The Literary Come-On

 Ooh, I've been writing so hard I feel as if my head is spinning and I could easily have parked my bicycle high on the wall of this French restaurant and in fact perhaps I did!

 Although I hardly know whether I'm on my head on my heels, I do recall rash promises of talking about tension and suspense, so here are a few brief thoughts...

Tension, suspense, anticipation – all of them delicious emotions if you experience them in moderation, although the extreme versions take you into murky, E L James, pain-and-pleasure territory, so it's probably best to stay within the parameters of delicious and allow your reader the thrill of having their expectations built up, before they are fulfilled or thwarted.

There are a few ways of doing this.

• You can announce that something is going to happen up front and then leave your reader in an agony as to how and why.
• You can drop hints – the use of portents and omens a la Thomas Hardy can be very useful here – without being too specific, just enough to whet the appetite.
• You can take your reader right to the brink of the crisis, and leave them there.
• You can convince your reader that one thing is going to happen and then surprise them with another.

It's a form of structural flirtation, a literary come-on. In a way, plotting the novel is an extended seduction, so we're back in EL James territory once again. You want to confound your reader, but not too often. You want to leave them hungry for more.

Cliffhangers and Coquettes

Once you have got your hooks into a reader with a punchy, dramatic start to a story, the only thing that will keep them reading (apart from your lambent prose, of course) is the irresistible urge to know what happens next and it is up to you to dole out your plot as tantalisingly as possible.  As with affairs of the heart, it is a balance between giving and withholding: you give them a little bit of information, but withhold the critical part.You promise much, but you don't deliver straight away. This is in effect what a cliffhanger is: you march your hero or heroine right to the brink of a major drama - and then you leave them (and your reader) in suspense.

Following a cliffhanger, it is a good idea to cut away from the excitement to something that has a different pace and texture, a different mood, even a different location, involving different characters.  In this way your reader's curiosity - their desire - is inflamed.  Plotting as a kind of flirtation, a come-on? Hmmm.