Create Edge-Of-Your-Seat Suspense: Increase Tension by Getting into Your Readers’ Heads

Build Edge-of-Your-Seat Suspense by Getting Inside Your Reader's Head

You've read a book where almost nothing was happening on the page, and still you couldn't put it down. That's suspense at its quietest, and in this session I show you how to build it on purpose, from a character readers care about to a structure that makes them wait.

What You'll Learn

• How to find suspense in everyday moments, like a wallet found in the street or a stranger's cart tapping yours in the checkout line, without relying on chases or gunfire
• How to make a character relatable through four factors: vulnerability, universal longings, a plot that threatens those longings, and interruptions to the plot's forward momentum
• Methods to use Maslow's hierarchy of needs to find a longing every reader shares, and then threaten it
• Techniques for using quiet, not noise, to build dread, and for showing a character's physical reactions instead of naming the emotion
• Strategies for using flashbacks and flash-forwards to layer in revelations without breaking the reader's momentum
• How to apply Alfred Hitchcock's distinction between surprise and suspense by giving readers the facts and withholding what those facts mean
• How to plant a recurring threat and bring it back at shorter and shorter intervals, so the tension builds with every appearance

Through this comprehensive approach, you'll see suspense as something that begins with a character your reader cares about, not with a ticking bomb. I start with why relatability comes first, and use Maslow's hierarchy of needs to find the longings every reader shares. From there, we look at how a boy fishing alone on a still lake becomes a scene of pure dread the moment the birds go silent, and why showing a character's sweaty palms does more than telling us he's nervous. Then we turn to structure: how Lucy Foley's The Hunting Party and Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie use time to make readers wait, how Hitchcock turned 15 seconds of surprise into 15 minutes of suspense, and the advice Lee Child gave me about asking a question and not answering it until later. I close with a look at two pages from Big Little Truths, Liane Moriarty's sequel to Big Little Lies, to show how the book's design lets her juggle a dozen points of view, and how a man in a green car becomes a threat that builds each time the kids see him.

Perfect for:

• Novelists who want tension in the quiet chapters, not only in the chase scenes
• Writers building a protagonist readers will root for, and wondering what makes a character someone a reader worries about
• Authors working with flashbacks, flash-forwards, or dual timelines who want each jump in time to raise the stakes
• Memoirists and nonfiction writers holding a reader's attention when the reader already knows how the story ends

This workshop equips you with techniques that work across genres, because suspense isn't reserved for thrillers. The examples run from Taken to Apollo 13, from domestic suspense to a literary classic, and every principle applies as much to memoir as to a thriller. Whether you're plotting a new book or revising a finished draft, you can look at any scene and ask two questions: does my reader care about this character, and does my reader know enough to worry?

Whether you're writing your first mystery or your tenth novel, this session gives you a practical way to keep readers turning pages in every chapter, not only the big ones. Suspense lives in what your reader knows, what they fear, and what they're waiting to find out.

Readers stay with a story when they care what happens next. Rent the replay to get my full guidance on building that kind of suspense, including a live Q&A where I answer questions on whether a book can have too much suspense, when humor helps rather than hurts, how to build suspense in memoir when readers know you survived, how often to hint at a character's backstory, how many false alarms readers will forgive, and how to use setting to create dread.