Have you seen the famous shower scene from the Alfred Hitchcock film, Psycho? It’s a great example of suspense in its purest, most chilling form, and so much of what it does can be taken into your writing.
The scene builds slowly – it’s just a woman taking a shower, at first – but we sense from the atmosphere and the subtle foreshadowing that something is going to happen. This makes us focus on the small details and the character’s oblivious movements, watching out for danger on her behalf. By the time we see the shadow of her attacker on the shower curtain, we are in a state of high alert. And this is what suspense is, in a story: that painfully delicious anticipation of what might be to come. As Oscar Wilde said, “The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.”
In thrillers, this might be the bomb under the chair, the gun in someone’s pocket, the intruder hiding in our protagonist’s house. But suspense happens across all genres. It’s the ‘will they/won’t they?’ moments that keep you gripped in a romance; the heart-in-mouth build-up to a game-changing penalty in a story about a sports team. From a writer’s point of view, it’s about restraint and delay. The suspense is released the moment the bomb goes off, or the couple finally kiss, or the penalty hits the back of the net. Time that just right and it becomes the reader’s reward for their agonising wait.
Take the scene from Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes which coined the term ‘cliff-hanger’. Henry Knight slips while trying to retrieve his hat, and ends up clinging to a cliff face while the young woman he is secretly engaged to, Elfride, disappears to find help. Hardy prolongs the suspense by describing what Knight sees and thinks as he dangles there. At one point, he realises he is looking into the eyes of a fossilised creature in the rock: he stares the long-dead thing in the face as he wonders whether he himself is about to die. By the time Elfride returns, the reader is as relieved to see her as Knight is, and desperate to know whether he will be saved.
The suspense a reader experiences in a scene may come from dramatic irony (the reader knowing something the character doesn’t, like the presence of an intruder) but can also come from a crucial choice the character has to make – perhaps with life or death consequences – so that we wait anxiously to see what they will do. Most importantly, though, it occurs because we are invested in the character’s fate. We are glued to the page because we care about what may or may not happen, and because the stakes are high. If we don’t care about the kiss, or the penalty, or the survival of our protagonist, there is no suspense.
As well as within scenes, suspense happens across the whole of a novel or story. It is the unresolved, escalating tension that keeps the reader turning the pages. But again, its creation is all about holding some things back; about raising questions and delaying or restricting the answers. Consider how to use the structure and pace of your story to maximise this. At what points will you stretch out the suspense as far as you can get away with, and at what points will you allow a release? Which brings me to the question: how much suspense is too much? It is possible to irritate your reader by overdoing it. If they spend an entire romance novel waiting for a couple to so much as brush hands, or an entire thriller waiting for hovering threats to turn into actual danger, they could become fed up. Unless, that is, you give them some rewards along the way: some near-misses, catastrophes, or moments when something different happens from what they thought they were waiting for. Surprise and suspense go hand in hand. Let your reader know you have some tricks up your sleeve, that not everything is going to happen in the way they expect (or want!), and their anticipation will be even greater.
Contributed by Helen Cooper
leicesterwritersclub.com 