How to Create Suspense
A creative writing lecturer reviews alum Megan Collins’ debut mystery
RECENTLY, a good friend of mine read the first draft of my coming-of-age novel set in a performing arts boarding school. He offered me feedback on what I’d thought was an intriguing plot line: mysterious, handwritten notes that appear all over campus. To my embarrassment, he had scribbled in the margin of an early chapter: “It’s already so obvious who’s writing those secret notes!” He advised me to read a mystery. I chose Megan Collins’ suspenseful debut, The Winter Sister (Atria Books, 2019), which is inspired by the Greek myth in which Demeter loses her daughter, Persephone, to the underworld for half of each year.
In Collins’ book, a teenage Persephone goes out one night with her boyfriend, never to return. Sixteen years have passed when her sister Sylvie returns home to care for their estranged mother, and begins to discover the truth about what happened to Persephone. The result is a startling, absorbing, thoroughly entertaining book, the type that caused me to miss my stop on the bus and stay up past bedtime.
We fiction writers are often told that if we know in advance what is going to happen in our stories, our readers will see it coming too. But Collins (GRS’08) uses this to her advantage: just when I thought I had someone pegged, a character or situation would take me by surprise. In my own novel, I decided to give my secret-note-writer an accomplice, a person no one would suspect.
I hesitate to write flashbacks, concerned they will disengage readers from my plot, but Collins moves deftly between past and present. Working through her memories and reinterpreting the facts, Sylvie comes to understand what happened that fateful night. I was particularly taken by the stark contrast between the mother Sylvie encounters in the present and the one Collins shows us from 16 years earlier: the flashbacks show a loving mother; the main storyline, a bitter, sarcastic woman.
Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that every character should want something, even if it’s a glass of water. The characters of The Winter Sister want so much: revenge, romance, knowledge about the night of Persephone’s disappearance. The battle is also internal—they contend with guilt, shame, and secrets of their own. In the Creative Writing Program, Professor Leslie Epstein teaches that it’s what characters do and say that makes a story good, grounding us in the concrete. But what about how they feel? Collins does an impressive job of rendering her characters’ physical responses to emotion. When overcome with guilt, Sylvie describes her heart as “a clenched fist knocking against my ribs; the air felt too thick, my throat too small.” With her sensory, cadenced lines, Collins renders abstract emotions immediate and visceral. A poet by training, she invites us to see the world as Sylvie—an artist—does, with gorgeous visual detail and the chance to paint over the past.
Comments & Discussion
Boston University moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (EST) and can only accept comments written in English. Statistics or facts must include a citation or a link to the citation.