How to Make Your Writing Suspenseful Victoria Smith What makes a good horror story? Sure, you could throw in some hideous monsters, fountains of blood, and things jumping out from every corner, but as classic horror author H.P. Lovecaf...
You need to do the same thing with the suspense in your story. Build it up for as long as you can, teasing your audience with possible answers and making them hungry for more. Subtly reference a piece of your suspense arc as early as possible. Then make them anticipate each individual ...
of us gathered here to celebrate the partial reactivation of our phones as well as our son’s upcoming job interview with a national franchise. Ki-Tek tries to deliver a heartfelt speech like a TV patriarch but severely lacks the gravitas. Chung-Sook and Ki-Jung are already drinking their...
Writers who know how to raise the high stakes in a story understand how to provide action that drives the story forward. Action often brings impending danger, and is one of those “go-to” elements of suspense, but you’ll see that you don’t have to rely on a high-speed car chase ...
Waiting for the other shoe to drop is suspenseful. But if you wait three weeks it’s just tedious. Oh, unless your villain happens to be a one-legged amputee. Or ‘She heard the first shoe drop. She lay there in the darkness, as tense as a bowstring in the bed. Then after an int...
This is why suffering is an essential ingredient in a gripping, suspenseful story. If your protagonist doesn't suffer, if there’s no risk of pain, the stakes won’t be high enough to keep your reader engaged until the end. 2. The Stakes Matter ...
Learning how to write mystery is easy when you understand the ingredients of mystery and suspense. Every good story has unknowns readers want answered, yet a good mystery makes us need to know. Here are 6 ways to create suspense and build mystery:...
Repetition is yet another technique to create a promising suspenseful aura. The same bundle of chords is repeated, establishing a rhythmic tension. A predictable pattern emphasizes the song and storyline. Additionally, the sudden chord change can be incorporated to release the hype or create a new...
For a novel with multiple protagonists to work, it must have an underlying unitary story — necessarily, unless the chapters and sections are a collection of unrelated short stories. (Which would make it a short story collection, not a novel, and it should be queried and submitted as such....
“A dark and heartfelt love letter to horror movies and Hollywood hells,How to Make a Horror Movie and Surviveis Craig DiLouie at his best—suspenseful, psychological, and unpredictable!”– James Chambers, Bram Stoker Award-winning author ofA Bright and Beautiful Eternal World ...