How do you build suspense throughout a book?

Jeffrey's answer

Suspense is the gap between what the reader knows and what they need to find out. The wider you can make that gap — and the longer you can sustain it — the more your reader will turn the page.

The master rule of suspense, given to me by my old friend  Corlies Smith, is this: when you have a problem on the page, make it more difficult. Then the reader will wonder even more — how on earth do you get out of that?

That is the engine. Page one, your protagonist faces a problem. By page fifty, the problem is twice as bad. By page two hundred, it has multiplied into something the reader genuinely does not believe can be solved. That is when suspense lives. Not in withholding information from the reader — they will smell that — but in piling difficulty upon difficulty until the reader is desperate to see how the writer is going to solve it.

The master of sustained suspense in any language is Alexandre Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo is, for me, the greatest example. Dumas published it in serial form in a newspaper. He had to make his readers come back next week, every week, for months. Every chapter ending was, in the most literal sense, a sales pitch — the reader who could not bear to wait was the reader who paid for the next instalment. Charles Dickens did the same with The Pickwick Papers. Every fortnight, a new chapter. Every fortnight, a fresh hook. The serialised novelists of the nineteenth century taught a discipline that modern novelists have largely forgotten: the chapter is the unit of suspense. Treat each ending as if the reader will not pick the book up again unless you give them a reason to.

Three rules, after fifty years of writing books designed to be unputdownable.

One: every chapter must end at a moment from which the reader cannot, in good conscience, walk away. A door is opening. A name is about to be revealed. A sword is being drawn. A phone is ringing, and the protagonist has just been told who is calling. End there. Cut the next paragraph. Make them turn the page. Ken Follet (im a big fan) often calls this his story change. It keeps the reader engaged.

Two: the reader must always know more than the protagonist about one thing, and less about another. The reader who knows the bomb is under the table — and watches the characters chat over coffee, oblivious — is in suspense. The reader who finds out about the bomb at the same moment as the characters is in surprise. Surprise lasts a sentence. Suspense lasts a chapter. Suspense is what you want.

Three: never cheat. The reader will follow you into the worst situations a writer can devise — but only if you play fair. Information that the protagonist has, the reader has. Information the reader is to be denied must be denied for a reason that, when revealed, makes the reader say “of course.” If the reader feels cheated, the book is over.

Get those three things right, and the reader gets to the end of every chapter and prays for ten more pages. Corlies Smith’s question — how on earth do you get out of that? — is the question they cannot stop asking. You can have them in your hand for six hundred pages.

A few practical notes

• Suspense vs. surprise. Hitchcock’s rule: if the audience knows there’s a bomb under the table and the characters don’t, that’s suspense (lasts a chapter). If everyone finds out simultaneously, that’s surprise (lasts a sentence). Suspense is what you want.
• End each chapter on a hook. Not necessarily a cliffhanger — but always something that makes the reader feel they cannot stop now.
• Withhold information strategically. If your detective knows who the killer is at chapter 4, the reader feels cheated when they don’t share it.
• Don’t withhold information cheaply. It’s cheating if the protagonist ‘remembered the address but the writer didn’t tell us until chapter 32 for dramatic effect’.
• Use the ticking clock. Constraints generate suspense. ‘The ransom is due in 48 hours.’
• Plant and pay. An object, person, or fact mentioned casually in chapter 3 becomes critical in chapter 27.
• Vary the pace. Ten chapters of escalation in a row exhausts the reader. Quiet chapters deepen character and amplify the next crisis.
• Cork Smith’s master rule: when you have a problem, make it more difficult. The harder the problem, the more the reader wants to see how you’ll solve it.