Halloween Book Week: Writing suspense and fear

Today is all about writing suspense and fear. Most fiction requires some suspense and often some fear, but of course some genres have a lot more of it than others – horror of course has bucketloads of both, while thrillers do too.

I’ve mentioned already this week that I find the best books and stories are able to maintain suspense throughout – to build and build and build on it, until the reader is holding so still waiting for the awful thing to happen. The build-up is usually the most important part and getting that right takes a lot of skill. I certainly can’t claim to have mastered it myself (which is why I’m writing about writing, rather than actually writing! But… the times when I do best are when I’ve managed to get inside my character’s head and felt their fear. I’ve been there, hearing the sounds they’re hearing, seeing what they’re seeing, smelling what they’re smelling. And only then have I been able to portray even in a tenth of that fear and suspense.

Some authors are brilliant at it: examples that spring to mind are Stephen King, Nicci French, Tess Gerritsen. Today we have a few authors stopping by to tell us about how they write suspense and fear and to give us a few general tips. I hope you enjoy the insights they bring today.

(Apologies for the lack of posts on Thursday – we didn’t have any guest posts for the topic and I needed to take a day off from a very busy week.)