Major help with suspense/tension/unpredictability needed!

Hm...I do suspense without thinking about it most of the time, but I do know that for me at least, a lot of it comes down to pacing.

The story should move faster when you want suspense. I tend to use shorter sentences (not all, of course because you still need a balance and it gets too staccato if you aren't careful), shorten up the descriptions, that sort of thing. You said you're good at character, so when you put yourself in the character's shoes and feel the tension they're feeling, the writing should reflect that same tension.

Let me see if I can think of an example. Let's say you have someone walking down the street and they think they're being followed or something. These are both off the top of my head, so please forgive the suckiness of the writing.

Anyway, here's how I'd probably write something like this:

Walk. Walk, don't run. Running would tip him off, and that wouldn't help because he'd run, too, and no doubt those long legs would be faster than mine. I needed safety. A place I could duck out of sight maybe before he noticed. Where the hell was a crowd when you needed one?

I pulled my jacket closer, picking up my pace just a bit, unable to stop myself. There were trees lining the sidewalk, thick trunks that might have hidden me from sight, but spread too thin to provide any kind of real cover. I reached into my purse, feeling for a weapon. God, why didn't I carry pepper spray? Or a knife. Or a gun.

The park was getting closer. It was decision time. Run or don't run?

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Compare that to something that is written with a more generic pacing, the way I might write just a normal general scene.

I probably should keep walking because running would tip off my pursuer and chances were he'd run, too. His legs were longer than mine, and that meant he'd be faster than me. I needed a safe place to escape to. Maybe a house or a building, or a police station would be nice, but there was nothing around.

I pulled my jacket closer and walked a little faster, even though I knew I shouldn't. The sidewalk was lined with big oak trees with thick trunks and bare limbs, but they were set too far apart to provide any real cover.

I reached into my purse and felt for anything that could be used for a weapon, but there was nothing there. I knew there wouldn't be. What was I supposed to do, stab him with a pen? I wished I'd thought to carry pepper spray, or maybe a knife or gun.

We were getting closer to the park with it's big open spaces and darkness. I needed to make a decision. Would I run for it or not?

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The second one describes basically the exact same thing as the first, but there's no tension to it. Well, at least I was aiming for it haha. These might be epic fails of examples here, but to me the first reads with tension and the second doesn't.

I'm not sure how to do this intentionally. I do it by feel. I feel the tension and write the tension and if the tension isn't there in what's ending up on the paper I know there's a problem. But I do know the pacing and sentence length makes a big difference.

Hope this helps some.

Take a look at the suspense movies and books you've seen and read that really had you on the edge of your seat or completely blindsided you. What was it they used to captivate you.


Your story obviously is set up for a cliffhanger, or the lack of it wouldn't be an issue, so what is it about your story that cries for a cliffhanger or tension? Look at the story's climax and think about what kind of twist or hanger would make it that much more exciting or tension filled.

What Kaitie said is good - get right inside your character's head. Also, check whether you're giving too much info away to the reader too early. It might be better just to drop hints. If the reader thinks there's something afoot but isn't quite sure what it is, the tension will build....

Mostly, though - pacing, rhythm; that kind of thing works wonders...

Turn off your brain and use your heart. Sounds emo, I know, but figure out how each of your scenes make you feel. Happy? Sad? Bored? Edge-of-your-seat nail-biting? Study movies and books with suspense and dissect to see how they manipulate your emotions. What exactly they do to make you feel the way you do in every single scene? Study Dan Brown. Lots of people say he suck but the dude is a master of end-of-chapter cliff-hangers and makes a wonderful living.

Your books are probably full of logical steps that gets story from A to B to C with no real emotional resonance (apologies for the crazy assumption).

Have multiple things going on at the same time. Cut between them at tense points. You can do this with multiple viewpoint characters, or the same character being interrupted by multiple important things, or by cutting back and forth in time.

Read really good MTS authors and see how they handle suspense. Read a LOT of it. There are several threads around here about what we're reading and our favorite MTS books.

Edit: mgoblue said it first. But it bears repeating.

How to write good suspense depends on the type of story you write. Is it action-packed? A legal story? Medical? What is it? The only reason I ask is that there's a lot of suspense in trying to stop a bomb from going off, or trying to stop a killer. Going to grandma's house? Maybe not so much... although I do have Mississippi back roads to deal with, so I never know.

There are definitely writing-based suspense tricks you can use if you don't have action. My last story had a lot of very non-actiony stuff at the end--the suspenseful part. A bunch of people finding things on computers, that sorta thing.

The scenes in that section get shorter, and I did little things to switch them up. Shorter scenes move faster, to start with, then I had one point when I cut a conversation halfway through at the biggest "WHAT!?" moment and started a new chapter. I wrote a small scene italicized in present tense. Little things like that, all depending on what the story calls for, can help, too. I had to definitely play with the writing techniques though to make the suspense work in order to keep it from getting boring. I've been told by the people who read it that they couldn't put it down at that point, so I'm guessing it was a success.

AussieBilly said:

So here I am, another finished manuscript in hand ready for submission ... but does it do the job? My critique readers say no ... no suspense .. no real Perry Mason Moment.

I need help, folks. How do I write suspense? What's the secret of drafting a cliffhanger? I can tell stories all day long, create good characters ... but for the life of me, I can't seem to devise suspense.

Will someone tell me how? What do I do now? There must be a secret I have yet to learn ... can someone share it with me?

Thanks ...

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A,
What I'm going to say may not make much sense to anyone but me (in fact, most of of what I say is like that), but maybe I can shed some light on this suspense/no suspense issue.

First off, suspense writing (or storytelling) requires a certain mindset. Your starting point is that the world is a dangerous place. Then shyte happens that makes it even more dangerous for your characters. If you start from that viewpoint, then you don't have to go looking for dangerous situations, they occur automatically.

Jan Darby's four questions will help:

The trouble starts when ....
The trouble gets worse when ....
The trouble gets unbearable when ...
It looks like the protagonist will lose everything when ...

They sound simplistic, but they can get get fiendishly difficult to answer sometimes. (These actually were created to help with queries by Jan, but they work well for the whole book too.)

Something else that will help is to end each chapter with a mini-cliffhanger, some kind of a hook to keep the reader interested in discovering what comes next.

Like Ruv and kaitie said, don't be afraid to experiment with shifting to another chars POV right at a critical point, to leave the reader hanging. (This has to be done with moderation, lest it take on the aspect of a cheap trick, and piss the reader off.)

Hope this is helps. Actually, I'd settle for understandable...

--Stan

Suspense doesn't literally need a ticking bomb but does benefit from a lit fuse. Going to grandma's house can be very tense if she's on the phone screaming for help and there's a hurricane alert out warning against travel.

Alternatively, if all the doors to easy solutions slam in the character's face one by one and the very last door has a known monster, one can always break the story where the character begins to open the door and cut to another scene -- instant suspense.

Stanmiller said:

Hope this is helps. Actually, I'd settle for understandable...

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I understand it. Jan's questions are excellent. In this instance they can really help you hone in on what areas of your plot should contain the most suspense.

I tend to see suspense as something that should build, too. I always think of those rising action, climax, falling action things we used to do in school. Thriller might need more tension there all the time, but I like suspense that builds up as the story goes on, so it isn't necessary to make everything suspenseful. A few bits scattered throughout that gradually come closer together and get stronger until it's mostly suspense based at the climax.

Hitchcock's theory

No better place to look than the master of suspense. In 1962, Hitchcock agreed to a series of interviews with Francois Truffaut. He made his famous allusion to a simple cafe conversation. Two people can have a mundane conversation in a cafe and it will be boring and dull. But if we have seen a saboteur place a bomb under their table and know it will go off at one o'clock, and can see a clock in the scene, the mundane conversation becomes extremely suspenseful. Two elements are required, danger and urgency. The bomb and the timer. And your reader must know about them both.

He emphasized the difference between suspense and surprise. If a bomb suddenly goes off under the table, the reader experiences surprise. If the reader knows the bomb is there, he/she experiences suspense waiting for it to blow. Suspense can be sustained over a long period, surprise cannot. The key is to inform the audience (your reader) as much as possible to create suspense. Another example he used was that if you have someone walking up a set of stairs and we don't know what is at the top, that is mystery. If that same person climbs the stairs and we know that a killer is waiting behind the door, that is suspense. You transform your story from an intellectual exercise to an emotional one.

Hope that helps.

Craig Faustus Buck

Something that really hit true for me when I was doing a writing course this year was when the teacher was talking about how suspense should build.

The basis of suspense is laid upon the fact that you've been telling your readers that something truly dreadful is coming. We let them know. We hint...throw shadows around the corners. And every time you throw in a little clue you're making your suspense more.

BUT...everything falls to pieces IF your 'bad, scary thing' that you've been hinting toward isn't scary enough! So if you've hinted though the whole novel to this terrible plot, then it will not work if the 'terrible plot' is that a guy pulls a gun during the presidents inauguration and shoots him. It's gotta be bigger, deeper. There have to be multiple guys involved, and it can't be a whim or a one-man stand. It's gotta be tied to this entire conspiracy to rule the world and bring the downfall of democracy...

And maybe that made no sense at all.

I try, and am usually told I succeed, to end every chapter (or scene in a short story) with a mini-cliffhanger. Something vital is said or done or acted upon and that's where the scene or chapter ends. The next chapter or scene may pick up from the previous (usually does with me) or may switch scenes to a different character or activity. This has the benefit of both getting the reader to turn the page and to get me to think about what's going to happen next during the writing process.

It also gets the reader guessing about what is going to happen next and that is almost the essence of suspense.