Presently reading I Found You by Lisa Jewell. She is the author of 18 best sellers and it is clear early on why this is the case. See, Jewell has mastered that slick trick that keeps readers engaged throughout books and throughout series. She is the master of Meta Suspense.
This is my term. I use the term to define a type of suspense that applies to the crux of the story but is played out between the writer and the reader and not actually the characters themselves. The really good writers have a knack of drawing you into a conflict by using different characters to form a mystery that directly pertains to the core problem of the story but forces you to guess early on what the answer is and then strings it out tightly throughout. In the case of I Found You, the story centers around a missing person. We first meet a woman whose husband has gone missing. This is one of three stories being told simultaneously. Hers is the first. The second is about a woman who finds a man on the beach. This man has lost his memory. Of course the assumption immediately is that this is the same man. This is where Jewell’s skill comes into play. She introduces a 3rd narrative told in 1993. This narrative features two men and throughout the book we are left to wonder which of the two men are eventually going to become this missing husband/amnesiac or if the two men are actually the same after all.
Suspense, yo.
I’ve been thinking about the power of Meta Suspense and how to incorporate that in my writing. It is a skill to be sure, and in the absence of the novel I was writing (now lost to the annals of the apple repair queue) I will be attempting to incorporate this Meta Suspense into the narrative of the story I will be starting tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow! First chance to actually write has at long last arrived.
If I do it well enough I may be able to construct that master meta suspense that spans an entire series. This is the thing that made A Song of Ice and Fire tick.