5 Tips for Building Anticipation in Thrillers
Writing thrillers and mysteries is all about keeping the reader guessing while building anticipation for the final big reveal. How can you ensure your reader doesn’t guess the ending too soon while giving them the pulse-inducing thrills they expect from the genre? Here are five tips I used when writing The Darkness Rises, my latest speculative thriller.
1) Have an annoyingly obvious red herring.
Every good thriller or mystery has it—that primary suspect that is so glaringly obvious it’s almost annoying. But this person plays a crucial role by giving the victim a place to focus their energy, which in turn helps them piece together clues.
The primary suspect can also serve as a diversion tactic and help build anticipation by keeping the reader guessing. There’s a point in the story where the reader starts to home in on other suspects, including the real villain. This is the moment you want to tighten the screws and point the reader’s attention back to the annoyingly obvious red herring. Drop a clue that puts them center stage as Primary Suspect Number One again. It’s a fantastic “look over here, look over here!” misdirection tool.
Growing up, I used to read R.L. Stine books. He was a master at doing this. Out of the gate there would be a villain—the ex-best friend, the jealous step-sister—that would be so obvious I immediately crossed them off my suspect list. But just about the time I thought I’d figured out who the real villain was, the initial villain would show up again under suspicious circumstances that were impossible to ignore. I’d start to wonder—how is it that this person keeps popping up every time something bad happens? Could the obvious villain actually be the villain? Way to keep me guessing, Stine.
2) Make everyone a suspect.
You’ve got your annoyingly obvious red herring, check. Now you need to keep the reader guessing. The best thrillers do this by making the reader question everyone—from the main character’s innocent-seeming grandma down to the narrator themselves.
It doesn’t take much to make a character a suspect—all you need is the slight hint of a motive, and readers will fill in the rest themselves. Perhaps the best friend is mad because the main character keeps blowing them off. Maybe the parent keeps disappearing without explanation, or the beloved dad leaves his bank statement out revealing his money troubles. And why does that favorite teacher show up at the farmer’s market around the same time something sinister happens?
Ask yourself: How can you create a moment where each character acts a little sus, thereby making them a potential suspect to the reader? The more suspects you have, the more readers will flip pages trying to piece together the clues before the big reveal.
Check out Stacy Stokes’ The Darkness Rises here:
(WD uses affiliate links)
3) Plant an early bread crumb.
In The Darkness Rises, there’s an early scene where Whitney looks in the mirror and wonders if she’ll be able to see her own darkness when a moment of danger arises. This is a bread crumb, foreshadowing a climactic future scene when Whitney looks in the mirror and sees a cloud hovering above her head, warning her that the killer is near.
Leaving a bread crumb is a great way to build suspense by giving the reader a tiny hat tip about the drama to come. It doesn’t have to be big—a flashback to when they were a child, a moment of pontification about something that seems unlikely—but savvy readers will catch it and look forward to the next crumb. Plus, who doesn’t love to be in on the secret?
4) Use humor to unwind the tension…then wind it back up.
Every scene in a thriller should act like a tightening coil, winding up to the big reveal. But a great way to create even more tension is to release the spring, just for a moment, before winding it back up again. It creates layers of emotion to the story, making it feel more like a roller coaster rather than a straight upward climb.
Adding moments of humor is a great tension-releasing mechanism. In The Darkness Rises, I use the two sidekicks as my comedic tools. Sometimes the comedy comes in the form of witty banter, sometimes through small hijinks, but after each tension-releasing moment I follow it up with another dramatic tension-building scene. The predictability of this pattern also serves as a great tool because the reader starts to suspect what’s coming next, building the anticipatory momentum of the narrative even further.
5) End every chapter on a cliffhanger.
The R.L. Stine Goosebumps franchise thrives on this. You’re flipping the pages, the room goes dark, someone grabs the main character and then…Boom! Chapter ending. Of course the reader has to find out what happens, so they flip to the next chapter only to learn that it’s just a friend who grabbed the main character’s shoulder. Annoying…but also a brilliant device to keep readers turning pages.
It’s tempting to end chapters on a conflict resolution, but if you’re looking to ratchet up the tension try ending in the middle of a scene rather than the end of it. Your job as a writer isn’t to make your reader feel happy by calmly resolving each narrative…it’s to keep their heart racing. And nothing does that more than an ill-placed scene cut.
Happy writing!
With a growing catalog of instructional writing videos available instantly, we have writing instruction on everything from improving your craft to getting published and finding an audience. New videos are added every month!