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Way back when, I recommended assessing your story’s suspense taking a look at the promises you were making and fulfilling. The example assessment I used (completely made up, of course) showed a list of promises made in various scenes, tracking their progress in subsequent scenes (whether they were fulfilled, delayed or denied). Just so you don’t have to click through again, here you go:
| Scene | Promise | Fulfilled |
| 7 | She’ll meet him at dawn (D)—6 | A fulfilled |
| 8 | – | C fulfilled |
| 9 | He’ll kill her (E)—10 | B delayed |
| 10 | – | D fulfilled; E denied |
We have a number of simultaneous, conflicting promises building here—a great set up for suspense. But it’s the last scene here that got me thinking. In that scene, apparently, we’re fulfilling her promise of meeting him at dawn, and obviously not fulfilling his promise to kill her. Really, this shouldn’t say that there are no promises made here—we should use the fulfillment of a promise to introduce a new, bigger promise.
Those two promises kept us in suspense, and we’ve now released that anticipation if he just decides, “Oh, I won’t kill her after all. She seems kinda nice.” The suspense level (and probably tension, too) bottoms out.
Instead of just letting it go, we can use this opportunity to add a new promise—since both of those characters have fulfilled or lost their promises, they need a new one to keep us in suspense. It doesn’t always have to come in the same scene, but it had better come pretty quick.
I’m planning to use this myself in my next round of revisions. I spend a while foreshadowing (aka promising and creating anticipation) a meeting between two characters. If they met and were glad/mad/sad to see one another, that lowers the suspense level for their storyline. That release can damage the suspense in my story—or I can channel the previous suspense into a new, related promise. Now character Z has to get character Q to do something, or his whole plan—and maybe their lives—could be in jeopardy.
What do you think? How do you stack promises to create suspense? How have you seen this in other books?
