Using story questions to control tension and pacing in The God of the Woods

I’m going to talk about the whole plot of The God of the Woods, including the ending and multiple plot surprises. The embedded graphic also gives away many plot elements.

As soon as I began reading The God of the Woods, I knew I wanted to track the way Liz Moore controls the tension and pacing of the novel by strategically opening and closing story questions. Her skill at managing what readers want to know next is, I think, a big reason behind the book’s success. The book description introduces two of the key story questions: What happened to thirteen-year-old Barbara Van Laar, who disappears from her camp bunk in the summer of 1975? And what happened to her brother, Bear, who vanished from the same area in the summer of 1961? They are big hook-y questions but, no matter how big they are, they aren’t enough by themselves to sustain our interest through a 476-page novel.

So how does Moore succeed in pulling readers through the book? First, she has been clever with her initial premise, offering up two vulnerable children for us to be anxious about, and with her ending, which, as we’ll see, she splits into two climaxes rather than one. Second, Moore continuously generates more story questions. Some of them are lower stakes and answered quickly, within the same chapter or after just a chapter or two—we saw this dynamic at work in my scene study—so readers feel like they are getting some answers, even if not the ones they want. When she does answer a high-stakes story question, the answer often opens up ten new questions for us to wonder about.

The figure below shows the number of story questions open at a time across the novel. There is a steady rise through the middle of part three, then a couple dips until the questions mount again just before the climax in part seven, when they close in a step-like pattern as interrelated groups of questions are finally answered at once.

There are a total of sixty-three story questions in the novel. The second figure below shows you exactly when each one is opened and closed. The highest-stakes questions are in orange; other notable story questions I discuss in this post are in turquoise. Notice that Moore opens new high-stakes questions at regular intervals through the middle of the novel. Even near the end, in part seven, she continues to open new questions as she closes others.

Let’s now zoom in to look at some examples of how the dynamic of opening and closing story questions actually works by looking at the questions marked as “notable” in that figure.

An important thing to note about The God of the Woods is that Moore uses a large cast of rotating point-of-view characters to narrate the novel. Readers become particularly attached to the first two narrators we meet: Louise, a twenty-three-year-old counselor at Camp Emerson who is struggling under the burden of poverty, an alcoholic mother, a dependent younger brother, and a wealthy but abusive fiancé; and Tracy, Barbara’s bunkmate and friend, who is struggling with all of the typical teenage angst in addition to her parents’ recent divorce.

Moore builds our sympathy with these two narrators and then promptly increases the tension of the novel by putting them at risk. First, Tracy sets off in search of Barbara herself. Tracy faces the standard risks of getting lost in a forest that has apparently already swallowed both Van Laar siblings, but readers also know something she doesn’t: a serial killer with generational ties to the Van Laar Preserve is heading her way. This is another instance of dramatic irony, which we saw in my scene study. But in that example we were allied with Louise as she lied to T.J. Here we feel dread rather than complicity.

Moore steadily ratchets up the suspense of this subplot. Tracy loses her way in the woods almost immediately. Eventually she does follow the camp instruction to “sit down and yell.” At the end of that chapter, midway through part three, this subplot reaches a climax as someone steps out of the woods in front of Tracy. Moore ends the chapter on a cliff-hanger, and readers must agonize over whether it is the serial killer for several chapters. In the meantime, Moore turns her attention to other characters and subplots, though even here she finds a spot to remind us of how worried we are about Tracy. Soon after that cliff-hanger, we witness Alice, the sedative-addled mother of the Van Laar children, hear a child yelling but do nothing about it. Is she going to fail yet another child, we wonder? (By this point in the novel, we suspect but don’t yet know the extent to which she has failed her own children.)

Finally, three chapters later, Moore relieves our suspense. A silent figure with long gray hair guides Tracy back to the road near the camp. Tracy is supposed to be wearing glasses but isn’t because they make her self-conscious, so she can’t clearly see the figure, and this becomes a new story question: Who guided Tracy out of the woods? Was it the serial killer, who perhaps wasn’t in a murderous mood that day, or someone else? This is a lower-stakes question that reverberates from the higher-stakes one—is Tracy found?—but it still provokes curiosity. Moore finally answers that question much later in the novel, in part seven. The lesson here: Think about whether, after you’ve cleared up a big what question in your plot, you can hold the answers to how and why for later in the novel.

As soon as Tracy’s situation is resolved, Moore increases the suspense about Louise’s predicament. Around the midpoint of the novel, we begin to worry that she will be framed for Barbara’s murder. It’s not confirmed that Barbara is dead; no body has been found, but a bag containing a bloody camp uniform is discovered in the trunk of Louise’s fiancé’s car, and he claims Louise gave him the bag. Once again, Moore increases the tension of this subplot further by having Louise call home from jail and discover that her mother is passed out, her twelve-year-old brother is hungry, and there is no food in the house.

Louise is bailed out of jail in part six, and the immediate tension eases. Moore doesn’t answer the question of whether Louise will be charged with murder so much as she defuses it, but even the defusing opens a new mystery: Who bailed out Louise? It certainly wasn’t her mother, and we don’t learn the answer for another sixteen chapters. See the pattern? Moore gives us the what but withholds the who and the why.

Cleverly, Moore also livens up the long middle stretch of the novel by revealing that we’ve been given false answers to two important questions involving the Van Laar children. First, we think we know that Barbara is going to meet her boyfriend every night at the wildfire observer’s cabin at the top of Hunt Mountain, near camp. This is what she’s told Tracy, and that’s where Tracy is headed when she gets lost. Moore has established Tracy (unlike Alice) as a reliable narrator, and the fact that she puts herself at risk to go find Barbara at the observer’s cabin means that we never question whether it’s true. This is a classic, and effective, example of misdirection.

Importantly, Moore doesn’t reverse the answer by having Tracy lie or withhold her knowledge from the reader. The new information comes out when police investigator Judyta, who doesn’t enter the novel as a POV character until a third of the way through, interviews another camper, who tells her he saw Barbara going to the camp director’s tent or cabin every night—a revelation that doesn’t happen until late in part six.

The second example of an answer reversal also involves the introduction of a new POV character. At the midpoint of the novel, in part four, we go back in time to the summer Bear disappeared, and we return to Carl Stoddard, who is employed by the Van Laars as a gardener. We gradually come to understand that Carl is going to be tied to Bear’s disappearance through some circumstantial evidence, but because we are in his point of view, we also believe that he is innocent. These two chapters change what we thought we knew about Bear’s disappearance and add one more layer of tension, especially after we meet Carl’s wife and daughter, who want to clear his name, putting them at odds with the powerful Van Laar family. The two later play instrumental roles in solving the mystery of what happened to the boy. Once again, it is Judyta who ultimately resolves this second reversal and unlocks the truth of what happened to Bear.

That resolution brings us to the end of the novel, where Moore makes another structural choice worth studying. The two questions the book description hands us—what happened to Barbara, and what happened to her brother, Bear—drive the whole novel, but Moore doesn’t resolve them at the same time. She settles the Bear mystery first; midway through part seven, we understand what happened to the boy. Only then does she turn back to Barbara, holding off on that answer until the next-to-last chapter, when we finally enter Barbara’s point of view for the first and only time.

Splitting the ending in two buys Moore room, allowing her to tilt the novel in a slower, more literary direction. Resolving the Bear mystery satisfies our hunger to have those questions answered, and she can use the remaining chapters to circle back to her themes. The stretch between the two resolutions is where the class threads we’ve been following from the start finally come together. We see that the Hewitts (T.J. and her father), like Louise, are the true embodiment of self-reliance. The Van Laars, on the other hand, live in a house that is named “Self-Reliance” but is run entirely by servants. Barbara’s final choice, to disappear into the woods, comes to embody the self-reliance her family has only ever paid lip service to.

The God of the Woods is a master class in how to manage a complex plot over the course of a long novel. Moore keeps the tension high by continually asking new questions and opening new mysteries, solving just enough of them that we can almost see the resolution hovering on the horizon. In the last part of the novel, as she begins circling the two key questions about Bear and Barbara we started with, the way Moore uses story questions starts to shift. She relies more heavily on shorter chapters that end with cliff-hangers about smaller questions: What is a potential witness going to reveal? Who is on the other side of a door? Where is one of the key witnesses? She doesn’t rely solely on the pull of those last high-stakes questions but instead keeps finding new ways to surprise us and to make the book feel like it’s moving forward quickly, even as she takes the time to unspool themes, excavate deep backstories, and paint detailed character portraits.

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