Fixing the suspense of a story can be a lot tougher than upping the tension in a single scene. Looking at suspense requires us to look at the big picture—and increasing the tension in several scenes can increase the suspense, too.
If you’ve gone back and fixed (or planned how to fix) the tension in several scenes, it might be time to reevaluate your suspense. Rerate your new scenes on tension and redo the EKG. If you’re really lucky, you may not have to do anything.
But then again, you might. Just as tension springs from conflict, suspense is created by anticipation. So the same things that fix scene tension might not fix story suspense.
Suspense is also harder to give general fixes for because it can be a lot more story-specific than tension problems (but I will offer a few 😀 ). Only you can tell what’s right for your story (and even then, we usually need help). I can’t just give the blanket “when in doubt, kill someone important,” axiom because that might work for many stories, but if that’s not going to be a focus of your story, it’s more likely to distract and derail than help.
Take a good, hard look at the places you don’t have anything major moving the story along. (Those unhightlighted sections of the scene chart.) You’ll probably have to rethink some of those scenes. (I’m rethinking an entire quarter of my book.) Be open to new ideas—especially when you’re doing other things. Be open to letting go of the things you worked so hard on.
That doesn’t always mean you’ll have to lose your favorite parts—but you may have to find very different ways to get them in there.
What do you think? What are your favorite ways to keep your readers in suspense?
Photo credit: Alex Schneider
Just want to say how much I’m enjoying this series, Jordan. It can be tempting to think we need some of those not-so-interesting moments as scene transitions but if they don’t maintain the suspense they may simply be opportunities to lose the reader. Thanks for this reminder.
I think purposeful action without any clear motivation can be suspenseful. People doing mysterious things in the night, strange twists in the plot, etc all can interest the reader in finding out “why”
@Carol—Thanks! The longer these series seem to go, the less people have to say (understandably), so it’s especially nice to hear this is still helpful 😀 .
@Andrew—Definitely—but we don’t want to leave it too long without explaining the motivation, of course.