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I’ve been thinking about maintaining suspense without disgusting/confusing your audience.  Essentially, you want to surprise your audience but you have to tell them enough to understand what they have been shown.

There are two ways of doing this that I can tell.  I’ll call the first The Mystery.  In any mystery, the audience implicitly understands that the identity of the criminal will be revealed at the end.  The audience’s trust might be betrayed if there is some gimmick ending (”it was really the detective all along!,” assuming that the detective was the first-person narrator, or the identity is never revealed).  Although the audience knows that it will have to wait, it understands WHY it has to wait.  Certainly, knowing who the criminal is is not essential to understanding the mystery’s plot.  Discovering the criminal IS the plot.

The second way is probably more relevant to what I’m doing.  I’ll call it the Harry Potter Method.  Characters see a mysterious chain of events and conclude that they mean one thing.  For example, Ron and Hermione watch Harry nearly fall off his broom because of a curse.  They see Snape chanting during the quidditch match in Sorcerer’s Stone and assume that he cursed Potter.  Given that there IS an established history of hostility between Potter and Snape, that interpretation of what they saw makes sense.  No audience member would say something along the lines of “That interpretation is wildly off-base,” or “What is going on?” There is an underlying suspense because by the time you read two or three Harry Potter books, you figure that SOMEONE somewhere has made a crucial misinterpretation.  The audience doesn’t feel betrayed when it emerges at the end that, for example, Snape wasn’t trying to kill Harry because it had been given accurate information all along, it just hadn’t interpreted correctly (neither had the characters).

Now, to my work.  It is (of course!) a novel about superheroes.  One element of suspense, I think, should be that the audience is not IMMEDIATELY told at a character’s introduction that he is a superhero.  This might create suspense, but it might also create confusion.  I’ll show an example of this.  Let’s assume for a moment that the author doesn’t have the space, time or desire to establish Jay (who, unbeknownst to the audience, is a superhero) as a paragon of benevolence, recklessness, selflessness, or thrill-seeking.  If the audience hasn’t been shown any of those traits and doesn’t know that he’s essentially impervious to flames, they will probably be confused when Jay runs headlong into a flaming room on the off-chance that survivors are inside.  Given that the potential risks to a normal human are great and the potential benefits are relatively small, that behavior needs to have some justification to be plausible to an audience.

The audience might, however, resolve that problem by reasoning… “OK, we already knew that Jay is freakishly tough.  Therefore, he is probably a superhero and many superheroes are resistant to flames.”  At least a fraction of the audience would thus not be confused by Jay running into the building, because they expect that any superhero could do something as simple as rescue people from a burning building.  What if the situation, though, required an ability not widely associated with superheroes…  like considerable expertise with military weapons or doctrine.  Familiarity with aliens (or actually being an alien).  Tracking by smell or infrared.   Metamorphosis.  Flight.   These are all traits that Jay (Hunter) has that probably couldn’t be assumed just because you suspect that he is a superhero.

Ok, let’s go back to the two methods of building suspense and understandability.  I could present Jay’s real identity as a mystery that will be the object of the book.  The problem is that the mystery approach would prevent me from using Jay as a major narrator of the book.  Any sort of truly understandable and non-deceptive narration from Jay would lead any competent reader to understand his identity.  I’m not thrilled about this option for this book because it would be harder to tell the story without using Jay as one of the narrators.  (Also, the mystery format would probably establish Jay as the central character around whom everything else revolves.  I don’t think I want that).

The Harry Potter approach is good, but I’m still looking at ways the audience might misinterpret what it’s seeing.