For writers! Building suspense, or you can't tell your story by not telling your story

One of the things I see in beginning writers' work is a fundamental misunderstanding about suspense and how an author goes about creating it in a story. I like to call it "You can't tell your story by not telling your story."

Here are my top 5 rules for building suspense in fiction.

1. Suspense does not come from who your characters are. It comes from what your characters are going to do next. Numero uno rule! It's difficult to move a plot forward if the central question in the story is just who the characters are. That's a passive mystery. Plus, readers need to know who the characters are in order to be interested in them. If I'm not interested in the characters, I'll stop reading.

2. Creating suspense does not mean withholding information from the reader. In fact, creating suspense is the opposite: it requires information. Effective suspense makes me wonder what's going to happen next. I can't wonder what's going to happen next if I don't know what's happening now. This goes for hiding villains, too. A hidden villain doesn't exist. If I haven't seen a character on the page, the character isn't part of the story I'm reading.

Read the rest over at my blog for writers at http://www.authorjuliagabriel.com/2/p...