By Brian Garfield
[Editor's note: In 1994, John Grisham revealed to
NEWSWEEK that he credited the following article by Brian Garfield
with giving him the tools to create his ground-breaking thriller, THE
FIRM , as well as subsequent books. Garfield himself is a noted bestselling
novelist, as well as a screenwriter, producer, and nonfiction writer.
He won the Edgar Award for HOPSCOTCH, which was made into the prize-winning
movie of the same name, starring Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson.
For more of this renowned author's credits, please see his bio
at the end of this article.]
The English call
them thrillers, and in our clumsier way we call them novels of
suspense.
They contain elements of mystery, romance and adventure, but they don't
fall into restrictive categories. And they're not circumscribed by artificial
systems of rules like those that govern the whodunit or the gothic romance.
The field is wide enough to include Alistair MacLean, Allen Drury,
Helen Maclnnes, Robert Crichton, Graham Greene, and Donald E. Westlake.
(Now there's a parlay.) The market is not limited by the stigmata of
genre labels, and therefore the potential for success of a novel in
this field is unrestricted: DAY OF THE JACKAL, for instance, was
a first novel.
The game's object: To perch the reader on edge ---
to keep him flipping pages to find out what's going to happen next.
The game's rules are harder to define; they are few, and these are
elastic. The seasoned professional learns the rules mainly in order
to know how to break them to good effect.
But such as they are, the rules can be defined as follows.
Start with action; explain it later.
This is an extension of Raymond Chandler's famous dictum: When things
slow down, bring in a man with a gun. To encourage the reader to turn
to page 2, give him something on page 1--conflict, trouble, fear, violence.
I realize you've got a lot of background that needs to be established,
leading up to the first moments of overt conflict, but you can establish
all that in chapter 2. Flash back to it if you need to. But in
Chapter 1, get the show on the road.
Make it tough for your protagonist.
Give him a worthy antagonist and make things look hopeless. Don't drop
convenient solutions in his lap. The tougher the opposition, the more
everything is stacked against the protagonist, the better.
Plant it early; pay it off later.
Don't bring in new characters or facts at the end to help solve the
protagonist's dilemma. He must work out his own solution based on a
conflict that's established early in the story.
No cavalry to the rescue, and no sudden unearthing of a revealing letter
written before he died by a character who was dispatched way back in
Chapter 3. (Unless, of course, you established in Chapter 4 that
such a letter exists, and followed that revelation with a race between
the protagonist and his enemies to see who'll get the letter first.)
No cavalry to the rescue.
Give the protagonist the initiative.
All good dramatic writing centers on conflict --- interior (alcoholism,
oedipal conflicts) or exterior (a dangerous enemy, an alien secret police
force). Only in poor gothic fiction is the protagonist habitually and
tearfully and hand-wringingly at the mercy of evil opposing forces that
push him or her around at will.
The best story is usually that in which the protagonist takes active
steps to achieve a goal against impossible odds, or to prevent opposing
forces from overcoming him or his loved ones. The protagonist may begin
by reacting, but in the end he must act from his own initiative.
Give the protagonist a personal stake.
No longer is it acceptable for the hero to solve a mystery just because
it presents an interesting puzzle. The more intimate his involvement
in the main conflict of the story, the better.
He himself, or his aims, should be in jeopardy: His own life or those
of his loved ones should be in danger, or his best friend has been murdered,
or he is the kind of character whose values and principles won't let
him sit by and allow injustice to destroy people around him.
Whatever the conflict is, if he loses, it's going to cost him horribly;
that's the essence.
Give the protagonist a tight time limit, and then shorten it.
This doesn't always work because the logic of many stories prohibits
it; don't use it unless you can work it in believably. But when time
is a factor, and when the brief span of time in which the hero must
resolve the conflict is then shortened, you have gone a long way toward
heightening the suspense.
Choose your character according to your own capacities, as
well as his.
Don't use as your protagonist an accomplished professional spy unless
you are prepared to do the research and groundwork necessary to create
such a character convincingly. It is better, particularly when approaching
the early stages of your own professionalism, to stick to the familiar.
Some of the most successful suspense-novel protagonists --- many
of Eric Ambler's, for instance --- are ordinary innocent people
caught up in dangerous webs. The indignant honest idealist makes a good
protagonist because his innocence makes the professional opposition
all the more frightening. Yet a plot-structure for this character is
often difficult to contrive because, in spite of his naiveté,
he has to be clever and resourceful enough (not lucky) to prevail over
his awesome enemies.
The other face of this coin, of course, is the professional-crook-as-protagonist;
he's easy to identify with because he's an outcast, an underdog, one
man using his wits to survive against society's oppressive machinery.
But the pitfalls of this genre are treacherous, and unless you know
criminal procedure and feel comfortable competing with Anthony Burgess
and Richard Stark, it's better to avoid the crook-hero in the beginning.
Know your destination before you set out.
The prevailing weakness of many suspense stories that are otherwise
successful is the letdown the reader experiences at the end ---
the illogical and disappointing anticlimax. It isn't enough to set up
intriguing conflicts and obey all the other rules if you haven't got
an ending that fulfills the promise of the preceding chapters.
It becomes disgustingly obvious when a writer has confronted his hero
with thrilling obstacles only to paint himself into a corner. Presented
with his own unsolvable cliffhanger, he is reduced to bringing in deus
ex machina to solve the hero's problems for him.
It isn't necessary to tie up all loose ends, but the climax should
resolve the principal conflict one way or another. (In recent years,
to avoid the traditional clichés of virtue-triumphant or ironic-downfall,
several talented novelists have resorted to obscure endings that no
reader could possibly decipher. I rather hope the fad is dying out;
whatever the reasons behind it, it demonstrates lazy thinking and infuriates
the reader.)
The best key to a good ending is to know what the ending will be before
you start writing the book.
Whether you write a preliminary outline or not, you should know where
the journey will end, and how.
Don't rush in where angels fear to tread.
I admit this one is a catchall. Essentially I mean that it is wise
to observe not only what the pros do, but also what they avoid doing.
The best writers do not jump on bandwagons; they build new ones.
The pro doesn't write a caper novel about the world's biggest heist
unless he's convinced he can write an unusual story with a unique and
important twist. Otherwise he risks unfavorable comparison with the
classics in that subgenre. "Why bother with it if it's not as taut as
Rififi and not as funny as The Hot Rock?"
Yet this should not be taken to mean every writer must obey faddish
advice, such as "Spy fiction is dead," or "Historical novels are out
this season." There is no such thing as a dead genre because the human
imagination is limitless, and there is never a dearth of new ideas,
new twists, new talents.
The question is, "Is this idea strong enough and important enough to
make the story sufficiently different from its predecessors to merit
publication?" If a novel is good enough, it will find a publisher whether
it is a hard-boiled detective story, a western, a spy novel, a historical
adventure, or a novel about bug-eyed monsters from Mars. If it isn't
good enough, the publisher may reject it by saying that such novels
are out of style, but this is merely a euphemism.
Don't write anything you wouldn't want to read.
This one sounds self-evident, but I've met several young writers who
decided they wanted to start out by hacking their way through gothics
or westerns, just to learn the ropes, because those categories looked
easy to imitate. Nuts. I f you start out that way, you'll end
up a hack.
Now if you like to read westerns, then write a western. But don't write
into a genre for which you have contempt. If you don't like gothics
but insist on writing one, your contempt will show; you can't hide it.
I don't say you can't sell books this way; God knows people do, all
too often. But if you thoroughly enjoy sea stories --- even if
you don't know a thing about nautical life --- you're better off
attempting to write a sea story because you'll go into it with enthusiasm.
© 1973, 1994 Brian Garfield
The award-winning author of some 60 books, Brian
Garfield was a finalist for the American Book Award for WILD TIMES,
which was the basis for the TV miniseries of the same name.
His seminal thriller DEATH WISH defined a crime-writers' genre and gave
rise to a hit series of action movies starring Charles Bronson.
His nonfiction book THE THOUSAND MILE WAR: WORLD WAR II IN ALASKA
AND THE ALEUTIANS is the definitive history of the only campaign
fought in North America during that war . Among his other novels
are KOLCHAK'S GOLD, RECOIL, and LINE OF SUCCESSION.
[Editor's note: This article was published twice by WRITER'S
DIGEST. Its first appearance was in 1973 in the magazine.
The second was in the 1994 WRITER'S YEARBOOK‹"At last: The real
secret behind John Grisham's success."]
