Remember what it was like watching Help! for the very first time, when you didn’t know whether or not poor Ringo would be sacrificed to the dread Kali? The suspense kept my attention riveted to the TV (I first saw it on video), just the way you want your readers to be riveted to their computers as they read your stories. So, how do you create suspense in your stories? In order to answer this question, first we’ll need to examine the basic premise underlying all stories. We’ll also discuss the importance of stakes, goals, and well-developed characters. Along the way, we’ll look at the Beatles’ movies, some Beatles fan fiction stories, and Piers Anthony’s fantasy Xanth series for examples of ways to create suspense within a story.

When it comes to creating plots for stories, there’s nothing new under the sun. Some books I’ve read state that there are only twenty or thirty “master” plots, such as a quest story, a revenge story, or a chase story, and that all stories are simply variations/combinations on these themes. Other books pare the number of plots down further to just one or two plots. “How can this be done?” you might ask. It’s simple. All stories boil down to the same situation: a character with a goal and the obstacles standing in his or her way. The story is about how the obstacles are overcome to achieve the goal. When the main character achieves his or her goal, the story is over. (Sometimes a character fails to achieve the goal; this is the second “master plot” I mentioned earlier.)

Let’s illustrate this with a few examples. At the beginning of the Yellow Submarine movie, Pepperland is conquered by the Blue Meanies. The goal of our heroes, the Beatles, is to restore Pepperland. In Help!, Ringo’s goal is to remove the sacred sacrificial ring from his finger so he won’t be sacrificed. The obstacle preventing him from removing it immediately is that there’s a catch: he must show courage before the ring will come off.

So, can you pick any goal for your hero or heroine? No; it has to be important to both your main character and your readers. For the goal to be important, something has to be at stake, or at risk. In Yellow Submarine, it’s Pepperland; in Help!, it’s Ringo’s life. Fear that the Meanies will defeat the Beatles or that Ringo could be killed keeps us watching the movies to find out what happens. A goal doesn’t need to be a life-and-death one; for instance, in a romance, a girl may want her favorite Beatle to fall in love with her, and the happiness of both of them may be at stake. But it has to be a goal the character cares about, and for us to care about the goal, we also need to care about the character. (We’ll return to this point later. Withholding a vital piece of information from the reader, by the way, can also create suspense. It’s not fair, though, to withhold the information if it’s something the viewpoint character knows; the character and the reader should search for the information together.)

Although Yellow Submarine and Help! do make us worry about the Beatles, we “know” that because they’re the stars, nothing really bad is going to happen to them in the movies. This can undercut the element of risk in a story. Orson Scott Card in his Writers Digest book Characters and Viewpoint elaborates on this and suggests a way to make the risk more believable:

It’s important to remember that jeopardy only works to increase the audience’s tension if the audience believes that the dreaded event might actually happen. In old-fashioned melodramas, the jeopardy was often grotesque – the hero was tied to a log heading into the sawmill; the heroine was bound to the railroad tracks as the train approached. But the audience eventually realized that there was no chance (in those days) that the storyteller would ever allow the hero to be cut to ribbons by the saw, or the heroine to be spattered along the tracks by the train…. Writers of melodrama…switched tactics.… They used very simple threats, but they made them come true. The first time a writer had the villain jam a burning cigarette into the heroine’s hand, the audience gasped and a threshold was crossed. The villain had proved that he not only could cause pain, he would. His next threat was credible again, and because the audience believed, jeopardy was again a powerful tool for creating tension (1988, page 72).

Another way to make risk believable is to have the characters accept it as real. For instance, in Angel Godiva’s story “No Reply,” John loses his hearing after being hit on the head, and the doctors don’t know whether or not he’ll regain his hearing. John refuses to accept this diagnosis, but he fears his deafness may be permanent.  Although John did not lose his hearing in real life, the way he reacts to his deafness in “No Reply” is so true-to-life that the readers fear he really could become permanently deaf in this story.

How do you use the concepts of goals, obstacles, and stakes within a story to create suspense? Remember, all stories are about goals and the obstacles characters must overcome to achieve their goals. Once they defeat the obstacles, the story is over. So, the more obstacles you put into your characters’ path, the longer the story will be – and the more suspense you’ll build. A good example of this can be found in Piers Anthony’s fantasy Xanth series. In several of these books, the main character seeks out a recurring character named Humfrey, a sorcerer who will answer questions in exchange for a service. For a main character, this service – which must be done before Humfrey will tell the character the answer to his or her question – may turn out to be a quest that seems simple at first but becomes more complicated as the book goes on. To generalize, accomplishing Task A may require traveling to Point B, which can only be reached by overcoming Obstacle C. This in turn may require the assistance of Character D, who will only help the main character if he or she will solve Problem E for them. By the time the main character finishes the quest, he or she will have overcome several problems but may have learned the answer to the original question along the way.

Suspense in a story depends greatly on the plot, but it can be enhanced by the way the story is written. As I’ve mentioned before, one way to get your readers to be involved with the story is to write it about a fully-developed character. There are several “Write Thinking” articles that can help you create fully-developed characters; I particularly recommend Cheryl Mortensen’s "It's Alive!  It's Alive!  Creating a Believable Character." I can also list a few tips here that will make your characters seem real to your readers. Tell most (but not necessarily all – more about that shortly) of the scenes from his or her point of view. Show your readers the character’s world through his or her senses, and let us hear his or her thoughts and motivations. Show him or her in a variety of situations interacting with various types of people. Give him or her good traits, personality quirks, and flaws. All of this character development makes the story richer, drawing readers into it.

Suspense can also be created by the way scenes and chapters end. Jack Bickham, author of over eighty novels and the Writers Digest book Scene and Structure, recommends having most of the scenes in a story, especially at the beginning, end in “disaster” for the main character. When he or she tries to reach a goal, it should be either denied to him or her, or the goal should be granted in such a way that will make reaching the next goal more difficult. In particular, chapters should end with “cliffhangers” to keep the readers panting to know what happens next. Sometimes cliffhangers involve a character in peril, as in Chapter 7 of Aviva Rothschild’s With Strings Attached, where John has been magically attacked and we’re left not knowing exactly what will happen to him. Others leave the reader in a tense situation. In order to keep the suspense up, you can have a couple of scenes in between the cliffhanger and the scene where the cliffhanger is resolved. An example of this occurs near the end of Help! when Professor Foot kidnaps Ringo. We don’t know at first who drags him from his date; instead, we see the other Beatles searching for him and the Superintendent questioning Bhuta. We don’t learn what’s happened to Ringo until we see him tied on a table on the Professor’s boat. You can do the same thing in a story by switching back and forth between several short scenes, as I do at various places in my own story To Thine Own Self Be True. When December 8 arrives on an alternate 1980 Earth, we experience it from John’s, Yoko’s, the murderer’s, and John’s great-great-grandson’s points of view. The switching helps prolong the suspense until the alternate John’s fate is finally decided.

Sandra Ulbrich started her writing career in high school, when she made up her own lyrics to songs. She soon graduated to writing sonnets, villanelles, and free verse. After obtaining her bachelor's degree in molecular biology/English and a Master of Technical and Scientific Communication degree, she worked as a teaching assistant, a science writing intern at the National Cancer Institute, a technical writer, and a proofreader. She is currently a lab technician at an enyzme-producing company. In addition to writing poetry, Sandra has also written a fantasy novel called Day of All Seasons, which has been submitted for publication. She is currently writing a sequel, called Fifth Season. When not writing, Sandra enjoys listening to classic rock (especially the Beatles), reading, gaming, attending cons, and chatting with her friends.