6 Tips for Telling a Story That Kills Them with Suspense [Writing Workshop]

You don’t have to be a great writer to tell a great story…but it certainly helps. By great writing here, I’m not talking about your ability to craft elegant sentences, or to convey poignant, other-worldly thoughts.

No, I’m talking about what some of the all-time great suspense writers have learned. That is, to tell the sort of story that keeps the readers riveted, turning page after page late into the evening long after the sun has gone down and they should most definitely be in bed getting some beauty sleep, you must have a firm understanding of some simple fundamentals.

Today we’re going to dive into those fundamentals. We’re going to pop the hood and dive into the nuts and bolts of the Suspense genre, disassembling the mechanical minutiae of storytelling to learn how to tell a great tension filled little ditty.

First, a definition by comparison.

Mystery and Suspense, as genres, are not synonymous. They possess distinctly unique traits. Understanding these differences is vital.

A Mystery typically begins with a crime, or crisis event, already having occurred. Throughout the rest of the story, we follow through the eyes of our detective as they gather clues and make progress towards discovering the villain. In a Mystery, the amount of information the reader possesses is limited to what the detective has collected (though quite often, the reader possesses even less).

In the world of Mystery, the reader actively participates in unraveling the web of lies.

Suspense, by contrast, creates drama by inserting the reader prior to the crisis event. For example, if we know some assassins are planning to drop a Hippopotamus on the President on Thursday, then the story might begin on Tuesday with the author informing the reader of this impending event.

Now we’ve created tension because we’ll constantly be aware of this looming threat on the horizon.

Remember this and you’ll never go wrong:

Murder is not suspense. Abduction with the threat of murder is.

To tell a good Suspense story, it is imperative your reader knows from the beginning just what is at stake. And this is why telling a good Suspense story can be so difficult. Unlike a Mystery, the author can’t afford to keep all their cards close to the vest.

Information that foreshadows impending disaster is the spice of Suspense. To that end, it’s critical your reader understand the “Who, Why, and When”.

That is, they must know who is doing the bad thing and who stands to lose from sad bad thing occurring.

They must know why bad thing is occurring.

And they must know when the bad thing is occurring.

Now that we have a fuzzy caterpillar’s worth of understanding on the distinction between Mystery and Suspense, let’s dive into 6 Tips for Telling a Story That Kills Them With Suspense.

1) Time is of the essence

Your story instantly gains +10 suspense points when you add any sort of time restriction. Ticking time bombs placed under the dinner table unbeknownst to the protagonist (and yet very beknownst to the reader) creates an infinitely more complex and interesting scene than our protagonist simply sitting down for a side of veal.

The hit television show 24 was based almost entirely around this single concept. The writers of that show leveraged the idea of limited time to ratchet the tension and suspense to nearly tantric levels. I highly recommend watching a season of 24, with an eye towards this single characteristic of Suspense, to level up your understanding of using limited time in your story.

2) Lofty Perspective

We already know that one of the key differentiators between Mystery and Suspense is the amount of information provided to the reader. In Suspense, the more information the reader possesses, the better.

Truly the only answers you need not reveal in a Suspense are will the hero stop the bad-guy, and how will the hero stop the bad-guy. Everything else is pretty much fair game.

So it is that you want to take a high level approach to your story. Don’t simply keep the reader behind the eyeballs of your protagonist. If you do, then you are naturally handicapping how much information your reader can possess at any given time.

If, however, you bop around your storyworld a bit, showing us key scenes from your villain’s perspective, then popping over to your victim, then back to your hero… well, now we’re able to see and know things the hero doesn’t, and this is where the sweet suspense-filled story nectar comes from because we as the reader can the future and an impending point of convergence likely ending in disaster.

A bomb under the table is only suspenseful if we know its there.

3) High Stakes

If your hero can, at any point in the story, simply walk away, the stakes aren’t high enough. The crisis has to be so important that the protag would do anything to stop it.

That doesn’t mean you must threaten world annihilation every other scene, for in fact, maybe your character is nihilistic and could give a rat’s ass whether the world goes down in flame tomorrow.

You must find the thing your character cares about more than anything, and then put that thing in jeopardy.

Taken with Liam Neeson is a great example of this. The bad-guys kidnap his daughter and that makes him very unhappy. He can’t just walk away.

Well, he could, but that would make him a pretty horrible person to cast as your main character, so I’d strongly recommend against going that particular aesthetic route, you crazy cracker.

4) Create Dilemmas

Make your protagonist choose between the lesser of two evils. Nothing drives tension in a story quite like a protagonist having to decide between two things he/she cares deeply about.

Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight tests Batman by making him choose between saving Harvey Dent or his wife, Rachel. This is a dilemma because there is no right or wrong answer, but the decision will ultimately reveal our hero’s true self. That is… unless you…

5) Complicate Shit Unpredictably

That’s right… If you remember that scene from The Dark Knight you know that Batman makes his decision, but ultimately The Joker has deceived him in such a way as to make that decision a moot point.

To complicate shit unpredictably, always keep in mind that your character should never get to take a step-forward unscathed. It should cost them something. They must choose between this path or that. You, as the author, must must always enforce consequences to that decision.

Batman chose to go left, great. Here’s what he gets in return, and here’s what it cost him.

This is life distilled to its most simple form: Cause and Effect. Though, in a Suspense story, that Effect must always escalate and complicate shit.

Bonus points if you apply this idea to your antagonist too, by the way. Yeah, that’s right. Not everything should go to plan for the bad-guy. Make them stretch and adapt in the same way you stretch the hero. Now your story is crammed full with twice the Suspense. Yum.

6) Change POV at Critical Moments

This is straight from the cliffhanger school of storytelling. If used correctly, this is the easiest way to guarantee your reader plows through the next chapter. If used incorrectly, this is the easiest way to guarantee your reader plows through you with their 1996 Miata.

Tread carefully, dear reader.

Again, we’ll return to 24 because I think that’s one of the most suspenseful shows of all-time. (Well, some of the seasons, at least.)

Practically no scene is ever resolved in 24. That means, bad things happen and then, right at the scenes climactic peak, when a decision must be made and resolution will be had for better or worse, the Point of View suddenly switches, and we jump to another scene.

Resolution will have to wait until the beginning of the next scene we take up with those characters.

Here’s a bad example:

Jack is tied to a chair. The bad-guys have him and they are torturing him for answers, but Jack is sealed tighter than premium Tupperware and he’s spilling absolutely zero beans. The bad-guys escalate and bring out Jack’s daugther. Villain puts a knife to daughters throat and says, give me the Pinto beans, or else!

Uh oh, escalation and dilemma. What will our Jacky-boy do?

Nobody knows, because suddenly the scene cuts to that beeping clock sound. We’ll just have to wait for resolution while the story hops behind the eyeballs of a different character for a time.

Now, you’ve gotta be real careful here because if you handle this poorly it’s all but guaranteed you’re going to piss off the reader. The key here is that whatever scene you hop into (instead of giving resolution to Jack’s torture) must be compelling enough in its own right to make the reader okay with delaying gratification.

24 masterfully handled this by ensuring all their scenes were pretty much cliffhangers. Therefore, anytime you jumped back into a scene, you were guaranteed some sort of resolution, which, when done correctly has the effect of keeping your audience absolutely hooked from beginning to end.

Go read some Suspense from the masters of the genre (Clancy, Patterson, Brown) and you’ll see all the myriad ways these 6 steps can be used. Tinker with them in your own fiction and then stop back in to let us know how it’s treating you.

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[box] Now it’s time top get down to the comments and share. What’s the most suspenseful television show, movie, or book you’ve ever consumed? Can you peg at least one reason it felt so damned suspenseful?[/box]