Writing Suspense Using Cinematic Beats and Mind Maps
Or how to keep your readers hooked even with the most passive of scenes, without special effects.
When all your book readers have is words on paper and their imagination, how does and author communicate that something happening on a page is intense without eerie music and dramatic cutaways?
Bur first, a huge thank you to NaNoWriMo for featuring my post on Organizational Writing Methods for Messy Minds! Whoever was the editor to keyboard-slap about me ‘test-driving software to find novel solutions for myriad rampant writerly woes’ — I love you. After all these years I couldn’t be more stoked. That submission is what made me realize I actually have quite some tricks up my sleeve to offer — so here I am on Medium. Thanks for that!
While editing sure is everything (in books and films alike), even motion pictures can fail at communicating the hype of a moment. How many have seen the ‘climax’ of a film consisting of characters narrating not-so-persuasive exposition about how intense things are, but we did not feel in the least excited? No amount of special effects and impressive visuals can make up for a director’s poor execution or a screenwriter’s lacking build up. Thus, even with films (and games and comic books) still comes back to, and begins with, imagination and what’s written on paper.
So, coming back to the question: how could the written word cue tension and suspense? One of the answers I will look at today takes tips and tricks from visual media for creating tension that us naked-word novelists can utilize.
But first, I recommend watching the video that inspired me:
Beat It!
I actually watched that video four years ago, and what I learned from it stayed with me to this day. It scrutinizes an episode of Death Note about two people walking down the street, and let me tell you: it had fans’ hearts racing and their glutes holding on to the edge of their seats with tension.
Every episode is a battle of the wits; and this is a show consisting primarily of internal monologues and info-dumps! How can that be? To quote Sage Hyden from Just Write:
The [Death Note] series is so binge-able because it has compressed a format designed for a one-hour structure into half [of] that time, and then sped it up even more by having more beats per minute than some of the most adrenalin-pumping dramas.
The A-plot of this particular episode (‘an extremely competent FBI agent and a ‘killer’ walking down the street’, sounds like the beginning of an anecdote) is cut into five scenes. Sage identifies thirty-three beats within them; an average of six beats per scene, with the last one fitting as many as twelve! That’s a new beat every thirty or so seconds.
But what’s a beat?
Beats are the atoms that make up your scene. I think Shaunta explains it quite well in this article, check it out. To quote:
…if you were telling someone about a story in a linear way you might say this happened and then this happened and then this happened. — Shaunta Grimes
Every ‘happening’ is a beat. A new beat can mark the shift in ‘tone’ to control a story’s emotional arc, or set the speed of events (aka, pace).
Mind Mapping Your Beat
Sadly, many ‘thriller’ films literally consist of ‘and then this happened’. Things are ‘happening’ fast, one after the other, without a moment of awareness to digest or even present a crisis or consequence. Any action scene is speed-running through the results without giving the viewers the chance to acknowledge the conflict. Suspense is communicated not through characters, but with omniscient camera panning.
At the end of the day, to build up your stakes you need to have stakes, know what they are and communicate it to your readers. If you want to hook your readers, you need to bait them with answers that satiate their hunger to know one answer, but creates a new hunger with a new question.
The best writing advice that helps me write and edit my craft is that every scene needs to have a purpose. Like every ad or marketing campaign needs to have a clear goal or message. As such, every beat is like a mini-plot of its own, with a final destination. The format I use for a full beat is much like a story:
Prompt:
Conflict:
Crisis:
Climax:
Resolve/Reaction/Result:
Why mind maps? They’re the cleanest way to present this in a digital format, especially with the the ability to expand and hide the nodes. That allows me to focus completely on a single beat at a time — treat it like a story of its own — to polish it and give it justice as a standalone moment that won’t feel like an empty filler.
Tension
When we’re talking tension, every beat marks a shift in stakes. These beats should come one after the other. The level of tension, i.e. how close we are to the potential consequences of failure, is continuously shifting.
As always, I’ll take an example from one of my personal projects. I dub it, Malediction.
Let’s imagine our character, K, is trying to sneakily escape a facility. K sees a guarded door and is certain that’s the exit.
Prompt: After distracting the guards K tries to open the door.
Conflict: The vault is unexpectedly noisy, they guards will surely hear!
Crisis: K has to pull it up slower. The massive door requires two people to raise it, K’s knees and arms are creaking, burning, weakening…
Climax: T crawls from under the vault. K is startled, drops the door. Bang!
Resolve: T made it out in time. K pulls T to a hiding spot.
This is a short moment, but we structure it like a plot of its own. The stakes were for K not to get caught. The creaky door makes K’s chances of being caught even more. With K’s fingers reddening as K tries to lift the vault, some quick thinking readers will ask how the character hopes to crawl under this heavy door. The surprise of someone coming out and the slip of K’s fingers startles us! The loud bang alerts the guards — the stakes shot up, but the tension of ‘will they or will they not’ gets released. A new character, T, joins the party.
Prompt: T thinks K’s here to rescue them.
Conflict: The loud bang attracts the guards. They both have to sneak.
Crisis: There’s two of them at stake now. T is frantic, noisy, erratic.
Climax: They get discovered.
Reaction: K has to whip out the gun.
What started as a stealth mission is now a shootout. K trying to escape and protect T against an entire facility. A more extreme version of this scene is if K decided to knock T out on purpose to quiet T, but given the fact that they were discovered anyway would have been better if T could run. Now K has to carry T on the shoulder while shooting with one hand. Dammit, K!
But I’m just brainstorming here. The beauty of a digital mind map is that you can go back and edit if you feel like your beats are falling flat.
The shift in beats becomes faster as your stakes become as simple as ‘will he make that jump or not’. As you’re speeding through beats some of them can turn into half-beats, getting as simple as Prompt, Reaction if only as a bridge to introduce a new prompt. For example, the gun flies out of your character’s hand and the girl picks it up.
But tension doesn’t have come from life-of-death stakes. A tense scene can be one where you’re confronted by your boss and have to cover up for the fact that you haven’t done any work for the last two weeks due to external conditions. Your crisis, climax and resolve could be your character’s inner monologue trying to figure out a lie. Tension ebbs and rises as the lie gets more complicated!
Suspense
The differences between tension and suspense is that suspense continuously leaves you without the answer. If tension comes from clear expectations, suspense comes from an urge to know. While tension comes with release, suspense leaves you, well, suspended, or hanging. Tension is the up and down of the likelihood of failure. Suspense keeps growing and growing. With suspense, there’s a secondary plot at work simultaneously that the reader doesn’t get to see.
So, with tension’s slower cousin, suspense, I define beats as a shift of power dynamic or character intentions. Let’s take a more passive scene this time, like a lecture lead by our character, M:
Prompt: M’s nervous. The lecture is about to start.
Conflict: B, a rising critic and a nasty one at that, enters the room.
Crisis: It’s been a while since M taught a class. The topic is controversial. B might suspect…
Climax: M’s heartrate is rising. Breathing exercises. Distract by calling out names and greeting every person in the room.
Resolve: M can do this. Most people in the room know M and seem excited.
Our character’s heart is already racing before the lecture began. When a critic he’s met before enters the room, M is close to a panic attack. The reader wonders: what’s this topic M is going to lecture, why it’s so taboo or controversial, and what might B ‘suspect’ of M?
Prompt: M asks a question about a theory.
Conflict: Almost no-one knows about it. M has to explain.
Crisis: It’s hard to explain without a visual. M risks drawing on the board. Detail every subtle move M makes with the marker…
Climax: The ‘drawing’ is a non-sensical scribble.
Resolve: Self-deprecating joke. Realizes M could just use objects on the desk.
It’s a seemingly simple task: M wants to draw a stickman with some arrows to make a point. Anyone could do it. Yet go through a painful paragraph guiding us through the exact printer-like moves of the marker and the meticulous logic that goes through M’s mind. Just to have the anticlimactic result of his effort be what could only be described as esoteric squiggling of toddlerhood.
M will finally deliver us the point through objects on the table, but the flabbergast was done. While we’re slowly being given answers to our first question (What’s this controversial topic we’re lecturing about?), we made new ones. What’s with the baby bombshell doodles? What’s wrong with M?
We also show M’s coping mechanisms and how good M actually is at lecturing as they dive into flawless action while freaking out inside. A ‘passive’ lecture scene is turned into a covert public interrogation from B, meanwhile M is simultaneously trying cover up a disability.
Execution & Keeping Track of Answers
What’s important to remember is that this is not you planning the plot. This is you organizing your execution. In another place, maybe in your Trello where you have a detailed Therefore/ However outline, you have the naked master plot that only you as the author know. Your beats, however, are like the linear script of a movie — which is where beats are typically used!
You know what’s up; your task is to spoon-feed the right amounts of ‘what’s up’ to your readers. We can’t continuously raise questions. We need to answer some of them along the way, in turn creating more questions from the answers while we’re answering the story’s main mystery. So I like to add a ‘Takeaways’ note at the end of every scene that summarizes what we learned, ensuring a purpose and impact with each part.
M has some sort of perception problems that impedes certain senses. Doing menial things is a mental challenge.
B is oddly turned on questioning M’s choice of topic and words, evidently trying to accuse M of something.
M smoothly and subtly parries B’s provocations. It’s unclear whether B is really onto something of M is just trying to
We learn of an organized cult with their practices in detail.
M is writing a book about said cult.
You know you’re doing it right when just by reading the takeaways from each scene you have a bird-view summary of plot elements that gradually build comprehension in the long run. In other words, stuff makes sense, loose ends tie neatly, and your reader is rewarded for paying attention (and rewarded for re-reading once you gave all the answers: it all becomes so obvious the second time around).
Post Scriptum
To tell a complete story with every installment — every chapter, every moment — is something I personally wish to master. Today, we studied beats (and used MindMeister) for that. This is just one of the ways you can map-out your plot, time your pacing and chisel your ‘tone’.
I hope some of you discovered a technique that finally clicks with you. If you read this far yet still felt like it wasn’t relevant enough, or you tried and this method didn’t work for you, you can respond here on Medium or hit me up on Twitter — and I’ll think of another method that might help!
By the way, in light of NaNoWriMo 2022 I have committed to one episode per day every day for preptober and November, overcoming creative blockers on twitch while streaming games which helped me think! Join me, share your creative blocks, let’s talk our way out of our messy minds at twitch.tv/
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