DRAMA QUEENS: Adding Suspense To Your Love Life

Our daily lives are surrounded by chaos, running around looking for matching socks, chasing children or pets to get things away from them that they think are fun but shouldn’t be playing with, and basically trying to get from point “A” to point “B” on time.

Our escapes tend to be places of calm, like a long bath with candles, rubber ducks... with the cat and the kids trying to get in, meowing and banging on the bathroom door. Other times, we escape outside to the back porch during a sunset, with a hot cup of coffee or tea, taking in all the splendor of nature, only to get nervous about the bird

By: S.L. Carpenter

Many of us escape into our imaginations with a book – especially those of us who long for all kinds of exciting adventures. How about some thrilling Romantic Suspense? Travel to faraway lands with a hero dressed like James Bond – someone suave, handsome, and a badass. His skills are many, of course, everything from dismantling a bomb, winning every hand at chemin de fer, Hlying anything with wings and an engine, and swinging from cables to swoop up the heroine, saving her from an oncoming train. And yes, he always orders his martini shaken, not stirred. Maybe even taking down an international mobster and using you (because you are, of course, the heroine in all these adventures) as bait for the trap. He will, without fail, get out of all these crises unscathed, and then whisk you off to the romantic setting where it’s pretty clear what’s going to happen next... cue the sexy music... but we’ll move on because I need to keep it PG-13 for the magazine. Those scenes are a different genre of Romance.

Suspense and Romance are entangled together in books, and have been for a very long time. The duels of the Regency period, for example, whether legal or not, offer the hero a chance to bravely face death while the heroine clutches her gloved hands to her bosom and holds her breath. The Middle Ages were rife with swords, scandals, and sometimes it seems there wasn’t ever a time that didn’t have somebody Highting with pirates. You can always Hind Romantic Suspense tales that include guns, cannons, and all kinds of different weapons set during wars going back thousands of years. You can read about foreign countries and landscapes ready to be tamed, and some of them the eyes, and impress everyone with their amazing abilities.

In more contemporary novels, we share the adventures of law enforcement ofHicers solving crimes and saving lives. We visit the havoc wreaked by natural disasters, where the heroine knows how to stop the dam from breaking but needs the strong arm of the hero to move the lever, and we suffer along with a family when someone takes the last of the strawberry ice cream without telling anyone… all serious issues that add an element of suspense to our lives when we read about them. Except for the last one – I’m still real mad about that.

Of course, I dream of the Bond girls, or the badass femme fatales who save the world in designer bikinis, but in this article, I’ll focus on the readers of books which are a little more dangerous and edgy; full of intrigue, suspense, and danger. And yes, a rugged hero.

What draws them to the suspense and romantic elements could be the danger; the knowledge that at any moment things could go from bad to worse. It’s a ticking time bomb about to explode, and it drives them to Hlip through the pages like a Tasmanian devil wondering what will happen next. Do not, under any circumstances, approach these readers at this time. They’re completely lost in the dramatic tension, and will probably bite. You have been warned. Now, even I’m intrigued by it. I have to say, I have a lot of respect for the writers of these books.

In movies and television programs, you can show everything with pyrotechnics, CGI, and movie effects, but in a book, the author needs to place someone in these dangerous situations with words alone – setting the scene, creating the intense peril, and even instilling the fears of imminent death or serious injury.

It takes real talent to bring all that to the page, and not smoke a couple of packs of cigarettes or drink three gallons of coffee while trying to maintain the intensity. (Some authors may indeed have such methods of handling this kind of writing. I cannot comment on that at this time, due to the threat of intense pain.)

There are so many different scenarios to understand and research, and then other elements have to be included as well. If it’s Romantic Suspense, you need to blend in some sexy dialog with your plot, and hopefully have it make sense. Having the hero handcuffed to the bed with a snorkel, and wearing Power Rangers underwear is difHicult to visualize unless it makes perfect sense for that particular scene in the adventure. (If anyone has a book with that scene in it, please let me know? I’d be really curious as to how it came to be...)

I tend to be repetitive about reading and escaping into a book, but the reason I believe in it so much is that I believe people need to use their imagination. It’s a gift to us that makes reality