Foundations of Suspense

We’ve been talking about creating suspense in your writing the last few weeks. Narrative suspense is built out of four parts: reader empathy, impending danger, escalating tension and reader concern – or as I call it: worry.
We create reader empathy by giving your protagonist a goal or objective or an inner struggle that readers can identify with. The more they empathize the better. Once they care about and identify with a character, readers will be personally invested when they see that character struggling to get what he wants.
We want readers to worry about whether or not the character will succeed.  Readers have to know what the character wants so they know what’s at stake, and they have to know what’s at stake to get engaged in the story. To get readers invested in your story, make it clear what your character desires, what is keeping him from getting it; and what huge, horrible consequences he’ll face if he doesn’t get it.
Suspense builds as danger approaches. Readers experience that worry when a character they care about is in peril. This doesn’t have to be a life-and-death situation. Depending on your genre, the threat may involve the character’s physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual or relational well-being. Whatever your genre, show that something terrible is about to happen—then postpone the resolution.That’s how you sustain suspense.
To get a truly satisfying climax, you need to escalate the tension. Raise the stakes by making the danger more imminent, or more intimate, or more personal or more devastating. So, if the shire is at risk in in the first film the world better be in danger at the end of the trilogy.  If the tension doesn’t escalate, your suspense will fade.
Next – give us more promises and less action. Suspense happens in the stillness of your story, in the gaps between the action sequences, in the moments between the promiseof something dreadful and its arrival.
If readers complain that “nothing is happening” in a story, they don’t usually mean no action is happening.  It usually means no promises are being made. Contrary to what you may have heard, reader boredom isn’t solved by adding action – the solution is to add apprehension. Suspense is anticipation; action is the payoff. You don’t increase suspense by adding events, but rather by promising that something will happen. So, don’t ask yourself “what needs to happen?” Ask, “What can I promise will go wrong?”
Next week I’ll give you some concrete examples of how to build suspense.