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

Sometimes, you just really need to info dump. The characters have made a discovery and must now explore its full significance—and if they don’t, the readers are going to be totally lost.

Are you totally lost by the generalizations there? Let’s try it this way: Indiana Jones and faithful sidekick Sallah finally get someone to examine the inscription on the medallion—but we know the Germans have already done so and are currently digging at the appointed spot. Basically, we’re watching someone watching someone reading something. Yeah, the bad guys already have it—and they’re using it. No tension. Audience nodding off.

In the story conference for Raiders (I can’t believe I’ve never linked to this before; this is great stuff!), creator George Lucas, director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan came to the same conclusion. They had to get this information to the audience, and there didn’t seem to be a better way to do it.

And then they hit on the solution. Do you remember? Maybe not. Without watching it again, all I remember is the German staff is the wrong height and—“Bad dates.” They added a situation in the background to enhance the tension—poisoned food which Indy comes perilously close to eating several times.

Mystery Man, in a column at the Story Department, talked about this kind of exposition (emphasis added):

What’s to be learned from this example? Great exposition is always in the context of something else. A scene should never be about exposition only. You should feed the exposition in the context of some other scenario that’s going on in the scene whether its poisoned food that’s eaten by a bad secret agent monkey or whether it’s something else interesting going on between the characters, such as a contest of wills, a budding love story, or perhaps exposition that’s being told to a secretly bad character who will use that information against the protagonists.

This also requires giving the audience more info—a look into the kitchen, a scene where we see this character is really in cahoots with a major baddie. That kind of info can often be dramatized, of course, but this is another example of the “give the audience more information” philosophy that Alfred Hitchcock pointed out created suspense. It’s letting the reader take a peek under the tablecloth or watch the baddies planting the bomb there, and suddenly, everything else they talk about is fraught with tension.

What do you think? How else can you imbue an almost-info-dump with more tension?

Mystery Man column via Victoria Mixon; photo by Yasmin & Arye Photographers

One of the ways that I’ve found to increase tension as I’ve read a bunch of craft books and reread my WIP is to pull readers into scenes and create tension quickly.

Our scene openings are really key in establishing tension early on. Many times, however, we spend the beginning of the scene “warming up”—rehashing the last scene or sequel, running through mundane events, working up to a conflict (or even to a scene goal). Even after I’d edited specifically focused on making scene goals clear, I still found many scenes meandering near the beginning, wandering around until we found a conflict.

The first step is to make our POV character’s scene goal clear. Often, that will be stated explicitly: she’s waiting for her mystery date or he headed into the office to check on the Q4 numbers. (Thrilling—though I actually do know someone shopping an MG financial thriller, so maybe it could work.) Sometimes it’ll be pretty darn clear from the way we ended the previous scene: the couple just had a fight, and now he’s at a florist.

If the character’s goal or purpose isn’t early in the scene, we can risk losing our readers. And if we don’t get those characters to work on those scene goals, we can risk losing our readers. And if those characters don’t do something interesting—find a source of tension—pretty quick, we can risk losing our readers. (They’re just fickle like that.)

I’ve said before that conflict is at the heart of tension—just as conflict is at the heart of any fully-imagined scene.

Once we’ve established the character’s goal, explicitly or implicitly, we should bring on the conflict. Maybe he’s headed to the florist but—the elevator’s broken—the stairs are being painted. He twists his ankle getting down from the fire escape—the nearest florist is closed—he can’t get a cab—he gets hit by the bus he’s trying to catch. Notice that the conflict doesn’t have to start huge—he doesn’t have to jump straight to the disaster.

It doesn’t even have to be big—maybe the florist doesn’t carry her favorite kind of flowers, or after he pays, he remembers she’s allergic. But don’t just leave him in there, pondering over whether to get daffodils or dianthus.

Along with this, we can look at the whole scene to see what we can tighten. Eliminate unnecessary or redundant words and use powerful, fast-paced language instead. Check out this tightening checklist at the Ruby-Slippered Sisterhood for help.

What do you think? Is there a time when we need long sections of thought between the goal and the conflict?

Photo by Matthias Rhomberg

I’m brushing up today on creating tension in a scene. There are lots of “tricks” and techniques to get the “tension in every page” Donald Maass recommends. While I don’t really go in for resorting to tricks to create suspense, little techniques can really establish, increase or build the tension within a scene.

The list:

1. Give a character a goal in each scene
2. Setbacks to a character’s goal in a scene
3. Uncertainty—often from a lack of information
4. Worry—plenty of bad information
5. Doubt, especially in one’s self (the character, not the writer )
6. Raise the stakes—put more people or a bigger, more valuable objective in danger



7. Increase the odds against the character
8. Make the characters care more—greater emotional stakes
9. Make things more challenging
10. Surprise character or event to change things up
11. Nonhuman obstacles—setting or weather interfere
12. Using the POV of a character that doesn’t know something vital (something we’ve established in another POV)
13. End the scene with a foreboding foreshadowing
14. Play on a character’s inner anxieties—push them to the limit (and beyond)
15. Let the characters blow up—what are the consequences?
16. “Minidisaster”—a preview of what could happen in the big disaster, by showing a small version of their impending doom.
17. A close call
18. A character purposefully withholding info from another
19. Jump cutting to another scene/storyline immediately after a disaster
20. Make characters’ goals look impossible. Or just make them impossible.
21. Stating a chilling fact.
22. Danger—dangerous, skillful work.
23. Deadlines approaching
24. Foreshadowing a coming confrontation



25. An unfortunate meeting
26. Trapped in a closed environment (perhaps a crucible?)
27. Fears coming true
28. Set up any of these situations and prolong them, rather than relieving the tension
29. Remove characters’ supports
30. Disable characters’ strengths
31. Undermine characters’ belief systems (not necessarily in a religious sense, but in a “I’m fighting for the greater good—holy crap, what do you mean the victim’s a bad guy?” kind of way)
32. Move up the deadline
33. Avoid low-tension scenes (sequels, really):
    • Thinking (esp while driving between one scene with live action and another)
    • Decompressing or cleaning up
    • Coffee breaks
    • “Aftermath” scenes
    • Sometimes, even love scenes—a sex scene releases all the sexual tension you’ve established, so then you have to reestablish that tension with something to keep them apart. Though this can be done well, often, this is where we get the contrived or entirely external conflicts that just aren’t that compelling.
34. Leave out the parts people skip —distill scenes to their essential parts
35. Cut small talk (unless you’ve worked hard to establish that the small talk is covering something else, something with a lot of tension, or you’ve got a lot of subtexting)
36. Make one character’s scene goal conflict with another’s scene goal
37. Make us root for the other guy—make the antagonist a sympathetic character, so we want both sides to win.

Sources: Revision And Self-Editing by James Scott Bell, Stein On Writing by Sol Stein, Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass, and me, of course.

What do you think? What do you do to create or increase tension in a scene? How can you implement these ideas in your work?

Photo credits: nail biter—Cavale Doom; knuckled grip—Alex Schneider