Suspense in writing: definition, 7 techniques and classic examples

Suspense is the anxious uncertainty a reader feels about what will happen next. It builds when the reader cares about a character, can see a danger or a decision coming, and has to wait to find out how it turns out. The reader knows enough to fear the outcome and not enough to be sure of it.

Below: how suspense differs from mystery, surprise and tension, seven techniques with examples from Poe, Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle, and exercises for your own draft.

The definition of suspense

Merriam-Webster gives two senses that matter to writers: “mental uncertainty: anxiety” and “pleasant excitement as to a decision or outcome.” Fiction depends on both at once. The reader worries, and enjoys worrying, because the danger is on the page and not in their own life. The word came into English in the fifteenth century, by way of French, from the Latin suspendere, to suspend: the reader is left hanging until the story lets them down.

Suspenseful passages usually combine four things:

• A character the reader cares about. Readers worry less about a stranger.
• A threat or question the reader can see. A bomb, a deadline, a lie about to be found out, a letter not yet opened.
• An outcome in doubt. Escape and disaster both have to look possible.
• Time. Suspense is the gap between the question and the answer. Close the gap and the suspense ends.

Suspense even survives a known ending. Readers told in the prologue that Romeo and Juliet die still read for how and when, which is why the foreshadowing that gives an outcome away can raise suspense instead of spending it.

Suspense vs mystery, surprise and tension

The four words describe different feelings, and each asks something different of the writer.

Alfred Hitchcock gave the classic explanation in his long interviews with François Truffaut, recorded in 1962 and published in French in 1966 and in English the following year. Picture two people chatting at a table with a bomb underneath it. If the bomb simply goes off, the audience gets a few seconds of surprise after a dull scene. If the audience has seen the bomb planted and knows when it will explode, the same small talk becomes unbearable, and the surprise of a moment becomes suspense that lasts the whole scene. His conclusion was to tell the audience whenever possible.

Here is one scene written three ways:

The events are the same; what changes is what the reader knows, and when. In the first version the reader learns of the danger at the same instant Margit does, and gets one jolt. In the second they learn of the crash after it has happened, with the cause kept from them: a puzzle about the past. In the third they see the threat before Margit leaves the house, and a character who can't see it, so from then on every harmless action, the news, the coat, the bowl, is a delay the reader feels.

Seven techniques for building suspense

1. Tell the reader more than the character knows

This is Hitchcock's principle as a technique, called dramatic irony: the reader knows something a character doesn't, so each innocent line becomes a near miss. In Shakespeare's Othello (c. 1604), Iago explains his plan to the audience in soliloquy and then spends the play being trusted. “My life upon her faith! Honest Iago,” Othello says as he leaves his wife in the care of the man plotting against them both (Act 1, Scene 3). Cassio wishes him “Good night, honest Iago” moments after Iago has arranged his disgrace (Act 2, Scene 3). The guide to situational irony sets dramatic irony beside its neighbors.

2. Start a clock

A deadline turns every delay into a threat, as long as the reader knows what is lost when it runs out. In Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), Phileas Fogg bets £20,000 at the Reform Club that he can circle the globe and be back by 8:45 p.m. on 21 December. The stake is half his fortune, and the other half is paying for the journey, so missing the deadline would ruin him and every late steamer is a crisis. The clock can be a tide, a fuse, a phone at 4 percent. Poe made it a blade:

3. Stretch the moment of danger

At the peak, slow down. Spend more words on less time, let the viewpoint character notice small things, and make the reader wait through every one of them. The guide to pacing calls this stretch. Conan Doyle stretches a whole night:

4. Hold back the answer, not the question

Withholding works when the reader knows exactly what they are waiting to learn. Confusion is not suspense. Early in The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins plants a question no reader can put down:

The same rule holds on screen. In Jaws (1975), the mechanical sharks kept failing, so Steven Spielberg mostly suggested the shark: yellow barrels on the water and John Williams's ominous theme. Audiences knew what they were waiting for. They just didn't get to see it.

5. End chapters on an open question

A chapter that ends before the answer pulls the reader into the next one. Scheherazade is the patron of the method: in the One Thousand and One Nights she stays alive by breaking off each night's story unfinished, so the king has to spare her to hear the end. Doyle ends the second chapter of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), serialized in The Strand Magazine from 1901, on the novel's most famous exchange:

To check your own endings, select the last page of a chapter and ask the Strokes Assistant what question a reader would carry into the next one. If it can't name one, look at that ending again.

6. Raise the stakes as you go

Suspense grows with the cost of failure. A threat to a stranger moves readers less than a threat to someone they have spent 200 pages with. Make readers care before you threaten: a quiet scene where the character is kind, funny or good at their job buys suspense later. Then raise the stakes in steps, at the inciting incident, the midpoint and the pinch points.

7. Promise trouble, then misdirect

A hint that something is coming starts the wait. A gun on the wall, a cough that won't go away, a promise to be home by nine: each is a detail the reader now watches, the principle known as Chekhov's gun. When a story combines suspense and mystery, a red herring points the reader's fear at the wrong suspect, so the real danger can come from the side.

Common suspense mistakes

• Hiding the threat from the reader. If readers don't know what to fear, they feel fog, not suspense. Be vague about the answer, not about the question.
• Cheating with the viewpoint. A POV character who knows the answer and never thinks about it isn't withholding; to a reader who notices, it feels like being lied to.
• False alarms. The noise was the cat, the attack was a dream. Do it often and readers start discounting the next alarm.
• Never releasing it. Hitchcock later said he regretted letting the bomb in Sabotage (1936) kill the boy carrying it, because suspense that has been built has to be relieved. Release doesn't mean a happy ending. It means an ending.
• A cliff on every chapter. When every chapter ends on an emergency that dissolves on the next page, readers can stop trusting the cliff. Save the hardest stops for the turns that matter.

Exercises for writing suspense

Each takes twenty minutes or less on a scene from your own draft. A scene outline helps you pick the scenes worth trying.

1. Put a bomb under the table. Take a dull conversation and give the reader one fact the characters don't know. Change none of the dialogue.
2. Add a clock. Give a scene a deadline the reader can measure, such as a train time or a guest due at eight, make clear what is lost if it passes, and mention it twice more.
3. Stretch ten seconds. Write the ten seconds before a door opens at full length, a page if you can. Then cut it in half.
4. End one beat earlier. Find a chapter that ends after its question is answered and move the break to just before the answer.

Practice: name the technique. Each line below (original examples) uses one of the seven techniques.

1. The gas gauge had read empty since Albuquerque, and the next town was forty-one miles away.
2. We know the letter is in his coat pocket. She asks him, for the third time, whether he's heard from the bank.
3. She opened the door. It was not her husband.
4. I'll tell you what he found in the attic, but first you need to know about the summer my father stopped speaking.
5. If the jury believes him, the girl goes back to her father.

Answers. 1 is a clock. 2 is dramatic irony: the reader knows more than she does. 3 is a chapter-ending question. 4 holds back the answer while naming the question. 5 raises the stakes.