This week’s tips are all about how to build suspense in your novel. Okay, there’s really only two tips!

Narrow the protagonist’s options . . . then narrow them again

(from 29 Seconds by T.M. Logan)

Logan increases the stakes over and over in this novel. All of Sarah’s options are cut off and shown to be ineffectual. He tears them apart.

Even in the beginning of the novel when Hawthorne corners Sarah in a cab, she considers the options. Get out of the taxi. Ask him to respect her boundaries. Keep her mouth shut and report him to human resources. Yell at him. But none of these will work. She’s stuck with a colleague groping her leg.

The stakes are too high for her to risk being fired, and they keep getting higher throughout the novel. Mortgage, kids, absentee husband: there’s a lot of pressure to keep this job. But that’s not enough. More and more pressures bear down on Sarah.

Each time the stakes are raised, he also cuts off all other options. All the decent ones, at least.

Sarah’s left with a choice. She can sleep with Hawthorne. Or she can pass his name to Grosvenor, the powerful man who has offered to make someone “disappear” for her. Both are morally despicable to her. But after Logan’s ripped apart all the other exits, these are the two that are left.

Forcing someone with integrity to choose between two contradictory things is suspenseful. But the choice can’t be between good and evil. In most stories, that’s too easy. It’s too obvious what a “good” character should do. (Whether that character will do it is a different matter.)

But forcing a character with a high sense of integrity to choose between two equally bad/morally grey options?

The character will have a harder time deciding this. It’s also harder to create two options with the same “weight”; one can’t be a throwaway, Oh, she could do this but she knows she won’t.

What if one seems more appealing than the other (like Grosvenor’s offer versus sex with Hawthorne) then how will that character justify that choice to herself? That’s tough. It’s also very compelling and suspenseful.

Use changes in time and viewpoint

(from Rewind by Catherine Ryan Howard)

Initially, I disliked the multiple points of view in this novel. Just when I felt settled into a character’s head, wham! I had to hop into another person’s head in the next scene. I also had to switch places in time, from before the crime to after the crime and various times leading up to and away from the central event.

But I started to see how Howard effectively uses this to increase tension and suspense.

Not all the characters know the same things. Some misinterpret others’ actions or words. Others lie. We, the reader, might know certain things but the viewpoint character might not and we wonder how that character will react when they learn what we know. Alternately, the viewpoint character might misinterpret another’s actions and because we don’t know better, we believe this misinterpretation.

The time shifts are artfully woven together. Suspense builds in each scene right up until the last words. Then Howard cuts away from that scene, at the exact moment when I don’t want it to end, and forces me to fast-forward or rewind or pause. So I have to put my story questions on hold (so to speak) while I read another event, from another person’s point of view.

I have a feeling that this technique is easier to analyze than to execute!