Writing Suspense

By Pepper Smith

So you want to write suspense. That’s wonderful! But do you understand what suspense is?

Many beginning writers confuse suspense with that “gotcha” moment in horror movies, when the monster lurches out of the shadows and strangles the life out of its hapless victim. It’s a frightening moment, all right, but it’s not suspense.
Suspense is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a “state of anxious uncertainty or expectation.” By definition, it’s not that “gotcha” moment, the moment when your villain performs some act of violence. It’s those uneasy moments that lead up to the “gotcha.”

To illustrate, imagine for a moment that you’re a young woman. You’ve just left the parking lot at the grocery store, and are headed for the home you share only with your pet cat. As you drive along the roads toward your house, you notice a man in the car behind you, making every turn that you do. You begin to wonder who he is. Is he really following you? Have you picked up a stalker? Did he think you looked like a likely target for rape or robbery? Scenarios run through your mind—What will he do? How will you respond? Will you be able to defend yourself or escape? Your heart speeds up as adrenaline reaches your bloodstream, and your anxiety increases as you turn onto your road and the man makes that turn as well.

In the end, it doesn’t matter if the man pulls into your driveway behind you and gets out of his car to serve you with a summons to appear in court, passes your driveway with the intent of coming back on foot after dark, or turns out to be the guy who just bought the house two doors down from you. The important thing is those moments of anxiety and uncertainty, when a stranger who could have been anyone, intent on anything, was following you. It’s those moments of anxiety that you want your readers to experience when you’re writing suspense.
But to work well, you need to give your readers characters whom they can connect with, people whom they will care enough about to feel concerned when threats are made to their safety. Suspense also requires that your characters have something at stake, something to lose. If your protagonist grows prized orchids and the villain points at the nearby greenhouse, declaring, “I’ll see that every one of those flowers is destroyed,” it’s not going to mean a thing to your protagonist if the greenhouse and the flowers inside are someone else’s. If your protagonist is being threatened with the loss of his job, his family, his own life, he has plenty of reason to feel anxious, and so will your readers. His struggle to save his job, or his family, or his life can provide many moments of suspense.

In our horror movie with the lurching monster, suspense can easily be built with lighting and background music. You generally know what’s coming by the atmosphere that’s created, but how you feel about it also depends on whether the filmmaker allowed you to feel empathy for the doomed character first. In writing, it’s all done with the words that you choose. Getting it right requires practice, but it’s worth the effort, both for yourself as a storyteller, and for your readers.