Will it, or Won’t It...And other Aspects of Suspense.

 

John Clark listening to various parts of my body. They’re reminding me that I am neither infallible, nor superhuman any more. I did suffer from those delusions quite frequently in my younger years. Anyhow, you can judge for yourself whether The Clark/Lozefski/Barrese team can fit all you see in the photos above, into the 30 cubic yard dumpster pictured below. This, folks, is suspense in real life (just like who’s winning on Nov. 5^th, but that’s too much suspense for this blogger).

As for YA fiction, it thrives on suspense, and in multiple forms. Think about The Hunger Games. They oozed suspense, likewise the Harry Potter series. What’s interesting, and possibly challenging to writers like me, is what level of intensity do you want your suspense to convey?

Here are examples from three books I’ve written, but haven’t been published. I give you snippets of suspenseful moments from each. Let’s begin with Marcy-Jo Parmenter, the main character in Don’t Say It. She goes to AA meetings regularly with her grandfather, a retired county sheriff, in part because her father drank himself to death. When she meets a boy around her age who moved to rural Maine from NYC, she’s intrigued, but he keeps her at a distance. Why is that, she wonders? The answer, after considerable suspense, requires her to rethink a lot of what she thought was normal. Even more suspenseful is her discovery of a skeleton while she’s bush hogging alders in the blueberry field she bought with Gramp’s encouragement. Who was the deceased? Why did they they lie for years in a clump of alders? Has anyone reported them missing?

In Thor’s Wingman, Jared Mills is gun shy thanks to horrific abuse by his father who was killed in a confrontation with local law enforcement. His orienteering and woodcrafting skills allow him to spend much of his time by himself. When testing the boat he built by doing some fishing, he catches a huge lake trout, but something tells him to release it when the fish seems to put some sort of spell on him. If that wasn’t enough to ‘rock his boat,’ on the Fourth of July, while watching fireworks from two different towns while in his boat, he sees a large object fall from a very tall pine on an island. Unable to resist returning the next morning to see what it was, he discovers a six foot tall eagle with a badly broken wing. Then the bird starts communication with him telepathically.

Then there’s I’m Not Singing the L.A. Blues wherein Skye Lundquist, who has just been humiliated by her boyfriend in a way that goes viral, has to sign for a certified letter, addressed to her mother. Mom freaks out when she reads it and retreats to her room with a bottle of wine. When Skye, who has no memory of anything before starting school, reads the letter, she’s stunned to learn that she had an aunt in Machias, Maine, who died and has left her and Mom a house, 600 acres of wild blueberry land, and a portfolio, all worth several million dollars.

Who was this relative? What connection does her mother have with a town in Maine that Skye has never heard of? The caveat in the will is that the two of them must live in the Machias homestead for a year in order to inherit everything. Skye not only doesn’t know anything about her mother’s past, nor who her father is, she has to walk on eggshells while waiting to learn is Mom is willing to accept the conditions...And Mom has NEVER told her anything about her past.