Noodling on the Mmes. de Winter

Why structure makes a suspense novel

I’ve been teaching myself how to write a novel for six years now, and I think I’ll be learning until I die. (Please, let it be death that stops me from learning and not vanity.)

Studying the pieces of a novel has felt similar to writing one–it’s a lot of weaving concepts and letting them build off of each other. This can feel daunting for the student; you can end up with twenty tabs open on your computer, either literally or just mentally, because you’re trying to learn about character development, theme, issues of plot, setting, dialogue, building a scene, and so on. But if we’re going to talk about how to write a suspense novel, we have to pick a starting place, even if we know the finished product is way more complex than any single strand, and even though our chosen concept is going to relate to all the others. Or, to put it prettily, a novel is like a big plate of spaghetti. We have to just pick a noodle and relax about the fact that the noodle we chose is part of a big, sloppy mess with a bunch of other noodles touching it.

When I’ve mentored young writers in how to write a novel, I’ve always started with lessons in story structure. When I say structure, I mean the way a story is told. How does it open? Who gets a point of view? How and when does it reveal information to the reader? How does the energy of the story act–hopefully it climbs, especially if you want anyone to call your book “a thriller” or any other sexy suspense genre. 

Although story structure relates to plot and can even help you decide what happens in your book, when I talk about story structure, I’m not talking about what happens chronologically in the “real world” of your novel. This distinction is important in suspense. Sometimes a novel is excavating an event in the past and, as the pages tick forward, the action moves back and forth and information is revealed out of order. There’s what actually happened in the reality of your novel, and there’s how you tell what happened to the reader. Thinking about these two related but often different tracks can make for a bit of a head game for a writer who’s trying to figure out both of them for herself. But writing a novel is a head game. I think it’s best to just try to focus on the game part and enjoy the challenge. (Some days I even manage to do this.)

On the subject of head games, let’s talk about Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which is such a good example of why structure matters. Rebecca could have been a mainstream romance novel if du Maurier had wanted it to be one, but she structured the book with suspense in mind and the result was one of the most famous suspense novels of all time; it’s probably the most famous romantic suspense novel.

In Rebecca, a young, pointedly nameless woman is our narrator. She meets a widower, Maxim de Winter, and quickly marries him. When she arrives at his estate as the new, second Mrs. de Winter–and clearly second best to the staff–she begins to doubt her husband’s intentions and question what happened to his late wife, Rebecca. 

Du Maurier guaranteed a suspenseful reading experience with a few careful choices of structure. Rebecca opens with a prologue that warns it’s all going to go to shit. Du Maurier traps us in the second Mrs. de Winter’s young, untrustworthy head–we only know what Maxim is thinking through dialogue, body language, and his wife’s perceptions of him. Du Maurier could have told us from the beginning what the late Rebecca was like from some neutral perspective, so we saw her more accurately as a person, but instead du Maurier made Rebecca mythic and let the woman’s ghost haunt us. One of the more famous features of the book is the villainous housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, a true gaslighting queen. Any number of structural changes would have dulled her effect (e.g. giving Maxim a point of view, or telling the reader certain information earlier on in the story) (I am attempting to avoid spoiling the whole book…in my next mentor column I’m definitely going to spoil a book but I’ll give ample warnings before I do).

And speaking of not spoiling things, let’s talk about twists. Twists are big in the suspense genre. (If I’m honest, I prefer the word “reveal” to “twist,” but “reveal” is decidedly unsexy.) Regardless, whether you’re writing a mystery, a thriller, or something less categorical, suspense readers want authors to be really thoughtful about where, how, and why they reveal information. You want maximum impact. An early shock can catch the reader off guard and set the tone–”buckle up, baby.” A mid-point twist keeps the book churning and gives your characters something to react to. A late reveal can bring a uniquely satisfying resolution. 

Elizabeth Egan interviewed me on Instagram Live a couple weeks after my book came out (and seven weeks after my daughter…came out). I was sweating, not figuratively, throughout the interview. My body was purging hormones, it was hot and we had no AC, and did I mention I was talking to Elizabeth Egan? She asked me how I’d laid the foundation for the final reveal in my book, which she’d found very satisfying.¹ I started sweating harder. No one had asked me this question yet: how do you set up a twist? But as I started to talk, I realized I actually had an answer. I’d made an effort to layer in a few references to the surprise ending at various points in the book. This is a good example of why story structure matters when you’re writing suspense, because suspense readers want to be surprised and satisfied. If you want to surprise your reader without disappointing them, you need to be really thoughtful about where you place information in the book. The goal is to walk the line so that most readers get to the twist and gasp “it was there all along but I didn’t see it!” This is hard to do, but potentially doable if you pay attention to your story’s structure and space things out with intention.

Hopefully I’ve convinced you to think about structure as you write your suspense novel. Moving past this general concept of how you tell a story, there are many “story structures” you can learn.² Each of these is a tool for writing, analyzing, and discussing stories. Next time, I’m going to break down my favorite, the very usable three-act structure.

But there’s one more reason I like to teach story structure first: I find the concept comforting to fall back on when I’m feeling overwhelmed by the vastness of writing a novel. Sometimes I can stave off panic by stepping away from the computer and drawing the shape of the story, as I see it then, or by drawing a common structure (like the three-act structure) and plugging in the information I know about my story. Maybe this will be helpful to you, too.

You can even come up with your own way to draw your story and orient yourself to the forest if you get lost looking at the trees.

Kurt Vonnegut has this five-minute, very entertaining lecture about the shape of story, using a graph measuring the main character’s good and ill fortune over time. You might like his graph, or find something else belongs on your y-axis. 

I put this at the end because he’s much smarter and funnier than me so I wanted to get in what I had to say before I lose you to the Kurt Vonnegut / YouTube author lecture rabbit hole. Enjoy. He’ll have you drawing story graphs in your spaghetti carbonara.

1. My braincells were like

2. For your googling pleasure, examples include the  2-, 3-, and 4-part structures, the Hero’s Journey, and the related Plot Embryo. There are innumerable methods for writing a novel, screenplay, or other story–the Save the Cat, Novel Blueprint, and Story Genius methods, to name a few. These methods aid in plotting and rely on character but, to me, fit into a discussion of structuring a book, so I think of them as structures, in a way. Stories with especially unique structures include David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, which reads like a mirror, and Memento’s famous backwards storytelling (there is probably a book that’s done this?). See 2a.

2a: Andromeda tells me there is: Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis moves backwards.