Suspense is all about what might happen.
It’s not the moment of danger itself that evokes suspense, but the growing dread that danger lurks nearby.
In this article, I’ll break down what suspense is, show you the mechanics that create it on the page, and walk through some of the most common ways writers accidentally deflate it. Lastly, I’ll give you a Story Weapon to help you amplify the tension in your scenes before you send your story out into the world.
Learning how to write suspense starts with understanding the difference between suspense and surprise: suspense gives the reader information the character doesn’t have, creating a sustained ache rather than a sudden jolt. Building that gap deliberately — through dramatic irony, an implied clock, and sentences that tighten as tension rises — keeps readers turning pages, while ending scenes mid-question rather than resolving them too neatly sustains momentum. Withholding information without real cause curdles suspense into confusion or manipulation.
What is suspense exactly?
A woman checks the locks on her front door for the third time. She tells herself it’s nothing. Then the phone rings, and the caller ID says “Unknown.” She doesn’t answer. It rings again.
Your reader can start to feel it . . . that small tightening behind their sternum. That’s suspense.
Difference between surprise and suspense
I often see writers use “surprise” interchangeably with “suspense,” so let’s take a moment to clear that up.
Nothing can explain it as clearly as Alfred Hitchcock’s “bomb under the table” analogy.
Consider two people sitting at a table having a conversation. Out of nowhere, a bomb goes off under them. This is surprise: your audience experiences a moment of shock.
Now imagine the same scene with the twist of showing the audience the bomb beforehand, the ticking timer. The two people sitting at the table could be chatting about anything — a deeply emotional struggle between them, such as how their marriage is collapsing or the betrayal of stealing a client, or utterly banal chatter about the weather or a baseball game. But now the scene has tension. The audience desperately waits to see what happens, hoping for these people to see the bomb and get away in time. This is suspense, and it can last for minutes rather than seconds. It is also a clever way to disguise exposition as your audience listens intently to every word while bracing for the explosion.
The difference is obvious. Suspense assumes that your reader or audience knows something your character does not, while surprise implies that no one knows what will happen next.
If you want your reader to experience mounting tension, you’re reaching for suspense, not surprise. Surprise is a jolt. Suspense is a slow, sustained ache, and it’s far more powerful over the course of a novel or screenplay.
Mystery is a third, related tool, and it’s worth naming here too. In a mystery, neither the reader nor the character has all the information yet. They’re both trying to solve it. That’s the engine behind a whodunit. Moments of suspense are set up differently from a mystery as the reader is often ahead of the character here, not beside them.
Where the tension lives
Suspense relies on creating a distance between what the reader knows and what the character knows.
Consider a story where your protagonist is rushing to meet with someone they fully trust. But your reader knows something your main character doesn’t: that this “trustworthy” person just made a phone call that will ruin all their plans. Now every word of dialogue between them has a hidden meaning, and each act of kindness is suspect. Your readers are no longer simply observing the scene, but preparing for what’s to come.
That is dramatic irony at work, one of the oldest methods of building up suspense.
Think about the shower scene in Psycho. We see the killer’s silhouette approach the curtain well before Marion does. She’s simply enjoying a hot shower, relaxed for the first time in the whole film, completely unaware. That gap between her ease and our dread are part of what makes the scene so powerful.
3 ways to build that gap intentionally:
- Show your reader the threat before your characters encounter it. Let your reader see the car that’s about to run the red light, the letter that’s been intercepted, the lie that’s about to be exposed. Then follow your characters into the scene, knowing what’s coming.
- Let the reader know one character’s true motive while another character remains in the dark. If your reader knows someone is lying, every word that character speaks becomes loaded, and your reader will read the scene twice as closely.
- Withhold the outcome of something your character has already set into motion. If they’ve sent the email, made the call, or told the lie, cut away before you show us the fallout. Come back to it later, once the pressure has had time to build.
Give your suspense a clock
Suspense is built for pressure and nothing puts on more pressure than time.
When your reader understands, consciously or not, that the window for things to go right is closing, that sense of urgency does a significant portion of the emotional work for you.
This doesn’t mean that each story has to have a digital countdown ticking away on a literal bomb, or even an announced deadline. The clock for suspense can be much more subtle than that.
It might be a parent in the school parking lot waiting for their child to walk out, dreading the conversation that will have to happen in the car. You might have a character who knows that once the sun goes down, the choice they’ve been circling will no longer be available to them. It can be two people in a conversation that keeps bending around the one thing neither of them has dared to say yet, frustration building with every exchange.
Memoir can use this as naturally as fiction does. For example, if you’ve told the reader you’re writing about the last summer before your parents’ divorce, they’ll start to feel the tension in every scene. Every dinner in that house, every family trip, every argument that blows over too quickly carries a weight it wouldn’t have otherwise.
The reader knows what is coming. Your younger self on the page does not. That gap between the reader’s knowledge and the character’s is where the clock ticks loudest.
The most effective deadlines are often the ones the reader supplies themselves. Give them enough information to sense that something cannot hold, and they will do the rest.
Control your pacing on the sentence level
Some of your best suspense tools are at the sentence level. Compress scenes down with shorter sentences as the tension builds, then let them expand in the quiet moments.
Consider how you might use pacing in a scene where a character is in a house they’re not supposed to be in. The early sentences may meander a bit to give texture and detail: the smell of the place, an old photograph on the wall. The sentences then begin to shrink as they hear a sound come from another room. Two words. One word. A fragment. Each line becomes laser-focused.
This is a technique that you can work on purposefully.
✒️ Writing exercise
Find one of the scenes you’ve already written and take note of where the tension should peak. Now review the length of the sentences leading up to that and how well each line supports that goal. If the climax lolls around at precisely the same leisurely pace as the setup, your reader might miss the importance of that moment.
Explore ways to shorten the sentences leading up to the revelation. Then read the new paragraph out loud and see how the rhythm and tone have changed.
End your scenes and chapters mid-question
If you want your reader to keep turning the page, don’t resolve everything before you cut away. This is one of the simplest suspense techniques and one of the most underused, because writers are often in a hurry to tie things up before moving on to the next scene.
Consider ending a chapter at the moment the tension peaks, not after it resolves.
- Your character picks up the phone. Cut.
- They open the door. Cut.
- The verdict is about to be read aloud. Cut.
You don’t need a cliffhanger in every single chapter — used too often, this technique becomes a gimmick, and readers will start to feel manipulated rather than gripped. But look for the key moments in your story where the tension is genuinely at its highest, and consider ending your scene or chapter right there, before the release, to entice your reader into the next chapter.
The pitfall — withholding for its own sake
Here’s where some writers start to overcorrect. If withholding information builds suspense, the thinking goes, then withholding more information must build more suspense, right?
But this is where suspense curdles into something else: confusion, or worse, manipulation. No reader wants to feel as though they’ve been tricked.
I see this with what I call the “false mystery,”where there’s obviously something important a character knows or realizes, but they choose to keep it secret or don’t bother fully analyzing the situation for weak or vague reasons.
When secrets are kept hidden to stretch out the story, your reader will stop caring. Especially for characters that are supposed to be clever or insightful. If they’re in the heat of battle, it’s possible some things might temporarily slip by, but if the protagonist in your mystery or suspense story isn’t anything less than brilliant, your readers attention will start to wane.
Either share the secret when it matters and let your characters deal with the fallout, or show that there’s a real cost if the secret gets out too soon.
Suspense belongs in every genre
Suspense isn’t the exclusive property of thrillers. Every genre uses suspense in some way.
- A romance asks whether two people will finally end up together.
- A fantasy asks whether the hero can stop the coming disaster.
- A family drama asks whether a broken relationship can be repaired.
- A memoir asks how someone survived an extraordinary experience.
- A comedy builds suspense before revealing the joke.
The question changes. The technique stays roughly the same. As a writer, your job isn’t just to tell readers what happens. It’s to make them need to find out.
Your story weapon: Amplify the suspense
Before you write your next scene, here’s a useful checklist to help you amplify suspense.
- Does my reader know something my character doesn’t, or are we both finding it out together? If they’re finding it out together, that’s mystery, not suspense. Decide which approach works best for this scene.
- Can you name what’s at stake in this scene in one sentence? If you can’t, your reader probably can’t either.
- Is there a clock in this scene, even an implied one? What happens if the character doesn’t act in time?
- Are you ending this scene or chapter before the tension resolves, or tying it up too neatly and letting the reader off the hook?
- Does your sentence rhythm tighten as the tension rises?
- Are you withholding information because the story needs it, or because you haven’t figured out how to reveal it yet? Be honest with yourself here.
Suspense is a promise you make to your reader, and you keep renewing it every time they turn a page. Learn to control that gap between what they know and what your character knows, and you’ll have them checking the locks on their own front doors long after they’ve put your book down.
Strengthening your understanding of suspense can help you make deliberate choices about tension, pacing, and what your reader needs to know at each moment. To develop these storytelling skills further, join one of my next workshops: The 90-Day Novel, The 90-Day Memoir, Story Day.
