Writing Romantic Suspense From Start to Finish

Lesson One

I know many of you have taken my on-line workshops and after every workshop, I’m bombarded with questions about building and maintaining suspense. I agree that it’s a difficult task, even when a romance isn’t involved. Blend the suspense with a romance, and the job becomes monumental. But it can be done, and many talented writers prove it every day. I wish I could tell you that there’s a simple formula as many people believe. If there is, I’m yet to discover it. But I have learned some techniques in the process of writing over thirty-five novels and novellas. I’ll discuss these techniques over the next twelve months in a series of articles designed to take you from the beginning to the end of a publishable romantic-suspense novel. So let’s start with the beginning.

Everyone has their own way of writing and developing their story. Some plot out everything in detail. Others, like me, write pretty much by the seat of their pants, but some parts of the process are similar no matter what the organizational style. Whether you outline or use the first draft as an outline, you have to spend time figuring out your story and how to make it work. Everyone starts at the same place – with a grain of an idea for a story.

I usually start with a situation. Sometimes the situation comes right out of the local newspaper or the nightly news. Sometimes it comes from putting a different twist on a movie I’ve seen or a book I’ve read. Sometimes it comes from a personal experience or a chat with a friend, which is where I got the idea for Alligator Moon. Wherever the idea comes from, I try to look at it and see if it has an inherent suspense element built into the situation. This inherent suspense makes my job as a writer much easier. Let’s look at some examples and see if I can better explain what I’m talking about.

For Gentleman’s Club, the situation that interested me was the irony built around the use of the word gentleman. I imagined men in suits who said all the right things and held positions of power stepping into a world where their well-camouflaged, deviant natures took over. Within the walls of the “Gentleman’s” Club, their darkest and most depraved fantasies could be acted out. That was the type of club I had in mind when I first started mentally playing with the idea or the situation for the book. Into that mix, I would, of course, throw in a murder and a vulnerable heroine. That immediately made the story rife with suspense and danger. That’s the kind of situation I like to work with, one that throws the characters into danger from the very beginning and opens a world of possibilities for me to work with. And once I was in the story, I found myself creating a world even more depraved and frightening than I’d first imagined.

Another example is Security Measures. The situation was a father breaking out of prison and going to search for his daughter, a teenage girl that didn’t know he existed. The girl and her mother have been in protective custody ever since the mother testified against the father, the son of a mafia boss, after seeing him take part in a virtual bloodbath of violence. She fears him, and yet he is the only man she’s ever loved, thus making the fear all the more powerful and the sensuality stronger.

Now bear in mind that these are just situations, not plots. The book will need a lot of work at this point, but this is what I’m looking for to jumpstart my creative juices, a situation that will naturally throw me into suspense.

So, what kind of situations do that? For starters, think of the nature of suspense. It’s danger that never lets up. It’s something that makes your blood run cold. It’s that apprehension that takes hold and accelerates. Some examples from the news are missing children, families taken hostage, stalkers, etc. The list goes on and on.

Some other situations I’ve used:

Another Woman’s Baby – A pregnant woman living in an isolated beach house and being stalked by a killer when she has no idea who to fear or who to trust.

Mystic Isle – A missing sister believed to be mixed up with a charismatic con man who’s into voodoo and depraved seductive acts.

The Amulet – A hotel that burned to the ground thirty years ago – but all the guests have not departed.

Try to come up with a few situations of your own. Remember, the more danger and suspense inherent to the situation, the easier it will be to keep the suspense escalating throughout the book.