Creating Suspense
Building apprehension in the minds of your readers is one of the most effective keys to engaging them early on in your novel and keeping them flipping pages late into the night.
Think: Worry equals suspense.
The best part is, the secrets for ratcheting up the suspense are easy to implement. Here are five of the most effective methods:
1. Put characters that readers care about in jeopardy.
When you write, you want to be constantly asking yourself what readers are hoping for, wondering about, or questioning at each point in the story. Our job as writers is to give them what they want, when they want it—or, to add a twist so that we give them more than they ever bargained for. Here are some ways to do that to amp up the suspense:
Think: Worry equals suspense.
The best part is, the secrets for ratcheting up the suspense are easy to implement. Here are five of the most effective methods:
1. Put characters that readers care about in jeopardy.
- Four factors are necessary for suspense—reader empathy, reader concern, impending danger and escalating tension.
- Once the readers care about and identify with a character, they will be invested when they see the character struggling to get what they desire most. We want readers to worry about whether or not the character will get what they want.
- Suspense builds as danger approaches. Readers experience apprehension when a character they care about is in peril. This doesn’t have to be a life-and-death situation, though; it can be a mental problem.
- We need to escalate the tension in our stories until it reaches a satisfying climax. Raise the stakes by making the danger more imminent, intimate, personal and devastating.
- Suspense happens in the stillness of your story, in the gaps between the action sequences, in the moments between the promise of something dreadful and its arrival.
- Suspense is anticipation; action is payoff. You don’t increase suspense by “making things happen,” but by promising that they will.
- Milk that moment; make the most of the suspense it offers. And then show us what happens in that meadow. In other words…
- In tandem with making promises is the obligation of keeping them. The bigger the promise, the bigger the payoff. Another huge promise. Readers think, OK, buddy. Let’s see if you deliver.
- A huge promise without the fulfillment isn’t suspense—it’s disappointment.
- When stories falter, it’s often because the writers didn’t make big enough promises, didn’t fulfill them when readers wanted them to be fulfilled, or broke promises by never fulfilling them at all.
- Don’t be predictable. Readers want to predict what will happen, but they want to be wrong. They’re only satisfied when the writer gives them more than they anticipate, not less.
- When readers invest their time, they want that investment to pay off. So make big promises. Then keep them.
- The more violence there is, the less it will matter. A murder is not suspense. An abduction with the threat of a murder is.
- If you want to build tension, cut down on the violence and increase the readers’ apprehension about a future violent act.
- The scariest stories often contain very little violence.
- For a horror story, you can show the beheading itself in all of its gory detail. But if you want suspense, the characters in the story will find out that someone is going to be beheaded, and they must find a way to stop it.
- Remember that valuing human life increases suspense. Since readers only feel suspense when they care about what happens to a character, we want to heighten their concern by heightening the impact of the tragedy. Show how valuable life is. The more murders your story contains, the more life will seem cheap, and if it’s cheap, readers don’t need to be concerned if it’s lost.
When you write, you want to be constantly asking yourself what readers are hoping for, wondering about, or questioning at each point in the story. Our job as writers is to give them what they want, when they want it—or, to add a twist so that we give them more than they ever bargained for. Here are some ways to do that to amp up the suspense:
- As you develop your story, appeal to readers’ fears and phobias. (Phobias are irrational fears, so to be afraid of a cobra is not a phobia, but to be afraid of all snakes is). Most people are afraid of helplessness in the face of danger. Many are afraid of needles, the dark, drowning, heights, and so on. Think of the things that frighten you most, and you can be sure many of your readers will fear them as well.
- Make sure you describe the setting of your story’s climax before you reach that part of the story. In other words, let someone visit it earlier and foreshadow everything you’ll need for readers to picture the scene when the climax arrives. Otherwise you’ll end up stalling out the story to describe the setting, when you should be pushing through to the climax.
- Countdowns and deadlines can be helpful, but can work against you if they don’t feed the story’s escalation. For example, having every chapter of your book start one hour closer to the climax is a gimmick that gets old after a while because it’s repetitious and predictable—two things that kill escalation. Instead, start your countdown in the middle of the book. To escalate a countdown, shorten the time available to solve the problem.
- As you build toward the climax, isolate your main character. Remove his tools, escape routes, and support system (buddies, mentors, helpers or defenders). This forces him to become self-reliant and makes it easier for you to put him at a disadvantage in his final confrontation with evil.
- Make it personal. Don’t just have a person get abducted—let it be the main character’s son. Don’t just let New York City be in danger—let Grandma live there.