researched, in-depth factual or physical detail are a considerable part of the writer's appeal. But unless you are writing such a tome crammed with often-esoteric "inside information," the rule of brevity applies.
The style should be crisp and understated because, again, a flowing and discursive style is not what the reader of this genre likes, and is not really fitting in a story of high tension and rapid movement.
The emotional background in suspense stories should be
chill because such a feeling-state in the major characters is the only believable one for story people in such grim situations.
The result of these reader expectations in suspense fiction generally is a tighter, colder writing style.
Here, for example, is the total description of a new bit of setting used in a novel of mine called The Regensburg Legacy:
The next morning, Friday, Dugger drove out of Stuttgart to the suburbs to the south. The sky was blue porcelain, relief after all the foul weather. A brisk breeze blew. Following small road signs with an American flag and the words KELLY BARRACKS on them, he turned off a routine German street and found himself approaching a gate to the military installation like any of a thousand others in the world. There was a high chain-link fence, a black-on-white sign, broad paving, and a guardhouse manned by smartly uniformed MPs.
There is no more description of the new setting. The plot continues immediately with Dugger's attempt to gain admittance to the installation.
While this limited amount of attention to setting, and this sort of unornamented prose, are perfectly fitting in suspense, let me ask you to pause for a moment here and give some thought to how much differently this setting segment might have been written for a romance novel. How much longer might it have been? How much looser and more flowery might the language have been? How much more emotional content —the feelings of the viewpoint character —might there have been?
I think it would have been three to five times as long, and perhaps longer. There would have been much heavier specific description of all kinds — details about the buildings and pavements, the colors of the flower boxes, the sounds of traffic, the sight of birds overhead, the smell of diesel fumes. The writing would have been looser and more ornate, and everything in the setting would have been related somehow to the viewpoint character's interior life, her emotional reactions to the environment.
Such differences in handling of setting are often overlooked by the unwary writer, so that even promising stories fail because their emphases and modes of delivery don't fit the genre.
HISTORICALS
Readers of historicals bring still different expectations to that genre, making different demands on the writer. In this kind of story—almost always a long, thick novel—breadth of focus, width of historical sweep, and richness of factual information are expected, even required. If you wish to write such a book, be sure to provide for:
1. Vast background content.
2. Heavy doses of minute period detail.
3. A variety of vantage points.
4. A plot deeply intertwined in the setting.
In terms of content, the setting should contain both vast historic and regional background. At the same time it is offering broad scope and panorama, it should give the reader heavy doses of setting minutiae, little tidbits about the cost of snuff in the colonies, for example, or how milady powdered her hair in those days.
Since both of these focal lengths —very long-distance and extremely close-up —are required in the historical, the writer will be forced to use both the wide-screen omniscient view "from on high" and the tightly restricted, intimate experience of the viewpoint character dealing with fine details. This will probably make the writing style itself fall somewhere between the lush-ness of the romance and the chill brevity of suspense.
Whatever is presented in the plot, the setting will
The style should be crisp and understated because, again, a flowing and discursive style is not what the reader of this genre likes, and is not really fitting in a story of high tension and rapid movement.
The emotional background in suspense stories should be
chill because such a feeling-state in the major characters is the only believable one for story people in such grim situations.
The result of these reader expectations in suspense fiction generally is a tighter, colder writing style.
Here, for example, is the total description of a new bit of setting used in a novel of mine called The Regensburg Legacy:
The next morning, Friday, Dugger drove out of Stuttgart to the suburbs to the south. The sky was blue porcelain, relief after all the foul weather. A brisk breeze blew. Following small road signs with an American flag and the words KELLY BARRACKS on them, he turned off a routine German street and found himself approaching a gate to the military installation like any of a thousand others in the world. There was a high chain-link fence, a black-on-white sign, broad paving, and a guardhouse manned by smartly uniformed MPs.
There is no more description of the new setting. The plot continues immediately with Dugger's attempt to gain admittance to the installation.
While this limited amount of attention to setting, and this sort of unornamented prose, are perfectly fitting in suspense, let me ask you to pause for a moment here and give some thought to how much differently this setting segment might have been written for a romance novel. How much longer might it have been? How much looser and more flowery might the language have been? How much more emotional content —the feelings of the viewpoint character —might there have been?
I think it would have been three to five times as long, and perhaps longer. There would have been much heavier specific description of all kinds — details about the buildings and pavements, the colors of the flower boxes, the sounds of traffic, the sight of birds overhead, the smell of diesel fumes. The writing would have been looser and more ornate, and everything in the setting would have been related somehow to the viewpoint character's interior life, her emotional reactions to the environment.
Such differences in handling of setting are often overlooked by the unwary writer, so that even promising stories fail because their emphases and modes of delivery don't fit the genre.
HISTORICALS
Readers of historicals bring still different expectations to that genre, making different demands on the writer. In this kind of story—almost always a long, thick novel—breadth of focus, width of historical sweep, and richness of factual information are expected, even required. If you wish to write such a book, be sure to provide for:
1. Vast background content.
2. Heavy doses of minute period detail.
3. A variety of vantage points.
4. A plot deeply intertwined in the setting.
In terms of content, the setting should contain both vast historic and regional background. At the same time it is offering broad scope and panorama, it should give the reader heavy doses of setting minutiae, little tidbits about the cost of snuff in the colonies, for example, or how milady powdered her hair in those days.
Since both of these focal lengths —very long-distance and extremely close-up —are required in the historical, the writer will be forced to use both the wide-screen omniscient view "from on high" and the tightly restricted, intimate experience of the viewpoint character dealing with fine details. This will probably make the writing style itself fall somewhere between the lush-ness of the romance and the chill brevity of suspense.
Whatever is presented in the plot, the setting will
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