Writing on the Edge: The Craft of Tension and Momentum

Evan Swensen
February 14, 2025

How Do I Effectively Build Tension and Suspense?

The moment before something happens is often more gripping than the event itself. Think of a storm rolling in—dark clouds thickening, the air turning electric, the silence just before the first drop of rain. That’s tension. A great story doesn’t just deliver shocking moments; it makes the reader feel them coming.

Writers, whether crafting fiction or nonfiction, must master this art. It’s not about explosions or dramatic revelations alone but about stretching the space between a question and its answer. Suspense isn’t exclusive to thrillers—it’s what keeps readers flipping pages in a memoir, a business book, even a historical narrative. The key is to make readers need to know what happens next.

The Power of the Unanswered Question

Imagine beginning a book with:
“He had ten minutes left to live, but he didn’t know it yet.”

Instantly, there’s a question: What will happen in those ten minutes? The reader doesn’t just want to know; they must know. The best suspense is driven by questions—questions raised early, teased out through carefully paced reveals, and answered only when the reader is on the edge of impatience.

Take Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. It doesn’t open with an outright crime scene but with a husband reflecting on his missing wife’s head shape. It’s an unsettling detail, a tiny thread that the reader instinctively tugs on, unraveling a much deeper mystery. The lesson? The best hooks aren’t necessarily dramatic but subtly off—something that makes the reader’s mind itch.

Pacing: The Art of Holding Back

New writers often make the mistake of dropping every crucial detail too soon, but suspense thrives on restraint. Think of Alfred Hitchcock’s famous observation: If a bomb suddenly explodes under a table, that’s surprise. But if the audience knows the bomb is there, ticking away while the characters chat, that’s suspense.

Pacing is the writer’s secret weapon. It’s knowing when to slow down and when to accelerate. In Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, tension builds through an almost agonizing slowness—the new Mrs. de Winter walking through the grand Manderley estate, feeling the presence of the dead Rebecca everywhere. It takes chapters before the whole truth is revealed, but by then, the reader has absorbed every whisper, every shadow.

One technique is the interrupted reveal—giving the reader a crucial piece of information, then shifting to another scene before explaining its full implications. This creates a psychological cliffhanger. Every delay makes the reader hungrier.

Foreshadowing: The Echo Before the Boom

A master of suspense plants seeds early—small, seemingly insignificant details that later explode into importance. This isn’t just for fiction. In nonfiction, the same technique applies: a memoir might introduce a minor event in childhood that later becomes a pivotal turning point in the writer’s life.

Consider In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. The book doesn’t start with the brutal murders at the heart of its story but with an eerie calm. Capote spends pages detailing the daily lives of the Clutter family, making the reader care about them before tearing it all away. Suspense often lies not in what’s happening, but in what we know is coming.

Emotional Buy-In: Making the Reader Care

No amount of tension matters if readers aren’t emotionally invested. Suspense isn’t just about plot mechanics—it’s about stakes. Why does it matter if the protagonist finds the missing piece of information? Why should we care if a decision is delayed? If tension exists in a vacuum, it falls flat.

A great example is To Kill a Mockingbird. The trial scenes don’t just carry legal tension; they carry moral tension. The reader isn’t just curious about the verdict—they dread it, knowing the deep injustices of the world where Scout and Atticus live.

Even in business writing or self-help books, personal stakes create suspense. Will the entrepreneur overcome a catastrophic failure? Will the struggling writer finally break through? A well-told story makes readers feel that the outcome matters.

The Subtle Art of the Cliffhanger

Cliffhangers aren’t just for the ends of chapters—they can exist at the end of sentences, even paragraphs. Breaking mid-thought, mid-reveal, mid-action forces the reader to keep moving.

A simple way to execute this is by cutting off resolution at key moments:

Instead of: “She turned the key and opened the door to find—”
Try: “She turned the key. The door creaked open. She froze.”

The latter forces the reader to fill in the gap, making them active participants in the suspense.

Final Thought: Keep the Tension Alive

Suspense isn’t just about shock value; it’s about an emotional thread that tightens as the story unfolds. The best writing leaves the reader in a near-constant state of anticipation. They might not even realize why they can’t put the book down—they know they have to keep going.

Tension isn’t optional whether writing fiction, memoir, business, or history. It’s the pulse of great storytelling, the force that keeps readers leaning in, waiting—breathless—for what comes next.

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