Great stories have plenty of suspense that keeps the reader turning the page. Sometimes, though, writers sabotage their story by unnecessarily reducing the suspense. Click the title for the full article:
• Maintain tension throughout your story
Any story you tell by definition has a plot, characters, setting, point of view and theme. But to really make a story pop, an author has to interweave and play these elements against one another so that the story has tension.
• Start your story in middle to increase suspense
An old but apt writing adage goes “Start your story in the middle.” That is, rather than give background information about how the story’s main conflict came to be, instead start it by dropping the reader right into the hornet’s nest.
• Your main character must fail
Typically a story is about a single character who overcomes some problem. For your story to work, through most of it the main character must have difficulty resolving the problem.
• Increase story’s suspense through reversal
As your main character attempts to resolve the story’s central problem, he should suffer reversals. Reversals occur when the main character’s effort to solve the crisis actually worsens the situation so that the problem is more difficult to rectify.
• Avoid ‘organ music’ to create story suspense
Sometimes when attempting to create tension and suspense in a story, writers can undercut their own efforts by adding “organ music.” A term coined at the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop, organ music us providing “details that countersink an emotional response before anything happens.”
• Don’t break circuit of suspense when it’s hot
An emotional circuit breaker is a craftsmanship error that occurs when the writer cuts away from a scene once the stakes get high…and often follows it with a lower-stakes retelling of the events.
______________
My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.
Check out some of my writing guidebooks:
Discover more from Inventing Reality Editing Service
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.