Hey guys, I'm writing a psychological suspense story about two women who are in jail and one of them gets heavily mistreated by both the prison guard and her cellmate who is the antagonist of the story but I'm new to writing suspense stories so i need some help. How could i make the characters personalities bounce off eachother and use threats and coercion to make it suspenseful. I know that I clearly need to read more suspense novels myself to get better but this story was just popping up in my soul so i had to write it . Any ideas would be heavily appreciated! Thanks and have a great day!
Are you asking how to create conflict between them? Conflict is the driver of story. There are many different kinds, it doesn't always have to be absolute head-to-head clashing (though that would work well in this situation). It can ver very subtle and take place mainly or entirely in subtext, or it can be right on the surface for all to see. Subtext is a lot more realistic, and is how most people tackle really intense subjects (often anyway), but it's also realistic for some characters to just say what they mean. That's actually fairly uncommon for real people when discussing really intense subject matter though. They'll at least start in subtext so it's sort of a secret conversation, referring to something only they know about. For instance imagine an old married couple where every time the man gets a little too full of himself the wife always says something like "Well, I guess you could solve it the way you always do, just go to the racetrack." When she says this a frustrated and angry look crosses his face, but he subsides, goes silent, and looks down submissively. Then she holds the dominant position in the relationship for a time, until he forgets and acts up again. And it develops that he used to tell her he was going to the racetrack but he was really having an affair with some younger woman that she found out about. And now she always holds it over his head any time he gets out of line. She never actually says the words, that would break the spell, she just threatens to. He doesn't want to hash it out for real, because he's morally in the wrong, so she has all the power. All she has to do is bring it up with that tone of threat hanging in the air, and he complies. Especially when there are other people there who don't know what they're referring to. Or I suppose people who do. Or you could keep it all on the surface. Set up a dialectic where each character is focused on something, and the two things are diametrically opposed. This used to be called the Lifeboat strategy. Imagine a bunch of people after a shipwreck on a lifeboat. Each person has a different idea about what they should do, and if any one gets their way it causes massive problems for all the others. For instance, one thinks they should paddle north to try to get to the nearest land mass, but maybe some of them are not welcome in that country. And somebody else thinks it's imperative to stay put near where the ship went down, because rescuers will be searching along that route. And maybe there isn't enough food and water for all of them for more than a few days, but rescue probably won't be for a week or more. This approach is about setting up a pressure cooker environment, where even the situation itself becomes dangerous to everybody, and each character is against all the others. There was a movie actually called Lifeboat made this way. I think it was by Hitchcock? But what you want to do is set things up so the characters want very different things, and if one gets what she wants the other will suffer. Then you have things start see-sawing, so one is winning for a while, but then the other finds some little trick or weakness, and gains the upper hand for a while. And it goes back and forth. I'm not sure if this is what you're asking about, or if you're looking for specific subjects for them to be fighting over? I just thought I'd start this by talking about strategies for approaching the writing in general.
Well this wasn't exactly what I was looking for but it is inspiring me to come with ideas on my own! thank you for your feedback and have a great day!
