Suspense

In practice

Suspense is the anxious, pleasurable uncertainty an audience feels about what will happen next, especially when something it cares about is at risk. It is the feeling of leaning forward: the bomb is ticking, the killer is in the house, the letter is about to be opened. Suspense is not the same as mystery. Mystery asks what happened; suspense asks what will happen, and it is strongest when the audience knows more than the characters do.

Alfred Hitchcock's famous example, given to François Truffaut in their interviews, makes the difference clear. If a bomb under a table goes off without warning, the audience gets a few seconds of surprise. If the audience sees the bomb first and then watches the characters chat about baseball, the same scene becomes fifteen minutes of suspense. Information given to the audience, not withheld from it, creates the tension.

The common mistake is confusing suspense with confusion. Hiding what is at stake, or keeping the audience unsure what a character wants, produces boredom rather than tension. Suspense needs clarity: a clear goal, a clear danger, a clear clock, and a character the audience wants to see survive. Once those are in place, delay does the rest.

The audience sees what she does not

Suspense comes from the gap between what the audience knows and what Maya knows. The writer shows the danger on the monitor, then delays the payoff with ordinary business: gum, a lyric, a phone. Every small action becomes unbearable because the audience is waiting for her to notice. The half-turn with the earbud raises the hope that she will, and putting it back in tightens the screw.

What suspense means

Suspense is a state of mental uncertainty, excitement or anxiety about how something will turn out. Merriam-Webster defines it as the state of being suspended, and as pleasant excitement as to a decision or outcome, often with anxiety. In storytelling, suspense is the tension an audience feels when it cares about a character and does not yet know whether things will go well or badly for them.

Suspense has three ingredients. The audience must care about the outcome, usually because it cares about a character. Something must be at stake that can be lost. And the outcome must be uncertain, or at least delayed. Take away any one of them and the tension drains: an unknown character in danger, a likable character in no danger, or a danger that resolves at once.

Suspense is not limited to thrillers. A romantic comedy creates suspense about whether two people will confess their feelings, a sports film about whether a kick will go in, and a family drama about whether a secret will come out at dinner. Any genre can use it, and most stories that hold readers do.

Suspense, surprise and mystery

Surprise is a sudden shock: information the audience did not expect arrives all at once. Suspense is extended anticipation: the audience expects something and waits for it. Hitchcock's bomb example shows that the same event can produce either, depending on what the audience is told first. Surprise gives a jolt; suspense gives a scene.

Mystery works by withholding. The audience lacks information (who did it, what the stranger wants, what is in the box) and keeps watching to find out. Suspense often works by sharing information. Dramatic irony, when the audience knows something a character does not, is one of the strongest suspense tools because it lets viewers see the danger coming while the character walks toward it.

Most stories combine the three. A detective story is built on mystery, but its best scenes are suspense: the detective searching a suspect's apartment while the audience watches the suspect's car pull up outside. Twists supply surprise, and the most satisfying ones, once revealed, make the earlier suspense scenes look different.

Techniques for building suspense

The ticking clock is the simplest technique: a deadline by which something must happen. A bomb timer, a train leaving, a hearing in the morning or a guest arriving in ten minutes all turn ordinary time into pressure. The clock works best when the audience is reminded of it as it runs down.

Foreshadowing and planting create suspense by making the audience expect something. A gun shown in act one, a weak railing mentioned early or a character's fear of water established in a quiet moment all make later scenes tense before anything happens. The audience starts waiting for the planted thing to matter.

Delay is the engine. Once the audience is waiting, slow down: interrupt the action with a phone call, cut away to another storyline, let a character hesitate, stretch the moment with small physical detail. Cliffhangers at the end of a chapter or episode are delay at the largest scale, leaving the question open across a break.

Examples of suspense

Hitchcock built his career on suspense. In Rear Window, the audience watches from the apartment as Lisa searches the suspected killer's flat and sees him coming up the stairs before she does. In Psycho, the car carrying the victim's body stops sinking into the swamp for a moment, and the audience finds itself hoping, uncomfortably, that it will go under.

Jaws holds back its shark for much of the film, using John Williams's two-note theme and the shark's point of view to make the audience feel it is near. Alien works the same way in a smaller space. The fact that the mechanical shark often failed during filming forced Steven Spielberg to show less of it, which made the film more suspenseful.

Suspense also drives novels without any violence at all. Pride and Prejudice keeps readers wondering whether Elizabeth and Darcy will overcome their misunderstandings, and Jane Austen delays the answer through letters, visits and interruptions. The stakes are personal, and they are enough.

How to write suspense

First make the audience care. Spend early pages on what your character wants and what they would lose, so that a threat to them is a threat to something the reader values. A danger to a stranger is a spectacle; a danger to a person we know is suspense.

Then tell the audience what could go wrong. Show the danger, state the deadline, plant the weakness. Consider giving the audience information the character lacks. Make the goal and the obstacle concrete enough that readers can picture both the good outcome and the bad one.

Finally, control the pace. Slow down at the moment of highest tension rather than rushing through it: shorter sentences or action lines, more white space, small physical details, and cuts away at the worst moment. Pay the suspense off when the delay has done its work, and make the payoff cost something, so the next time the audience will believe the danger is real.