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Chapter 21: Tightening the Tension to Enthral Readers
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Sowing clues into the story
Clues are an essential ingredient of fiction, not just detective fiction. They’re
like the paper trail in a treasure hunt. If no pieces of paper point you in the
right direction, you don’t know where to begin. If too many exist, no one has
any fun looking for them. Clues in fiction can be of three main kinds:
✓ Physical clues: Traces a person leaves behind, such as photographs,
objects belonging a character, or pieces of herself such as hair or
fingerprints.
✓ Verbal clues: Things people say, such as information they give, things
they let slip, things they leave unsaid.
✓ Action clues: Things that people do (or don’t do) that can give information
away. Past actions can also lead readers to expect the character to
behave in a similar way in the future.
Clues can be so obvious that readers can’t possibly miss them, or so subtle
that only discerning readers notice. Probably the best clues are somewhere
in between.
If you want to reveal a clue, have your character notice it and describe it to
readers in detail. If you want her not to pay attention to it until later, distract
readers from it by immediately delivering some other important information
or by making the character react emotionally to something else. You can also
conceal a physical clue by burying it in a list of other objects, so that the
reader doesn’t recognise which is the significant one. Remember, the first and
last objects in a list are always the most memorable!
Try this exercise to conceal or reveal important clues. I’ll give you a clue:
remember that the more detailed the description, the more memorable the
object will be. Write two lists of objects in which you
✓ First, conceal which is the important one.
✓ Second, reveal which is the important one.
You can make your clues ambiguous. A shoe that the main character thinks
belongs to one person can turn out to be an identical one belonging to someone
else. A clue may mean nothing on its own until another one turns up
somewhere else or someone else draws attention to it.