The Slow Leak: Dripping Out Those Clues

Not many things in real life are more annoying than a slow leak of the faucet. That plop-plop-plop from the bathroom is guaranteed to drive a writer (who’s probably hoping for a distraction anyway) craaazy. But in your writing, those slow leaks can be an effective way to build tension and lead the reader along clue by clue to a surprise ending. This is supremely important with mysteries and thrillers, but any book with any tension is going to have to deal with the matter of doling out information. So don’t call the plumber yet—a few reflections first won’t hurt anybody!

A couple of aspects of “good leakage” should get your juices flowing (hopefully not with a plop-plop-plop). Let’s look at pace, order, and subtlety.

Pace

Here, as in so many aspects of writing, it’s the happy mean that gets the job done. If you drop clues too quickly, the reader will be onto the conclusion immediately, and everything else you say will be anticlimactic. If they’re too slow in coming, the denouement will seem artificial—a case of deus ex machina. You want to lead readers along without them even noticing that they’re being given important information. Let them wonder what’s relevant and what isn’t. Then, at the end, they’ll suddenly see how everything fits together—and has, right from the start—despite the red herrings. And the reaction will be an enlightened and satisfied “Aha!”

Order

I have the peculiarity of writing in scenes, often non-chronologically, and then putting the scenes together in the desired order as a kind of outline I then fill in. But to get the book right, I have to put the scenes in the right order, or else the plot may seem flabby or fail to pull readers along. There may seem to be holes in it.

Even if you’re a Plotter (lucky you!), there’s a point at which you have to consider the order in which your readers are going to be informed of certain facts. A datum that may seem like a flash of inspiration at one point in the book might seem self-evident later on. You don’t want to hear readers saying, “Well, duh…” I can quote here my favorite example, given me by an editor years ago. Mention early on that there is a letter jacket hanging in Joe’s closet. By itself, it will mean nothing to the reader, and she’ll probably forget all about it, until she realizes it was significant all along. But once you’ve gotten as far as figuring out the criminal was a football player, it’s too late to introduce this fact. The clue would be too obvious. It would be like a big tattoo across Joe’s face saying “guilty.”

Subtlety

Joe and his jacket have already made a point about subtlety. You don’t want it to be so obvious when a clue hits the floor. Some of what seems to be significant won’t be, and vice-versa. Timing controls some of that sense of importance, but also simply the way in which facts are presented.

This is dangerous, but let me use an example from one of my own books. The murderer turns out to be a peripheral character, yet one who had been mentioned right from the beginning, with a considerable part of their motive explained as well—without any sense that this information was going to be relevant to the central plot or any plot at all. It had been introduced simply to explain a certain behavior of a main character that was suspicious.

There you have three “plops” to pay attention to as you leak out your clues. No doubt readers can think of many more ways to make the steady dripping a builder of suspense. What do you think?