Building Tension in a Longer Work
Hi, friends.
Hope you are well as we slide into July. This flip of the calendar is particularly bittersweet to me. Half the year is gone. More than half of my summer. School will be here before I am ready. People are also, I suppose, busy firing up their grills and setting off fireworks. A good reminder that I need to light a fire under my behind and put pencil to paper (what I can control) instead of contemplating the passage of time (what I can’t). So, let’s get to it, shall we?
Story.
We’re taking a look at Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca this week and next. Why Rebecca? There’s an agent I follow on twitter who periodically comments on momentum and pacing after reading through a pile of submissions. It’s caught my eye a couple of times and it’s something I’m thinking a lot about as I slog through revisions. What keeps people turning the page? How do you as a writer, pick and choose the right scenes to propel the story forward and satisfy the reader? I have DNFed a few books recently because they were so. very. slow. Either, I could not get invested. Or they kept hitting the same note.
I’ve been googling literary thrillers and page turners of late and this is one of the reasons I selected Rebecca for our reading. It is always at the top of these lists and has stayed the test of time, never going out of print in all these years (which I so want for all of us), and is, in fact, having a bit of a revival. So, let’s take a look at some of the things du Maurier is doing in the first few chapters of the book. (I am reading as we go and am currently on Chapter 10.)
Craft tidbits.
The opening:
Last night I dreamt I went to Mandereley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited.
I’m fairly certain opening with a dream would be unadvised in workshopland. And yet. Here we are, in this dreamworld, looking at Manderley through the narrator’s eyes. It lets us know the importance of this house. Manderley will be rendered as a character.
There’s also some great subtext in this opening chapter to set the mood: tourtured elms, monster shrubs, meanacing woods.
Something has happened. It’s a hook for the reader. Don’t we want to know why she dreams of this house? Why they can’t go back?
Double headed narrator. (There may be a better term for this, but it’s the term one of my professors used in MFA. I’ve never heard it used since.) It’s an older narrator telling a story of when they were younger. Narratively, it’s a great device. They can filter the story through the lens of wisdom and experience. They have had time to reflect on events. And that’s what we have here. In the early chapters, our older narrator is concerned with time and how things might have gone differently.
We can never go back again, that much is certain. (opening of Chapter 2)
I wonder what my life would be like to-day, if Mrs. Van Hopper had not been a snob. (opening of Chapter 3)
I’m glad it can not happen twice, the fever of first love. (opening of Chapter 5)
This double headed narrator allows for some tension building too. The reader realizes and knows more than the younger (tewnty one year old) narrator and this is apparent in Chapter 6 when she agrees to marry Maxim without really giving it much thought. We already know that she lives in her head. Here she is imagining Maxim and Mrs. Van Hopper discussing the marriage proposal in this way
I wondered what he was saying to her, how he phrased his words. Perhaps he said, “We’ve been seeing one another every day.” And she in answer, “Why, Mr. De Winter, it’s quite the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.” Romantic, that was the word I had tried to remember coming up in the lift. Yes, of course. Romantic. That was what people would say. It was all very sudden and romantic.
Oh, you sweet summer child. The reader knows differently. We see that the proposal isn’t romantic at all. In fact, she doesn’t even understand what he’s asking.
“So Mrs. Van Hopper has had enough of Monte Carlo,” he said, “and now she wants to go home. So do I. She to New York and I to Manderley. Which would you prefer? You can take your choice.”
She is naive, yes. And this keeps her from really understanding how life will be for her at Manderley, living in the shadow of the first Mrs. De Winter.
She was dead, and one must not have thoughts about the dead. They slept in peace, the grass blew over their graves.
The past would not exist for either of us, we were starting afresh, he and I.
But we know, from our own life experience and because she is so naive, that this can’t possibly be. We see when she arrives at Manderley that this will not be the case.
Chapter Endings. Take a look at the close of du Maurier’s chapters. These are where she makes little revelations.
Chapter 1: We would not talk of Manderley, I would not tell my dream. For Manderley was ours no longer. Manderely was no more. [Here the repetition is lovely, building until that last little reveal. It exists in dreams alone. And there is a bit of secrecy on the part of narrator.]
Chapter 2: “It’s Max de Winter,” she said, “the man who owns Manderley. You’ve heard of it, of course. He looks ill, doesn’t he? They say he can’t get over his wife’s death…” [The character of Mrs. Van Hopper is great. She’s such a medlesome gossip. Careless. Putting out her cigarettes in cold cream and butter. What an odd and fascinating detail.]
Here is Mrs. Van Hopper again in Chapter 4: “An appalling tragedy,” she was saying, “the papers were full of it of course. They say he never talks about it, never mentions her name. She was drowned you know, in a bay near Manderley…”
Chapter 7: Unconsciously I shivered, as though someone had opened the door behind me, and let a draguth into the room. I was sitting in Rebecca’s chair, I was leaning against Rebecca’s cushion, and the dog had come to me and laid his head upon my knee because that had been his custom, and he remembered, in the past, she had given sugar to him there. [The narrator realizing that past does exist for her and that she will be in Rebecca’s shadow at Manderely.]
These reveals keep us turning the page. One more chapter, we say. Looking for the next revelation.
I think it’s also important to look at what’s omitted and how that might build tension. We do not know the narrator’s name. Only that it’s lovely and unusual. We are to infer that is not nearly as important as Rebecca’s name because our narrator is not as important as the shadow of the first wife.
Likewise, we don’t really know that much about her backstory. Her parents have both died. She is an only child. She has been rather sheltered until she took up with Mrs. Van Hopper.
Nor do we get that much about the courtship. Though admittedly it’s a fast one, we only see two car rides in Chapters 4 and 5. A luncheon. I suppose their other excursions are similar to these and we should think of them as unimportant.
We’re told they tour around France and Italy for seven weeks but we aren’t there with them as they stroll hand in hand. We don’t get to see this happiness. And maybe we don’t need to. We want to focus on the days that are different. The days that cause conflict. Instead, we pick back up when they return to Manderley, where there will be no peace but a visit by Maxim’s sister.
Sparks.
Write about the replacement. The new girlfriend. The new husband. Another child. (In her memoir, The Glass Eye, Jeannie Vanasco writes about how she was named for a daughter her father had in a previous marriage. A daughter who had died. She carries that weight every time she writes her name.) How do people want others to refill (or not) someone else’s shoes?
Revision: du Maurier is great at ratcheting up the stakes. In Chapter 6, Mrs. Van Hopper has decided immediately that they will leave Monte Carlo. They must pack and make arrangements. The narrator wants to say good-bye to Maxim but he’s not there. Mrs. Van Hopper wants to take the earlier train causing the narrator even more anxiety. In Chapter 9, Beatrice and Giles come for lunch. The narrator isn’t looking forward to it. So, du Maurier has them arrive early. Before Maxim comes home. How can you add another complication that would cause your characters more distress?
du Maurier’s characters (Mrs. Van Hopper, Beatrice, Maxim himself) are not shy in conversation. They constantly throw pointed barbs into the conversations to bring others down a notch. Maybe one of your characters needs to be more confrontational? What can they say to cause tension? Make another character feel slighted?
Other tidbits.
If you are in the process of querying or will be soon, here’s a great thread on some dos and don’ts.
Maybe you’ve already got a manuscript ready to roll. Awesome. Soft Skull press is open for submissions (no fee, no agent) through July 20th. Roxane Gay Books is also open (no fee, agented or no) though I don’t see a close date there.
If you’ve got something shorter, Joyland is also open for free subs in July.
Okay Scribblers. That’s all I’ve got for today. We’ll talk more about Rebecca next time. Until then, the year is halfway over. Are you where you wanted to be in your writing? Me neither. So, pencils up and get after it. Pretend they are sparklers if it helps~
Marsha
Marsha, this post came at the right time for me. I'm working on creating tension in my own manuscript.