We need another bathroom in our home. Not that we don’t already have three, but we have an unfinished room in the basement, plumbed out for a bathroom. More importantly, our daughter is graduating from High School next month, and I have about 30,875 people arriving at our home for the festivities.
I’m anticipating a high need.
So…with that thought in mind, I dragged my husband to the tile store to contemplate options. His eyes nearly rolled into the back of his head from the excitement. Still, with a vision of the lineup in front of the boy’s scary bathroom, he helped me pick out tiles. See, it’s not about whether we need this, but how soon. Even more important than the need is the deadline that looms over us.
When writing a suspense, and creating the Big Event, there needs to be an immediacy or a deadline to the Event. An end date. The world will blow up on July 7, 2011. The Aliens will attack on Friday 13th. The Russian sub will fire as soon as they find the Red October. The bride will walk down the aisle on April 29th. In other words, the hero/heroine/readers must believe that the threat/Big Event will happen, and soon.
We accomplish this by dropping in foreshadowing. In Dante’s Peak, it’s the boiling gasses in the hot springs, and the fact that the volcano guys can read their charts and in their experience they know an eruption will happen soon. In one of my other favorites, Bird on a Wire, wherever the hero/heroine turn, the bad guys aren’t far behind…in fact, they might even be one step ahead. They need to track down the one man who can help free them before he is murdered.
You may not have this foreshadowing or immediacy in the first act of the story. However, by the second act, and definitely by the middle of the book there needs to be a ticking clock or countdown to the Big Event. Whether it’s the mounting pressure inside the volcano, or the harried hostage taker losing his patience, or the plane running out of fuel…ramp up the immediacy of the Big Event.
How have you made your Big Event immediate? Have you increased the urgency of your suspense by even moving up the Big Event? (another great technique to ramping up your story!).
Join me next week when we talk about the last element of the Big Event…
Susie May