Hello and welcome back.

Today I would like to give three tips on how to create suspense in your book. So without further ado here we go.

Tip 1: Create mini cliff hangers at the end of a chapter. I picked this up from the Book In A Month system I used while doing last year’s NaNoWriMo.

Here’s an example of how to do that:

Jake sprints down the alley towards the dumpster and climbs in closing the lid as quietly as possible. He hears the voices of his pursuers say they don’t think he came down here. Despite the stench of the garbage, he decides to wait for several minutes before leaving the dumpster. One minute after making that decision he hears the sound of a truck engine entering the alley. Then the clunk of the metal and the weightless sensation of the dumpster being lifted off the ground.

That would be the end of one chapter. For the next chapter I can either start where I left off with Jake in the belly of the garbage truck or with him escaping, or I can go to different characters, perhaps his pursuers, or anyone else in a different part of the city.

Tip 2: Put your character in an impossible (or seemingly impossible) situation. One trick might be to lock her in a shark cage underwater with a diminishing air supply and a timer on the lock to the cage that will open the cage and she has to swim among sharks to safety.

Tip 3: There is always the good old countdown timer. Say the character has a week to solve a problem such as finding the nuclear bomb before it destroys a city. Each mistake she makes or how she gets closer to the location of the bomb cuts the time down by half.of what it was. So to start out the story she has a week, then gets a message showing the countdown timer is now at 3 days and 12 hours and so on as the story progresses.

I hope this helps, have a great day.