You know suspense when you see it in a film. You feel suspense when you read a book that makes you anticipate the next page, the next chapter, or even the next sentence. In a novel, suspense is simply the aspect of the story that causes readers to wonder, “What happens next?” Whether you’re writing a literary coming-of-age novel or a sci-fi epic, there’s no story without suspense.
Naturally, the bar for suspense is higher in certain genres, such as crime novels1 or thrillers. If our main character is a policeman, and a body is discovered in the woods on page one, then we expect a certain level of nail-biting suspense.
But even if you’re writing a quieter, more philosophical novel, the one question you cannot dispense with is, “What happens next?”
The reader must always want to know the answer to that question. Of course, if the writing is strong, some readers will be content to get lost in the beauty or the rhythm of the sentences. There may be a kind of stylistic suspense that carries you along for a while. And if the characters are fascinating, the reader may be content, for a time, to read about what your protagonist had for breakfast or what she thinks of the pattern of rain on the car window. But that contentment is not likely to last, for most readers, without a strong narrative drive.
From whence does narrative drive come? How can we make sure that the reader is drawn along, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, from page one to page 401?
Patricia Highsmith, author of The Talented Mr. Ripley and a whole shelf full of popular, tautly plotted novels, knew a thing or two about suspense. For advice we can turn to a book I often recommend to my students, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction. In chapter one of this slim book, which is really more of a “How I Did It” than a “How to Do It,” Highsmith writes,
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