How does one build suspense as a writer? I may as well ask how to spin gold out of straw. If it was as simple as capturing it in a blog post, everyone would be great. So I decided instead to share what worked for me, and to do that, I’ll need to go to what I consider my greatest work – Salvation Day.
For those who don’t know, Salvation Day is about a
grief-stricken man who wants to kill God(a lot more complex than that, but
that’s the essence). To build a
narrative that allows the reader to sympathize with such an awful motivation, I
had to build it slowly and put the reader on the edge of his or her seat. I brought in echoes of the past lamenting how
he lost his family. I integrated
supernatural elements with his own paranoid personality. I made characters that are nominally seen as
“evil” into more fleshed out versions that push back against such a simplistic
caricature.
I also had to know how to draw readers into wanting to keep
reading. Most folks read from chapter to
chapter. After all, the chapter is where
the action is, so who stops reading in the middle of a fight scene or
impassioned speech? Yet the reader also
had to be drawn into the next chapter and want to read it as soon as they
could, so I set mini-cliffhangers. The
main character was fired, had an awful vision while sleeping, and wakes up to
answer his phone. The gates of Heaven
had been breached and the demon army was on the cusp of storming inside. The main character was given an ultimatum by
his allies to decide whether to bend to them or face death.
Basically, it was about creating a compulsion to keep
reading, even when the reader was tired and wanted to go to sleep or had to
dart off to their kid’s ballet practice.
That compulsion may have to lay dormant for a while, but the urge to
continue must be there or it becomes easy to not read. So answer some questions, but create
more. That makes the reader hungry to know,
and that’s what helps create suspense.
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