You know the feeling. You’re reading a book, and suddenly you realize you’ve been holding your breath for three pages. The house is quiet, it’s past midnight, but you can’t put the book down. You need to know what happens next. That magnetic pull, that edge-of-your-seat tension, is the power of suspenseful writing.
As a writer, I’m always chasing that effect. I want my readers to feel like they’re right there with my characters, heart pounding, unable to look away. But I also know how hard it can be to create that kind of tension. Sometimes, a scene feels flat no matter how much you tweak it. The stakes don’t feel real, the danger doesn’t land, and the reader puts the book down without a second thought.
If you’ve ever wondered how to create suspense in your writing without relying on cheap tricks like jump scares or convoluted plot twists, you’re in the right place. Suspense isn’t magic. It’s a craft, a process of making promises to your reader and then making them wait (and worry) for the payoff. Whether you’re writing a high-octane thriller or a quiet family drama, mastering suspense is the key to keeping readers hooked.
Let’s dive in.
At its core, suspense is about anticipation. It’s the anxiety we feel when we know something significant is about to happen, but we don’t know exactly how or when. It’s the ticking clock, the unanswered question, the sense that the ground could shift at any moment.
Here’s a simple formula I use to think about suspense:
Uncertainty + Stakes + Time Pressure = Suspense
Put these elements together, and you have suspense. Let me give you an example. Imagine a spy waiting in a Paris café for a contact who’s late. She’s scanning the room, watching the door, her coffee growing cold. The stakes? If the contact doesn’t show, her mission fails. The uncertainty? Is the contact delayed, or have they been compromised? The time pressure? She knows she can’t stay long without drawing attention. Every detail becomes charged with tension, the clink of a spoon, the hum of conversation.
Alfred Hitchcock explained the difference between surprise and suspense better than anyone. Imagine two people talking at a table. Suddenly, a bomb beneath the table explodes. That’s surprise. It shocks the audience for a moment, but it’s over quickly.
Now imagine the audience knows the bomb is there, but the characters don’t. They see the clock ticking down. The characters are chatting about baseball, oblivious to the danger. The audience is screaming internally, “Stop talking! There’s a bomb!” That’s suspense. It’s the agony of anticipation.
Suspenseful writing isn’t about hiding information. It’s about giving the reader just enough to make them worry.
To create suspense, you need a strong foundation. It’s not about sprinkling “scary words” into a scene. It’s about building tension into the very structure of your story.
If your protagonist fails, what happens? If the answer is “not much,” you don’t have suspense. The stakes need to be tangible and significant, not always life-or-death or the ‘end of the world’, but devastating to that character. In my Ahriman series, Petra Shirazi, an Iranian-American operative, often faces moral stakes as well as physical ones. Will she betray her values to complete the mission? Will she risk her life to save someone she barely knows? These questions keep the tension high.
A suspenseful story is a series of questions. Will the spy escape? Will the bomb go off? Will the lovers meet before the train leaves? Plant these questions early and delay the answers. If you resolve a question too quickly, the tension evaporates.
This is the art of the slow burn. If a character walks into a dark room and immediately finds the light switch, there’s no tension. But if they fumble for the switch, hear a noise, realize the bulb is dead, and then hear the noise again, now you’ve got suspense.
We only fear for people we care about. If your protagonist is invincible, we won’t worry about them. Make your characters vulnerable. Give them flaws, fears, or physical limitations. In Ahriman: The Spirit of Destruction, Petra is highly capable, but she’s also human. She makes mistakes. She doubts herself. That vulnerability makes her struggles more suspenseful.
Here are some practical tools you can use to tighten the screws in your scenes:
Every scene needs a goal. The character wants something (to open the safe, to escape the room, to get the truth). Suspense lives in the gap between the goal and success. Place obstacles in that gap. For example:
These micro-failures create a rhythm of “almost… almost… oh no!” that keeps readers hooked. But make sure to keep it believable. It’s easy to add one too many obstacles and irritate your reader.
When tension is high, your instinct might be to write fast. But often, that’s when you should slow down. Stretch out the moment. Describe the bead of sweat rolling down a character’s neck. Describe the silence. Force the reader to dwell in the danger. Then, when the action explodes, you can veer toward shorter, choppier sentences to mimic a racing heartbeat.
Let the reader know more than the character. If the reader knows the killer is in the closet, but the protagonist doesn’t, the suspense is excruciating. This technique, called dramatic irony, is a powerhouse for building tension. But another option is to keep both the readers and characters in the dark, titrating out the information and using the mystery to create questions, and thereby suspense.
Never resolve a scene fully at the end of a chapter. Cut the scene at the moment of a new revelation, a new threat, or a decisive action. For example, don’t end with: He went to bed, worried about tomorrow. End with: He pulled back the sheets and realized he wasn’t alone.
Or, for more minor hooks in between the bigger cliffhangers, use foreshadowing, simple predictions, or similar statements to maintain the suspense. Even something like this gets the job done: He shut the blinds knowing how difficult the morning would be. But until then, all he could do was sleep.
In spy thrillers, suspense often comes from tradecraft and moral ambiguity. A coded message left in a bookshop. A safe house that doesn’t feel safe. A meeting in a crowded market where every face could be an enemy. These moments are rich with tension because they combine uncertainty, stakes, and time pressure.
But you don’t have to write thrillers to use these techniques. Suspense is universal. In a romance, the suspense might be, “Will they kiss?” In a memoir, it might be, “Will they survive this illness?” The tools are the same.
If your draft feels flat, don’t worry. Revision is where the real magic happens. Here’s how to add suspense during editing:
Writing suspense isn’t about scaring people. It’s about engagement. It’s about making your reader care so much that they can’t stop turning the pages. If you’re stuck, start small. Take one scene and ask: What’s the goal? What’s at stake? What could go wrong? Then, let your imagination run wild.
If you’d like more writing tips like this, visit my blog.
Warmly, Puja
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