Most of my fiction fits in the suspense/thriller genre. This means I keep my chapters short, to the point and for the most part, fast. Still, I slow things down to give the reader a breather and my characters space to develop.

Whether I’m writing my own work or reading someone else’s a certain level of fatigue can set in if everything is moving ahead at blistering pace, not to mention that when the train is moving at break-neck speed, the characters riding it have little chance to do anything but hang on. If you want character development, you’ll have to slow things down a bit. Not for long and not often, perhaps, but long and often enough to (a) give your reader a breather and (b) let your characters grow and/or show who they are while they’re not hanging by a fraying thread from a 10 mile high cliff.

How to do this? Well, it depends on the story, of course, and it depends on the characters and their propensity to talk, to be introspective and so on. How do I do it? Typically I segment this along chapter lines, though it can happen within a chapter, inside a quiet scene that then gives way to explosive action. Some specific guidelines I use:

1) Don’t slow it down at the beginning: Chapter 1 needs to move from the get go. I like to start as if the story is already ongoing. The place to insert a slow beat or to do deliberate character development is not in the first chapter (though character development can happen in the midst of action), or at least not in the first few paragraphs. I realize other types of fiction (though they might benefit from the same approach) might follow a different method, but we’re talking about suspense and thrillers here. Suspend and thrill them from the get-go.

2) Insert the slow beat (chapter or scene) at a decisional point: By this I mean, a place in the story where after a big bang in the action or a plot twist the protagonist stops and either introspectively (through internal dialog) or through dialog with another character, works out how to proceed, how to defeat the challenges before her, or how to run the other way. These can be great opportunities to reveal your characters’ motivations, their fears, even their world-views. It can also be a time where two of your characters grow closer through this interaction.

3) Keep it to the point: This can mean short passages, but not necessarily so. I aim for short just in case, and let it land where it may — then edit like crazy to shorten it if possible. I always feel that too long of a slow scene or chapter, and my reader will (a) forget what happened before this point or (b) no longer care what happens next or (c) both of the above! The short of it is, make it say exactly what you need to get across, nothing more, nothing less.

4) Don’t forget tension: Just because this is a slow beat, it doesn’t mean it can’t be tense. In fact, slow scenes can provide as much if not more tension, especially at the character level, than the ones where everything is blowing up and moving at blurring speeds. For example, your protagonist and his side-kick could be working out how to find the ticking bomb, while the protagonist discerns whether he can really trust his side-kick to come through when the chips are down. You can create back-and-forth dialog between the two where they feel each other out in the process of figuring out likely locations for the bomb.

5) Provide foundation for what comes next: In other words, if at the end of the slow beat and the next thing that comes hard and fast you are asking “so what?” about the slow beat, it’s time to select and hit delete, or re-edit to make it relevant. In the example I gave in number four, make sure that the bomb blows up, or that they run into the bomb maker, or that they get a lead to where the bomb maker might be, and maybe when they find him he throws a pipe bomb at them, and the side-kick risks her life to kick the bomb away. OK, it sounds silly, but that’s the gist of it: make sure the slow beat directly ties in to the action and suspense that follows.

I write all this as I’m at a point in my story where, before the final breaking point leading the climax and after some significant happenings leading up to this point, it feels right to insert a slow chapter. Aaah, let’s get it started.

This post was inspired by Decisive Moment, a suspense novel about a sniper turned photographer who takes a fateful set of photos of a movie star and her mobster boyfriend gunning down her producer, and must then decide whether to sell the photos and to whom, or turn to a life of crime to avoid the consequences that attach to his ownership of these photos.

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