Tried and True Methods To Create and Maintain… Suspense!
For our next writer roundtable, let’s talk suspense. What are your tried and true methods for creating and maintain suspense in your work? Feel free to quote examples you’ve written.
Bobby Nash: If my POV character is the one experiencing it, I use short, choppy sentences, disjointed or incomplete thoughts, distractions that move from one to the other. It feels frantic in that character’s thoughts. I try to have the reader feel the character’s anxiety.
John L. Taylor: I use descriptive cues in their environment. One I used in a yet unpublished manuscript was to have a seemingly unmenacing character begin talking to the POV character while Greig’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” is being played on a piano in the background. His tale gets more and more morbid with the music until the POV character realizes she’s talking to the Angel of Death who’s threatening to kill her entire city at the crescendo.
Bill Craig: Create a sense of urgency, as if the hero is racing against a clock.
Brian K Morris: In my writing, I like to establish that the character is moving towards something mysterious, unknowable. It’s even better when I remove their support systems and any reasons to retreat from the danger.
Marian Allen: I put my characters out of their element or out of their depth and make sure the readers know it. In my mystery/comedy Bar Sinister, the “detective” is a naive busybody poking around a murder as if it’s a fun puzzle. In my historical (1968) mystery A Dead Guy at the Summer House, the main character is trying desperately NOT to be told what happened before he was hired as a handyman, and doesn’t even know a murder has been committed — but other people think he knows ALL about it. I like for my characters to be — with the readers’ knowledge — to approach danger unawares, so the reader can sit on a bus and shout aloud, “Don’t go in there!” Good times.
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https://seanhtaylor.blogspot.com/2021/10/tried-and-true-methods-to-create-and.html
