Keeping up the suspense

How do you think of suspense in a story?  In terms of a bomb counting down, or cliffhanging action?But suspense is much wider than that.  It's everything a writer does to keep the reader turning the pages.

In the Panthera books I achieved that by having four or five viewpoints, and by changing the viewpoint frequently.  Some of my chapters are very short, not more than 460 words, but they end on some kind of suspense.

Not every chapter ends on a classic cliffhanger, of course.  The reader does need time to draw their breath between the action sequences.  But I've tried to end every chapter with some sense of mystery,  with the character - and hopefully the reader - having to turn the page to find out what happens next .

Putting a character at risk can be more subtle than physical risk.  It can be putting a character face to face with their greatest fears. Psychological or emotional jeopardy keeps up the suspense if we've already come to know and like the character.

Thrillers work because the characters are working against time.  The hero or heroine has to do something before a certain time or all the world will be destroyed. Or the suspense can come from something the characters are seeking.  My novel Starfire is structured around my Trader captain, Ria Bihar, helping an alien race to recover a stolen artefact of theirs before relations between the two races break down into war.

Foreshadowing and asking dramatic questions also add to suspense.  The story should become a journey towards showing how that information  is relevant, or answering that question.

How you structure your novel is crucial to maintaining suspense.  This was one of the reasons I planned out the Panthera books in detail before I strarted to write.  I was placing plot points and cliffhangers, and working out where to change viewpoint for suspense.  But as I was writing the plan sometimes changed.  I'd missed the opportunity to add cliffhangers several times, and I had to rearrange my chapter ends and beginnings to accommodate them.

The result was worth it. Every reader has commented on the pace of the books, and how they felt compelled to keep turning the pages.  And that kind of feedback tells me that I've handled suspense effectively, that I've kept the reader's attention to the end of the story.   And that's what we want suspense to do.