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Chapter 21: Tightening the Tension to Enthral Readers
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You can achieve this goal in a number of ways depending on the point of view
you’re using to narrate the story. (As I describe in Chapter 8, in the first- or
third-person limited narrative, readers can only know what the character
knows.) These are:
✓ Your character loses her memory: A contemporary example is SJ
Watson’s 2011 novel Before I Go to Sleep, in which a character suffers
from amnesia and wakes up every morning not knowing who she is and
what’s happened to her. She tries to overcome this problem by writing a
diary.
✓ Your narrative leaves a character just before an important event happens,
and you switch to another point of view only to return to the
first character much later. In Joseph Conrad’s 1911 novel Under Western
Eyes, the first part of the novel ends with the main character facing a
dilemma. The narrative then skips forward several months and changes
to the point of view of a teacher of English in Geneva, who meets the
main character in exile there. Readers only find out what choice the
main character made much later.
✓ You break off a journal or spoken account at a certain point, leaving
your readers in the dark about what happens later in the story. A
famous example is Bram Stocker’s 1897 novel Dracula, which is told as a
series of letters, diary entries and ship’s log entries, occasionally supplemented
with newspaper clippings. Switching from one part of the story
to another helps create narrative suspense.
✓ Your unreliable narrator deliberately withholds information about
an event. Agatha Christie’s 1926 novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd has
a narrator who hides essential truths in the text through evasion, omission
and obfuscation.
This last technique is difficult to achieve without readers feeling
cheated. You need to develop the voice of the character in such a
way that the reader realises that she may not be entirely reliable (see
Chapter 8).
Try out this technique by creating a missing piece in your own story. It could
be a conversation where a significant piece of information is exchanged, a
meeting that one of the characters (and therefore the reader) doesn’t know
about, or an event the main character isn’t privy to. Remember that you need
to know what happened, even if the characters don’t:
1. Think of a way to create a gap in the narrative of your own story.
2. Make sure that what happens in this gap is vital to your story. If the
plot doesn’t turn on it, this exercise won’t work.