Why do you get sucked into suspense?

Great literature is all about keeping the reader on the edge of their seat for hours. As a reader and novelist, I frequently wonder how engaging masterworks of writing are created. If you are curious, you might be interested in what I've learnt about this issue.

Suspense is key. In psychology, suspense is a cognitive state of uncertainty dealing with the hopeful anticipation of an emotional consequence. To captivate a reader to continue and finish the story, it naturally works best if both the ambiguity and expectation of the resolution last for as long as feasible.

How does an author create suspense that lasts the entire book? I'm not talking about "the sound of footsteps outside the door" type of suspense, which gets resolved in the same or next chapter, and when repeated often in the long form story, can feel random or monotonous. Creating a novel length suspense is all about when and how to reveal information to a reader. There is no suspense if all the events are laid out chronologically in a transparent way to a reader, even though the dramatic scenes could still have tension because of heightened stakes and potential threats to the protagonist.

Let me share how expert storytellers write about secrets—whether they're family secrets in modern family drama, domestic suspense, or in the more general genre of psychological suspense stories—and how they're engineered and selectively dished out.

The vital story information—denoted as the 'answer' or 'secret', which unlike in whodunit mystery, is not necessarily the identity of a villain—must be revealed to the reader as late as possible, but enough bits and pieces should be dangled early and sprinkled throughout the story to sustain the reader's curiosity so that he keeps reading to the end. For effectiveness, the most puzzling bit of the story should be revealed at the book's ending, or even in the last chapter\epilogue, or if possible, in the last one percent of the book.

In a mystery, the answer can be satisfactorily explained within a short reveal, eg., a round up all the suspects by the detective kind of moment. The problem is, if the sophisticated puzzle is complicated or involves a non-obvious motive or a complicated mechanism, the explanation should be dramatised and not just summarised. This usually means it will be of significant length and can't be contained wholely within one chapter or just within one percent of the book.

So how could top authors managed to execute overarching suspense? In order to illustrate this and provide examples, I have to give away some spoilers. So please do not read this article any further, if you haven't read any of the following books or have an intention to enjoy them in the future: The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides, Love, Mum by Iliana Xander, Gone Tonight by Sarah Pekkanen, or She's Not Sorry by Mary Kubica.

The successful trick is to reveal the secret slowly in scenes that form a separate story thread. So the narrative is necessarily non-linear. However, the alternating threads must not be simply woven together in a crude way. The reader gets bored easily and loses interest as soon as he realises one of the alternating threads is the backstory that will provide the vital clue—it's hard to motivate the reading of the parts of the backstory that don't directly solve the puzzle. From this stage onwards, the reader tends to feel much less uncertainty about what the story is hanging on to, and this destroys the central uncertainty that maintains the suspense.

The following are some examples of how the second thread can be delivered without this negative effect.

In The Silent Patient, the earlier narrative is told in an alternate chapter from the story present narrative, but written in such a way that the reader isn't aware of the period of the earlier narrative. The reader assumes that every event in The Silent Patient, occurs consecutively in linear time, and the existence and timing of the thread that occurs earlier in time is cleverly revealed and explained at the end of the book, when the final event in the second thread catches up with the beginning event in the first narrative. Similarly, in Gone Tonight, the protagonist Catherine is trying to uncover her mother's secret in the story present. The narrative of Catherine's mother, Ruth, is told in a separate, alternating thread, but because Ruth has a different name in the past, the reader does not know how the two narratives relate to each other, or when the second narrative actually occur, relative to Catherine's story. So unlike The Silent Patient, the reader is aware that the second narrative of a different setting exists, but he is not aware how it relates to Catherine's story. A third mechanism is shown in Love, Mum, a family drama with domestic suspense. Here, the family secret is revealed to the story's protagonist, Mackenzie, via a series of letters physically sent to her. She doesn't know who sent her the letters but they appears to be pages of an old diary written by her mother, an accomplished writer. The reader is aware of how the second story is related to the present story, but is unaware of how this comes into the hands of Mackenzie, until the end of the novel, when the identity of the sender is revealed to be a relatively minor character. At the midpoint, the reader gets a huge twist reveal, and at the same time, Mackenzie realizes that her mother who has just died may not be her real mother. This revelation is done entirely through the diary pages she received.

The weaving of a second story thread is a way of sustaining suspense that is independent of other writing techniques like misdirection or unreliability of the narrator. The strategy can be used in combination with these other techniques. As an example, in Mary Kubica's highly successful She's Not Sorry, the nurse protagonist who takes care of a comatose patient is not an entirely reliable narrator, but the story is also told in a dual timeline. In this case, the narrator with-holds the identity of the victim in the second narrative.

In summary, to sustain a book length suspense, non-linear information reveal is necessary. However, maximum impact can be achieved only if the reader is kept in the dark about some important aspect of the historical or earlier, explanatory back history thread: either hiding the character's identity, the time of the occurence of this thread, the setting, or how the protagonist becomes aware of this thread. Although I've provided only four examples, it seems there are countless ways to use this strategy and it wouldn't be formulaic if executed well.

I hope you enjoy this. If you're a writer, have you used this strategy? If you're a reader of modern drama, please let me know if you like stories with such suspense. Have you come across other clever ways of sustaining suspense over the length of an entire book?