Want to keep the reader on the edge of their seats in a scene, quivering with suspense as they turn each page? I’ve got a thrilling Writing Skill for you: What Happened? This is a splendid skill for creating slow-burn thriller-style tension, and for weaving in purposeful atmospheric description that becomes part of the action, makes the events memorable, fills the scene with atmosphere, and makes the reader feel like they're living inside the story.
So if you want to stretch your suspense skills, have a play with this. Steal ten minutes for your writing, grab a pen, a cuppa, and your notebook, and curl up to write.
To start with, you need two things: an empty public building + something very very wrong.
The empty public building
It might be empty because it's after dark. It might be deserted. It might be in ruins, ancient or modern. As for what kind of public building, it could be a library, CERN, a medical facility, a shopping mall, a college, a pavilion, a church, a school... Wikipedia has a helpful list of public and institutional buildings if you want more ideas. (An aquarium, perhaps?)
Something very wrong
As for what's wrong, well... We're playing with thriller mode, here, which opens up an inspiring range of sub-genres: action, crime, political, spy, legal, science fiction, medical, archaeological, mystical... Do you want them finding evidence of a new disease? A priceless artefact missing? Gothic powers at work? Glowing fish that almost certainly shouldn't be glowing?
You don't actually have to decide what's wrong in advance, mind. You can consider possibilities, then shrug, dive into the writing, and discover alongside your character.
Start writing
You're not mapping out the whole story, in this Skill: you're diving into writing the first scene. Your character (who they are can gradually come clear through writing them) is exploring the empty building. They know something's wrong, but they don't know what yet.
Include plenty of multi-sensory description as they move through:
- What are they seeing? They're hunting for what's wrong: we're looking through their eyes.
- What are they hearing? Sounds are particularly evocative for creating a tense atmosphere, because they also emphasise the underlying silence, and what we can't see.
- What does it smell like? Smell is brilliant for making us feel like we're really there, inside a scene, because it's not easily reproducible, unlike visuals and sounds.
- What sensations are they having? Is the air warm, cold, humid, dry? Do they touch anything? What are the textures? This brings us right into the embodied experience of the character, so we feel like it's happening to us.
Then end the scene at the most dramatic moment. That may or may not include the reveal on the page – up to you. At the moment you gasp, end the scene. (If you can't bear to stop writing, grab another page and continue the scene on that, as a new section. Leaving the reader on that cliff-hanger!)
Have (thrilling, eerie) fun with it! And if you'd like to explore techniques for keeping your plot suspense high in mysterious, thrilling stories, join this fun-filled hands-on online workshop: Unravelling Secrets, next weekend on
Saturday & Sunday 21–22 March 2026.
It's packed with lively activities and discoveries, on Zoom, and you can join from anywhere in the world. Click here for the workshop details and to book your place. Bookings close this Thursday 19 March.
