Dialing Up the Tension in Psychological Suspense
Dialing Up the Tension in Psychological Suspense
By Julie Tollefson
Allison Buccola, whose sophomore novel The Ascent comes out May 20, writes slow-burn psychological suspense designed to ratchet up readers’ anxiety in the most entertaining ways. Here she offers five tips for loading your stories with tension and drama that will keep readers turning the pages.
1) Force your character to confront her demons — Allison, who begins each new book with a character and a core conflict, keeps three goals in mind when crafting the story.
One key is making sure the plot forces her main character to deal with the core conflict. For Catch Her When She Falls, her debut,“I knew I wanted to write about a woman with uncomfortable ties to a death that had drawn public attention,” Allison says. “For The Ascent, I was really interested in writing about a cult survivor who felt grief and loss over not being a part of that group anymore.”
A second priority is to ensure that her protagonist faces immediate, credible danger or that she’s signaled to the reader that a threat will be coming soon.
Third, Allison laces her plot with multiple big questions with related but separate answers. The Ascent, for example, centers on a woman who grew up in a doomsday cult whose members all disappeared overnight, leaving her, a 12-year-old child at the time, on her own. Twenty years later, a stranger shows up at her door, claiming to be from her past. Two main mysteries thread through the story: What happened to the cult? Is this visitor who she claims to be and what are her intentions?
“The questions are related and interact with each other, but they don’t have the same answer,” Allison says. “A reader might figure out the answer to one without figuring out the other, and it keeps everyone (including me) on their toes.”
Because she starts with character, Allison says it can take time to work out the story.
“The plot needs to be something that brings out and accentuates the main character’s inner conflict, and — for me, at least — figuring that out takes trial and error,” she says. One resource she’s found to help speed that process is Lisa Cron’s nonfiction book on novel writing, Story Genius.
2) Take it slow — Much of the tension in Allison’s books come from an unhurried buildup of anticipation, spinning out suspense slowly and deliberately. Her stories contain “characters we’re not sure if we can trust, questions we don’t have an answer to, threats the characters haven’t yet spotted themselves,” she says. “I like to parcel out information slowly so the reader gradually gets a full sense of what’s going on. But I try to make sure the reader knows something is coming, even if they don’t know exactly what, through structural cues, foreshadowing, off-kilter interactions, or other signs that something isn’t right.”
Point of view helps her control the reveal of information. “The Ascent is primarily first person present, so the reader learns things the same time Lee (the main character) learns them. If she isn’t aware of something (because she doesn’t know it or isn’t ready to face it), the reader isn’t told it, either,” Allison says. In contrast, Catch Her When She Falls is “largely first person past, which is helpful for foreshadowing (since the narrator knows what’s coming) but trickier in terms of ordering information (since the narrator knows things she’s not ready to share).”
To give her protagonist, Micah, a reason to withhold information from the reader, Allison gives her a “hypothetical interlocutor.” “She’s driving toward someone, she’s thinking about how she’s going to tell her story so that he believes her and takes her side,” Allison says. “Having that interlocutor in mind helped me think about what Micah would share and what she would hold back in a way that felt natural to her.”
3) Let your characters lead the story — Allison goes deep inside her characters’ heads so readers see events unfold through their eyes, with all the uncertainty that can instill.
“Both of my books have main characters whose fears are being downplayed or written off by those around them,” Allison says. “I wanted the reader to experience their anxieties and doubts and self-rationalizations along with them, and I also wanted the reader to potentially be vulnerable to their same blind spots.”
The close point of view helps Allison play fair with readers while maintaining taut, tight pacing, as in a scene in Catch Her When She Falls when Micah refuses to answer a call that she knows, instinctively, will deliver bad news.
The scene plays out over several pages, as the caller tries multiple times, unsuccessfully, to reach Micah. “She really doesn’t want to face it,” Allison says. “Until she’s ready, the reader doesn’t get to face it either and (hopefully) that feels fair because we are solidly within Micah’s perspective.”
Though Allison’s characters are put in untenable situations, it’s important that they feel real and relatable. “I try to make sure that, whatever my characters are going through, there’s something familiar about their story that readers (and I) can use as a foothold,” she says.
The main character of The Ascent, for example, struggles with new motherhood. “The details of her past (growing up in a cult) might be very particular to her, but a lot of people have experienced the anxiety that goes along with being a new mom, and it’s easy to imagine how a past loss might exacerbate that anxiety,” Allison says.
4) Lean into techniques proven to increase suspense — “I love countdown headings,” Allison says of a tool she uses to great effect in her debut. “Micah is running away from something that just happened in her hometown, and she’s driving toward someone from her past in the hopes that he can help her. The reader is meant to suspect that she’s unknowingly running toward danger instead of away from it.”
Each chapter begins with a heading telling readers how many miles remain: 350, 132, and so on. Similarly, other books use time markers (days or hours remaining). “One book I read recently — Whalefall by Daniel Kraus, which is incredible — does it with PSI, or units of air left in a scuba tank,” Allison says. “I think of countdown headings as a structural promise to the reader: in X miles or X hours or X PSI, time’s up and something explosive is going to happen. They let the reader know that we’re heading for disaster.”
Allison uses a different technique in The Ascent, splitting the book into four parts, each named after a phase discussed in the cult’s manifesto. “I think of that as a promise to the reader, too,” she says. “You know that when you start reaching the final phases of the manifesto, things are going to get bad.”
5) Sweat the small stuff — Details make a setting real. To make the fictional town in her debut novel feel real, Allison based it on Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. “I walked around to get a sense of how the town felt, and I took pictures that I could refer back to for architectural details, landmarks, a general sense of store names, etc.”
For The Ascent, she visited a Quaker retreat for inspiration for that book’s reclusive community. “It’s helpful to have a sense of how your characters would move through a place, and small details can be the difference between a place feeling real and a place being too vague or undefined,” she says.
Documentaries, interviews, and memoirs all contributed to the rich world building in Allison’s stories. “I went down a few rabbit holes,” she says of her research for The Ascent. “I try to make sure I’ve hit my daily word count before I start letting myself do too much of that, so I don’t end up researching as a form of procrastination.”