I give a lecture on occasion on building suspense in fiction, and touch briefly on applying techniques of fictional suspense to nonfiction. Characters, motivation, surprise, conflict, pacing … the same building blocks that bring fiction to life can also electrify nonfiction.
If you break down nonfiction bestsellers you’ll find this true. Fabulous examples abound. The Lost City of Z (2009) by David Grann. Dead Wake (2015) by Erik Larson. In the Heart of the Sea (2000), by Nathaniel Philbrick.
Let’s zero in on a personal fave, Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone (1995), a book brimming with valuable lessons in suspense. Lots of novels out there center on apocalyptic plague. This book takes a largely overlooked incident to illustrate the threat of such things, with an obvious advantage over fiction; this stuff actually happened.
Preston first shares the story of “Charles Monet,” a pseudonym for the real person involved. Monet, a French expat living in Kenya, contracts a disease while exploring a cave on a camping trip. We get to know Monet on a personal level, building our empathy with him. And we witness his horrible, swift demise from Marburg Virus, a variant on Ebola, in Nairobi.
Preston then shifts gears to a suburb of Washington, DC, where we follow the 1989 accidental release of another variant on Ebola, soon to be named Reston virus. A shipment of wild monkeys has recently been accepted; twenty-nine quickly succumb to the lethal virus, and the lab is quarantined. Government researchers selflessly place themselves in mortal danger and attack the problem, soon identifying the “hot agent.” Ebola.
To wring maximum suspense, Preston follows a brilliant, dedicated researcher in the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). Dr Nancy Jaax. A loving wife. A mom.
A hero.
When Dr. Jaax cuts her hand at home in the kitchen and subsequently becomes exposed due to a tear in her hazmat suit while heroically working to contain the viral outbreak, we sit on the edges of our seat, holding our breaths. Preston has already shown us in horrifying wet detail the effects of Marburg on Charles Monet, and thoughts of Jaax suffering through the same grip us.
In a textbook case for writers, Preston employs the techniques of fiction. He describes in detail and imagery the onset and progression of the disease. He seasons the narrative with personal details so that we get characters with whom we sympathize and empathize. We build that bond with them. We get the villain, in multiple strains of Ebola. We get action through active voice storytelling. We get the piecing together of bits of evidence and confounding clues, in the classic tradition of the whodunit. We get an architecture of the overall story with built-in suspense. We get a race against the clock. We get high stakes; the outbreak occurs just fifteen minutes from the seat of our national government. We get conflict in every scene.
Unless your goal is to write for an academic audience, if you are writing popular nonfiction, treat yourself to a master class by studying the methods of the best practitioners of fictional suspense. Stephen King, Ken Follett, Patricia Highsmith, and others know the secrets to spellbinding, and they’re there for you to absorb.
At the time of this writing, The Hot Zone is in development as a TV series for National Geographic, due this spring. If it’s half as good as the book, it’ll be riveting indeed.
