One of the best ways to make your book un-put-down-able is to incorporate suspense throughout your story. But building suspense is an art and, like any art, it can be a challenging skill to master. Here, I’ll go over two key principles and several specific tools to help you create suspense in fiction.

Principle #1: Establish Personal Stakes

First, note that tension is not the same as conflict. In order for readers to feel tension when they read scenes of conflict, they need to be personally invested in the characters and they need to understand the stakes at play. Without investment into fleshed-out characters and without clear, personable stakes, intense action scenes can still feel dull.

Think of some of the most intense and famous scenes in novels. The Nazgûls’ presence in the Shire wouldn’t have been as terrifying if we hadn’t first come to love Frodo and the endearing town of Hobbiton. Katniss’s decision to volunteer for her sister wouldn’t have felt nearly as intense if Suzanne Collins hadn’t first established the relationship between Katniss and her sister Prim. All the deaths in The Game of Thrones that sting do so because the story made us care about the characters and their goals first.

The establishment of relationships and stakes usually happens in scenes of dialogue and description, but these slower-paced scenes are still vital for making later scenes of action feel intense. To create deep suspense, you need to give the reader opportunity to emotionally invest in the characters and the stakes involved.

Principle #2: Give Just Enough Information to Stir Curiosity

Another key part of suspense is controlling the amount of information readers have. Give readers the information they need, but don’t reveal everything right away. Keeping key elements a mystery is a powerful way of making readers want to keep reading.

To carry suspense throughout a novel, the plot needs to pose multiple suspenseful questions. Until the conclusion of the book, any given answers should always lead to a new suspenseful question. Some of the best suspenseful scenes resolve by giving readers the answers they want in a way they don’t see coming.

To see what I mean, take a look at Naomi Novik‘s first lines from her novel Uprooted:

Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. Of course that’s not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.

The very first sentence makes us ask: what kind of dragon lives in this valley and takes the girls in it? The next few sentences give the answer: an immortal wizard named the Dragon who protects the villagers from the Wood. But that answer only begs more questions: Who is this wizard? Why does he take girls? What dangers come from the Wood to justify such a cost for protection? Building suspense is all about controlling information and giving answers that beg more questions.

Here is another of my favourite opening lines, this time from Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus:

The man billed as Prospero the Enchanter receives a fair amount of correspondence via the theater office, but this is the first envelope addressed to him that contains a suicide note, and it is also the first to arrive carefully pinned to the coat of a five-year-old girl.

In a single sentence, Morgenstern does an amazing job of building expectations and undermining them to spur intense curiosity. The first half of the sentence is about the mundane topic of office mail and sounds rather dull, even with the unusual name Prospero the Enchanter thrown in. The mundane scene is then completely undermined not once, but twice: once with the suicide note and then again with the involvement of a five-year-old girl.

The single sentence breaks expectations and gives you just enough information to pique your curiosity. Why was a suicide note mailed to a magician and why on Earth would it come with a five-year-old girl? Well, you’ll have to keep reading to find out. It’s another brilliant example of how to build suspense by manipulating expectations and hiding key information.

Specific Tools for Building Suspense

Of course, what I’ve been describing so far have been general principles. There are also specific narrative structures you can use to build suspense. While there are more tools for suspense than I name below, these are great starting tools for your repertoire. But keep in mind that predictability is the enemy of suspense. If you use any of these tools too frequently, they can become predictable and lose their punch.

Also, I must give credit where credit is due. Several of these tools I learned from the master of suspense Dan Brown in his MasterClass. With that acknowledgement out of the way, here are some specific scene-framing tools you can use to heighten suspense from scene to scene.

The Ticking Clock

In this plot device, the action is constrained by a ticking clock. For example, “if we don’t find a way to open this locked door within a couple minutes, the room we’re trapped in will completely fill with water and we’ll drown.” Introducing a ticking clock that signals impending doom if the characters fail can add intense suspense.

The Cliff Hanger

This is one of the most common tools for building suspense. In a cliff hanger, you build a scene to look like something devastating is going to happen to the protagonist or to another character. Then you end the chapter or scene right before the reader finds out what happens. The desire to learn how the intense scene resolves then propels the reader to start the next chapter.

This is one of the few suspense devices that can be used over and over again without losing its punch. A cliff hanger is also a great tool to use right before a point of view shift. If a reader has to wait a chapter or two to find out what happened to the other point of view character, it prolongs their anticipation.

The Premonition

In scenes where everything is going well, you can allude to future conflict by having one of the characters notice a little detail that’s not quite right. Or the character could simply have a bad feeling about a situation. That way, in the scenes where all seems well, the character and the reader would together wonder what the looming danger is that they can’t quite identify.

The Web of Secrets

In this plot device, the protagonist suspects that other characters are hiding specific information from him. These secrets are especially suspense-inducing when it appears that they’re coming from someone that the protagonist believes is an ally. These secrets naturally pose the following questions: Why would this person, or friend, hold a secret? What is it that they know and don’t want the me (the protagonist) to know? Most significantly, are they hiding information to protect or to harm?

The Puppet Master

In this plot device, the primary antagonist remains a hidden, faceless mystery. The primary antagonist may hire or be involved with other antagonists, but behind these minor antagonists there’s an unseen puppet master pulling the strings. The protagonist and reader may not know there is a puppet master. In that case, the puppet master’s reveal would make a great plot twist. Or the protagonist and the reader may suspect that a puppet master is involved, but have no idea who she is. If the characters suspect a puppet master, then this plot device begs the question, who is the true enemy here?

With all these shiny new toys tucked away in your suspense toolkit, I hope you are excited to jump back in to your writing with new inspiration. Do you have any suspense tips or tools that you would like to share? Feel free to share them below!