Writing Suspense

The Slow Knife: How I Write Suspense as a Horror Author

Suspense is the engine of horror—a steadily tightening thread that drags the reader to an inescapable breaking point. When people ask how I write fear, I tell them it isn't about the monster—it's about anticipation. Suspense is the promise of something lurking in the dark and the constant whisper urging, 'read on—danger waits.'

But writing suspense didn’t come naturally to me. I used to equate horror with events—big scares, bloody reveals, monstrous encounters. It took years, and many discarded manuscripts, to understand that the most terrifying moments in my stories aren’t the climaxes—they’re the spaces before the reveal, the pregnant hush right before the candle goes out.

In this blog post, I'd like to take you through my process. As we move from anticipation to execution, I’ll show how I build tension, manipulate pacing, decide when to withhold information and when to reveal it, craft characters who can carry the unbearable weight of dread, and use setting and sensory detail to make the reader’s skin crawl before they even know why. Think of this as a guided walk through my personal haunted house—the toolbox I reach for over and over again when I’m trying to make someone’s heart race.

Where Suspense Really Begins

Suspense doesn’t start with a scene. It doesn’t even start with a plot. For me, it begins with a question. Not the sort of question a reader could easily answer, but one that plants a seed of unease.

Questions like:

• Why is no one in town talking about what happened in the woods?

• Why does the protagonist’s sister refuse to sleep at night?

• Why is the basement always locked, even though nobody ever goes down there?

There’s a difference between mystery and suspense. A mystery invites curiosity. Suspense invites dread. When I craft the central question of a story, I look for one with teeth—something that feels dangerous simply to ask. And I pick a question where the truth feels inevitable, like it’s been waiting beneath the floorboards the whole time.

Once I have that question, suspense becomes my main job. Almost everything I write in the first half of a horror story is designed to sharpen that question, deepen the unease around it, or tempt the reader into thinking they’re ready for an answer.

Spoiler: they aren’t.

The Art of What I Don’t Say

I used to love big descriptive paragraphs. Long explanations. Carefully mapped-out lore. Now? I’m a ruthless cutter. One of my biggest tools for building suspense is omission.

Horror readers are hungry for information. They want crumbs. They want to understand the shape of the creature in the dark. But I never, ever give them everything right away. I cut away just enough that the reader’s imagination has to fill in the blanks—and readers will always imagine something more frightening than what I could describe in full.

When I’m writing a tense scene, I often ask myself:

• What if the character notices something but can’t identify it?

• What if they hear a sound but can’t see its source?

• What if they’re certain someone is watching them, but there’s no proof?

One of my favorite tricks is describing a reaction instead of the thing itself. Instead of saying:

“A monstrous shape crawled across the ceiling.”

I’ll write something like:

“She looked up—and her breath left her in a single, broken exhale as her eyes climbed the corner of the ceiling.”

Now the reader fills the gap. And the gap is exactly where suspense lives.

Pacing: The Pulse Behind the Fear

Suspense is rhythm. It’s the inhale and exhale of fear, and I control that rhythm through pacing.

I think of scenes in horror as contractions during labor: periods of painful tightening punctuated by brief intervals of relief. The relief is important; without it, the tension becomes white noise. But those moments of ease shouldn’t feel safe—they should feel temporary.

When I’m drafting, I pay attention to:

1. Sentence Length

Long, flowing sentences lull a reader. They’re breathy. Reflective.
Short sentences hit like a hammer.
Sometimes I’ll break a paragraph into a single isolated line to make the reader’s eyes stutter.

2. Scene Structure

In many of my horror stories, nothing “big” happens for chapters. The creeping dread accumulates through small disturbances—lights flickering, a recurring dream, the sense of being followed. I consider these micro-escalations my breadcrumbs.

3. Alternating Tension

I try to end every chapter with a disturbance, unease, or question. Not a cliffhanger necessarily—just a shift. A moment where the character realizes something is wrong, even if they don’t know what.

Pacing suspense is like keeping a hand on the reader’s back: guiding them, sometimes gently, sometimes with pressure, but always forward. Always deeper.

Character: The Vessel of Dread

Suspense only works if the reader cares about the person in danger. I’ve written entire novels that didn’t scare anyone—not because the monsters weren’t frightening, but because the protagonist wasn’t someone to root for. When I realized that, everything changed.

I build my horror protagonists to be vulnerable, but not weak. Capable, but not invincible. Flawed, but not frustrating. The reader needs to believe this character could survive, but also that they might not.

Here’s what I focus on:

1. Internal Stakes

What is the character afraid of before the plot ever starts?
Grief, guilt, childhood trauma, family secrets—these aren’t just flavor, they’re pressure points. Good horror presses on old wounds until the character, not just the reader, feels cornered.

2. Empathy

Suspense collapses if the reader is indifferent. So I breathe life into my characters in quiet ways: a habit, a sentiment, a memory, a small contradiction. I want them to feel like someone the reader might know.

3. Agency

The protagonist shouldn’t be dragged into the plot. They should walk into the dark with shaky determination. Fear hits hardest when the reader knows the character chose to be here—even if that choice was made out of necessity or desperation.

A suspenseful scene is twice as terrifying when it feels like the character could have turned back… but didn’t.

Setting: The Silent Accomplice

Most of my horror ideas begin with a place. A decaying manor. A forest that swallows sound. A cult compound where the walls listen. Suspense thrives in environments that feel alive and hostile.

When building a setting, I ask myself: If I removed all the characters, would the setting still tell a story? Would it still unsettle someone?

A few ways I use setting to amplify suspense:

1. Sensory Disruption

Horror often comes from something being slightly… off.

• A hallway that’s too long

• A silence too deep

• A room that feels colder the farther you step into it

When a setting doesn’t behave the way it should, the reader feels unmoored.

2. Isolation

Not just physical. Emotional. Social. Psychological. Suspense deepens when the character can’t rely on help—either because help is too far away or because help is unreliable.

3. History

Every unsettling place has a past. I drip-feed that history: rumors, fragments, documents, whispered confessions. Letting the reader sense the weight of history—not by explaining it, but by letting it loom—creates an atmosphere thick enough to choke on.

Setting isn’t a backdrop in horror. It’s a conspirator.

The Power of the Near Miss

One of the most important techniques I use in suspense is what I call the near miss—a moment where something almost goes wrong. The character hears footsteps but sees nothing. The flashlight flickers but stays on. The door moves but doesn’t open.

These moments train the reader to anticipate danger. It’s like stretching a rubber band. You pull it again and again, each time a little tighter, until the reader is braced for the snap.

But here’s the real trick: I don’t snap the band when they expect it. I let it stretch. And stretch. And stretch.

Suspense is often about restraint. The longer I can delay the moment of impact, the harder that impact hits.

Letting the Reader Know More Than the Character

This technique, sometimes called dramatic irony, is one of the sharpest tools in my kit. If the reader knows something the character doesn’t, every action becomes suspenseful.

Imagine a scene where the character enters a dark room. If the reader doesn’t know anything, the scene might be mildly eerie. But if I reveal—just one paragraph earlier—that something is already in that room?

Now the act of opening the door becomes unbearable.

I rarely give the reader a full view of the danger, but I often give them more than the protagonist. It forces them into a helpless, voyeuristic tension. They want to warn the character, but they can’t. They can only watch.

And watching is its own form of agony.

Suspense Through Internal Struggle

External danger is one thing, but internal tension? That’s where true psychological horror thrives.

Many of my protagonists carry secrets. Traumas. Conflicting desires. Shame. When I place them in a suspenseful scenario, those internal conflicts bubble up. A character who freezes in a moment of danger because the situation mirrors something from their past? That’s more gripping than someone who simply panics.

The reader isn’t just waiting to see whether the character survives—they’re waiting to see whether the character breaks.

Internal suspense often involves questions like:

• Will they confront the truth or keep running from it?

• Will they trust the wrong person?

• Will they repeat an old mistake?

• Will their fear sabotage them?

It’s a suspense that lingers even when the monster isn’t on the page.

Controlling the Reveal

Suspense builds toward revelation. But how much to reveal—and when—is one of the hardest decisions I make. Reveal too early, and the story loses its tension. Reveal too late, and the reader becomes frustrated instead of frightened.

I treat reveals like doors. Each one opens to a slightly darker room.

The First Door: The Disturbance

This is where the protagonist realizes something is wrong. It’s minor. It’s deniable. But it’s enough to set the tone.

The Second Door: The Pattern

Now the danger feels organized. Repeated. Intentional. The protagonist can’t ignore it anymore.

The Third Door: The Obsession

The protagonist must know more. The reader must know more. Suspense reaches a fever pitch here; both parties are aware that the truth will hurt, but they can’t stop chasing it.

The Final Door: The Confrontation

This is where the rubber band finally snaps. Everything I held back becomes clear. And ideally, the reveal feels both surprising and inevitable—like the story was always heading here, even if the reader didn’t notice the path until now.

Suspense is the act of leading the reader from the first door to the last without them realizing how far they’ve walked into the darkness.

Sound, Silence, and Sensory Illusions

In real life, our senses protect us. In horror writing, I use those senses against the reader.

One of my favorite sensory techniques is focusing on sound. Sound is primal. It bypasses logic. A branch snapping, a whispered voice, the scuttle of something unseen—these small auditory cues create an instinctual fear response.

But silence? Silence is even worse.

A sudden silence after a steady background noise (wind, insects, traffic) signals danger. When I describe silence as “thick,” “unnatural,” or “holding its breath,” readers feel the shift.

Sometimes I blend senses. The character feels watched but hears nothing. They smell something rotting but see no source. These sensory contradictions create dissonance, and dissonance breeds suspense.

The body knows before the mind does.

The Emotional Hook: Why Suspense Hurts So Good

At its core, suspense is emotional manipulation. I’m not ashamed to admit it. A horror author is both conductor and puppeteer. We pull strings. We play with anticipation. We control the beat of the reader’s heart.

But suspense only works if the emotional stakes are grounded in something real. Fear, yes—but also longing. Hope. Love. Desperation. Grief.

If the reader feels connected to the character’s internal world, then every external threat becomes twice as potent. They’re not just afraid that something bad will happen—they’re afraid of what that bad thing will mean.

The best suspense isn’t just “oh no, they might die.”
It’s “oh no, if they die, the person they love will never know the truth.”
Or “oh no, if they fail, they’ll become the thing they fear most.”

Suspense is fueled by the stakes of the heart.

The Final Ingredient: Trusting the Reader

For a long time, I overwrote. I explained too much. I filled in every blank because I didn’t trust the reader to follow me. But suspense is a collaboration. The reader isn’t a passive observer—they’re an active participant.

So one of the most important lessons I learned was this:
Trust the reader to feel the dread. Don’t force it. Don’t point to it. Just cultivate it.

Sometimes a single sentence of implication can carry more terror than a paragraph of description. Sometimes a pause is more powerful than a scream.

Suspense is letting the reader walk into a room first, before the light turns on. Before anyone knows what’s breathing in the corner.

Why I Love Writing Suspense

Horror isn’t just about fear—it’s about transformation. Suspense is the emotional journey that leads a character to the brink of who they used to be. When I write suspense, I’m guiding both character and reader toward a threshold.

Suspense is the bridge.
Terror is the drop on the other side.

Suspense is the held breath.
Horror is the exhale.

Suspense is the trembling hand reaching for the doorknob.
Horror is what waits behind it.

When I do my job well, readers finish the story feeling changed—not because of the scares, but because of the sustained tension that carried them across the narrative. Suspense is a slow alchemy. A quiet magic. A psychological seduction.

And it’s the heart of why I write horror.