share this story because we don’t often know how writers come up with ideas or how they fix the broken ones, especially when one is new to a genre, as I am. For me, it’s a trial-and-error process that involves TIME. I frequently set aside first pages that don’t have sufficient energy or a half-complete manuscript if it isn’t pleasing me, I write something else, I let that old idea go cold, so cold I can’t remember most of the scenes, and then—sometimes, dare I say usually—I come back.

So far, with each “failed”¹ manuscript, I’ve learned a different lesson.

One of the first times I tried to write a suspense novel, I let my story sprawl too far, both chronologically and geographically. (I describe that blunder and two related ones in a post for Women Writers, Women(s) Books.) In that case, it wasn’t the antagonist wandering afield, it was the protagonists.

But for the purpose of this post, let’s stick with the problem of a wandering or distant antagonist.

“Monster in the house” is a horror trope, and it usually involves an evil, supernatural entity, a contained environment (whether house or town). According to the trope experts, there’s usually a sin involved as well—something that kicked off the haunting or violence.

I don’t write horror (yet!) but I think this trope has crossover relevance to the suspense genre, especially in relation to the second element, which is containment.

Especially in domestic suspense as versus horror, the containment may be physical—an actual house or closed location— but it can also be emotional— relationships that aren’t easy to untangle from. (I gotta admit that I prefer the threatening claustrophobia of a relationship over a building, because in the case of the building, I’m the one shouting, “Just leave!” But in the case of relationships, we know we often can’t. Horror writers, jump in and argue your case!)

Completely by chance, the last two novels I read used a combination of physical and emotional containment to good advantage.

In Ruth Rendell’s Dark Corners, a creepy man named Dermot rents a room from our main character, Carl, and not only encroaches on our protag’s privacy but begins to blackmail him.²

In Erin Flanagan’s, Come with Me, a frenemy named Nicola helps out our protag Gwen by getting her a job, and a duplex close to her own, so that they can be together nearly every minute of the day. The frenemy also befriends our protag’s young daughter, infiltrating Gwen’s family life.

A clearly defined antagonist or limited circle of possible antagonists forces our protagonist to make choices and act, constantly. If the author has done a good job, each one of those imperfect choices creates further trouble. (Don’t give your characters too many breaks! Their job is to suffer!)

Interactions between protags and antags—awkward or puzzling exchanges, threatening or weird dialogues—are fun to read and fun to write, all the more so when our main character isn’t completely sure if the villain is truly the villain, or knows but is limited from acting by some circumstance, whether bribery, loyalty, self-doubt, complicity, or something else.

In the case of a definite antagonist, we should squirm as our main character’s dilemma gets even more thorny and inescapable. In the case of an uncertain antagonist, or multiple possible antagonists, we should feel even more dread as uncertainty balloons.

By the way…(always more fun when this is a conversation!)

Think of your favorite novels or recent suspense reads. Often, the villain—or potential villain—is a wife, husband, child, friend, frenemy, roommate, or co-worker. The closer the relationship, in some ways, the greater the pressure.

The challenge for many of us, when we want to keep the monster (villain/antagonist) close but unidentified and possibly hidden among a limited number of potential antagonists, is how to surprise the reader. After all, in the most contained stories, there aren’t too many possibilities! (Wife? Husband? Child? Friend/frenemy? Apparently helpful cop/teacher/psychologist? In Agatha Christie’s day, readers were gullible. Modern readers are simply too suspicious and smart!)

Some writers do let the monster leave the house and still manage to keep the pressure on. I find it instructive to question why this trope-bending move can work—and how.

In Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn—don’t you hate her for being so brilliant—quickly vanishes Amy (our antagonist, though we don’t realize it for a while), removing her from the novel for a while. When we re-engage with her POV, she’s on the road, far from Nick.

At that distance, she can’t directly threaten or taunt, except via some left-behind clues in an anniversary treasure hunt. But had that treasure hunt been excised from the plot, the main gears of the plot would still function, because Flynn has turned the trope on its head. The monster isn’t just Amy. It’s Amy’s absence.

In Gone Girl, the public assumes that Nick is guilty. The longer Amy goes missing, the more guilty he seems. Meanwhile, we readers still get to engage with Amy’s villainous personality through her POV chapters. She is vivid and present for us—an essential development, preventing the second half of the novel from sagging—even while she is miles away from Nick.

Earlier in this post, I claimed that my suspense writing is a trial-and-error process that involves time. I also realize that it requires faith. Sometimes we invent a good premise but don’t have the voice or characters nailed down. Sometimes, the characters are sympathetic, realistic and complex, but the plot isn’t sufficiently urgent or compelling.

So far, for every suspense novel I’ve finished—a grand total of two!—I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words that haven’t been published. But for every novel—and every failed novel—I write, I am noticing my errors and learning valuable lessons more quickly. For now, I’ll keep my monsters as close as I can.

Tell me your favorite novel that has a threatening or disturbing character present in many scenes. Or help us think of novels that break with that trope, surprising us with a worthy antagonist who stays “off-page” for most of the book.³

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1. You can probably guess that I don’t consider these manuscripts “failed” at all. It’s just the process!

2. Dark Corners utilizes a great set-up, even if the second half of the book falters; it happened to be this author’s final novel, written just before her death, and one has to wonder if it wasn’t truly finished or properly edited. I’m making this dutiful note in case you haven’t read a Ruth Rendell book. According to reviews, this is not the one to start with, but it is a wonderful example of a book that started strong and could be rewritten many ways, which is an interesting thought experiment for the person reading.

3. I can’t think of a single one. When I analyzed two dozen suspense novels, the ones that disappointed me the most were the ones where we barely met the antagonist—or only belatedly/unmemorably—and had no reason to suspect that person.