Writing intense quiet…
I write sci-fi thrillers. Readers and writers have preconceived notions about what that means. The sci-fi part is well understood—or is it? The whole Star Wars juggernaut was fantasy, not sci-fi, for example—or, at best, a fantasized rendering of Asimov’s Foundation series souped up with language from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter series (Jedi warriors, the white beast on the ice planet, etc). Still, I’ll give you that sci-fi writing is well defined, even if Hollywood doesn’t know the definition.
Hollywood has also played fast and loose with the concept of thriller. A modern movie thriller has a protagonist who faces unspeakable adversity and violence, suffers through interminable car chases or escapes from murderous robots, zombies, vampires, or werewolves, and saves one or two unnaturally slim and buxom women in the process. Compare Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity with the movie version. If the movie is a sci-fi thriller, the women become super smart scientists as well (the movie version of I, Robot comes to mind). It’s hard to find a few cinematic seconds that are devoid of sex, violence, or other intense action.
Literary thrillers need intense quiet. Thriller writers must learn to write it. You can’t have scenes of desperate action without moments of quiet desperation. In my novel Survivors of the Chaos, slavers capture Zebediah and throw him into a boxcar with other future slaves who will make the journey from the Midwest to be sold in New York City (the capture and the confinement are the desperate actions). Here he passes long hours wondering about his fate (the quiet desperation, even after arriving in New York). You can’t have sex, violence, and other intense action all the time for the reader’s sake either. You must give the reader time to catch his breath. Not too much—just enough.
I call this the Goldilocks paradox. As a writer, you must solve the problem of striking just the right balance between intense quiet and intense action. As a reader, you know there’s no real solution to this problem. You might not need as much quiet time in the story as another reader. You’re a marathon reader, not a sprinter reader, to use a sports analogy.
What should a writer do? There are two answers. First, follow Clancy’s advice: just write the damn story. Its elements will often dictate the correct balance. Moreover, “quiet before the storm” is not a cliché—it’s a writing technique. Any action either has to be set up or, if it’s a surprise, explained later, a setup in reverse. And neither the setup or the action can intrude on the forward motion of the story significantly or you’ll lose your reader.
The second answer is easy to state but more complicate: write what you’re comfortable with. You shouldn’t be writing thrillers if you don’t read them. You should read them for entertainment, of course, but only by reading many thrillers can you determine how much intense action and intense quiet you like. You then write that way yourself, striking your own balance, but only as it fits the story. You’re assuming, of course, that you are representative of the average thriller reader. If you’re not, compensate for that.
It’s difficult to use words to describe intense action. It’s even harder to use them to describe intense quiet. Shakespeare used soliloquies to allow a character on stage to describe what he’s thinking. In fiction, it’s easier—you can get inside a character’s head if you’re in his point-of-view. Even outside his POV, you can show what he’s thinking with body language. (It’s acceptable to do that. The character defining the POV doesn’t necessarily pick up on the significance of the body language, even though the reader does, but it’s visible. This is the same argument for character description—“he had brown hair and blue eyes” might mean that the POV-determining character noticed that, but maybe not. Purists might argue with me here.)
Consider the following example: “Pete looked from the old wall clock in the corridor to the cell door and back. His head moved like a tennis fan’s as he follows a tournament volley. He gripped the edge of his cot. Sweat soaked his prison duds.” This is intense quiet versus intense action. I don’t have to tell the reader that Pete’s worried about something and that it’s going to happen soon at a certain time. Maybe a firing squad? A visit from a jilted girl friend? I’d have to explain before or after the firing squad appears or the girl friend arrives. (By the way, POV is indeterminate in this snippet. It might be Pete’s, it might be a jailor’s, or it might be the rat’s sitting on a window sill.)
I suppose that we can parse words here and say this is suspense. From a practical point of view, it’s easier to say thriller than suspense novel, although we often say the genre is thriller or suspense (or both). Maybe the formula is action + suspense = thriller. Yes, I like that. Suspense describes the intense quiet. The extended formula I use is sci-fi + action + suspense = sci-fi thriller. (Again, purists might argue with me here.)
John le Carré was a master of suspense. The passages of intense quiet in his spy novels are superb. Here’s one example where Hollywood got it right: the movie version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy matches the suspense in the book, for example. Both book and movie have episodes of intense quiet, the movie’s aided by the visual aspects of cinematographic art.
Ludlum’s passages of intense quiet are not as common, but he pulls it off better than Hollywood. He uses those passages where Bourne worries about who he is to good effect. Hollywood minimally includes that angst as an afterthought.
I don’t want to give the idea that I didn’t enjoy the Bourne movies. They were fun once I learned to forget the books. Moreover, Matt Damon is my image of Bourne—tightly wound, muscular, and lethal. The visual film medium changes things no matter how faithfully the Hollywood screenwriter follows the book. Hollywood gets away with emphasizing the intense action because (1) it’s done very well in the movie, and (2) Damon is perfect for the role.
English has many verbs to describe action. It has fewer to describe quiet. The verbs in the paragraph about Pete are weak. I could fiddle with them a bit: Pete looked à Pete’s eyes jerked, and head moved à head swiveled. But these changes don’t help much. Maybe intense quiet needs to emphasize the adjectives and adverbs (but not an overabundance of either). Tinker has it right.
There’s no hard and fast set of rules for writing quiet time well. Sometimes I struggle with it; other times I think it’s so good, I’m afraid to touch it. This struggle plays out in all aspects of my writing. It’s part of the fun. But don’t think more attention to intense quiet is always good. Quiet time is like an ocean scene painted by an artist. Sometimes, the more you work at it, the muddier it gets, until you end up with something unusable. Keep it fresh and alive—even if it’s quiet.
In libris libertas….
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