What’s the Secret to Writing Great Romantic Suspense?

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Writing suspense is all about building tension. Writing romance is also all about building tension—just a different kind. These rising tensions can be achieved in all sorts of different ways. Please note: my way may be very different than your way. Take my words as suggestions or thought provokers as you discover what works best for you. And if you write suspense without the romance or vice versa, I hope you’ll take away what you find most helpful.

The Suspense:

Tension in a suspense novel focuses on the ever-ratcheting-upward actions of the Bad Guy (BG). What will he/she do next?  Who will get hurt (or even die) because they’re in the BG’s path? A few tips to consider as you crank up the BG tension:

• Make your BG as smart or smarter than the good guys trying to catch him. If he’s easily outwitted early on, your tension dissipates like mist in sunshine. Your good guy has to be at the top of his/her game to bring him down.
• Know your BG’s goal and make him/her completely immersed in achieving that goal. The goal may be simply “To hide a crime from the cops or a family member.” The tension occurs as he finds that one action leads to another and another as he tries to hide his crimes.
• Make the BG’s goal so convincing that your reader will believe his actions. “If I were evil, that’s exactly what I’d do.”
• Make him vulnerable in some way—give him something/someone to care about. It serves to make him more three-dimensional but also to let the reader know that he’s got an Achilles heel. Maybe he has a child. Maybe he likes animals and has to choose whether to hurt one in order to progress the plot (pro tip: don’t hurt animals or children). One of my villains steals a car only to find that there is a child strapped into a car seat in the back. Will he leave the child to freeze to death? He doesn’t, but the child makes his escape precarious. That was unplanned, by the way. I had no idea that the baby was back there or what he’d do. Makes writing fun for me.
• Less can mean more. Rather than detailing every moment of his villainous ways (which can be gory and over the top for many readers), focus on the way it makes the victims feel. Are they frightened? How does the person discovering the victim react? In many of the old noir movies, they don’t show blood, or gore, or even bodies. Instead, they show the facial expressions of the other characters. This can evoke more emotion in your reader which results in an increase of tension.
• Allow him increasing access to the good guys. Will he get to them this time? Do they know he’s hovering? Is he in their inner circle? There are lots of ways to increase tension with physical/emotional proximity.
• Give your BG a few wins along the way. He has to be able to hurt the good guys either through direct contact or by hurting those they care for. One of my villains sought to isolate the main character by killing people with whom she came into contact on any given day—the florist, the guy in the wine store. None of these victims had “done anything,” except be friendly with the main character. As a result, her world began to shrink—and her hope shrank with it.
• Make his victims both human and real. This can be as simple as a defining characteristic. A victim of one of my past killers wore Winnie-the-Pooh scrubs—she was a pediatric nurse. Another wore a fedora, and all that was left at the scene of his murder was his fedora on the bloody ground. If your victims feel real to the reader, the killer is that much worse and the tension that much higher.
• Give your reader a break. The tension has to rise, then fall, only to rise higher the next time. If it’s one constant rise, the reader can become overwhelmed or even numbed, and then the finale loses its punch. Achieve these breaks via romance (if your story has one) or through scenes with family, friends, or humor of some kind. Maybe you have a crazy neighbor whose role is comic relief. The moments with that character can give your story depth, but also provide a moment to breathe. And once you’ve let your readers breathe, you hit them harder in the next scene. That makes the tension ratchet higher.
• Give your big finale high stakes. Winner will take all. If the good guys fail, a lot of people will suffer, as the killer will be free to continue wreaking havoc. And if there is more than one good guy (like a couple in a romantic suspense story) it’s more satisfying if they both have a hand in the takedown.

The Romance:

Creating romantic tension involves building an emotional connection and increasing the level of physical interaction as the story progresses.

• Decide when they’ll take “the fall.” Sometimes the two romantic leads (hero/heroine, hero/hero, or whichever pairing you’ve chosen) fall for each other quickly. They know from the get-go that they’ll have a relationship. Other times they have to bicker their way into a relationship. I personally don’t like to write the bickering path. If my H/H don’t like each other, it makes me nervous. In one book, my two main characters didn’t like/trust each other for nearly a third of the book and the stress gave me stomachaches, so I usually make them curious about each other at the very least.
• Opposites do attract, but don’t make them so opposite that the reader won’t believe they’d ever truly get together. Provide reasoning for two such opposite people to be together. At first it might simply be sexual attraction, but for the couple to build true romantic tension, they should have an emotional connection as well.
• Have some idea what their emotional connection might be. Are they from similar backgrounds? Have they each endured a loss? Do they respect the other’s work? Do they just like each other because they’re both likable people?
• Introduce physical closeness slowly. This doesn’t work for all pairings, of course, especially if they’re very sexually attracted from the get-go. But an accidental touch can build tension nicely, especially in the get-to-know-each-other phase.
• Put one or both of the characters in the villain’s sights. The need to protect is a very useful way of ratcheting up romantic tension.
• The romance scenes can serve more than one purpose. Of course it’s the way to bring the two main characters together, but these scenes can also give the reader a moment to breathe after a particularly suspenseful event.
• Give them an HEA (happily ever after) or at least an HFN (happy for now). It’s the expected reward for the reader who’s been holding their breath through the scary parts and grieving the victims along the way. And also a reward for me.

If you’re writing a romantic suspense, the task is to build the tension in both the suspense and the romance at the same time.  It’s like a braided rope. Each strand has strength and purpose, but once they’re braided, the finished product has more strength and becomes an entity all its own. If you can rip out either the suspense or the romance and still have a coherent story, the elements aren’t sufficiently braided together.

Finally, some authors plot out every point of their stories, identifying where the suspense tension increases and where the romantic tension increases. Some have no clue; they just sit down and write. I’m somewhere in between. I know some of the high points, but the path from here to there is part of the fun for me. I know who the bad guy is and usually why he’s doing what he’s doing, but not always. Some things are a total shock, like the baby in the car seat. And I figure if I’m shocked, my readers will be, too. If I mourn the victims, if they’re real to me, my readers will think so, too. And if I’m happy at the end and satisfied with the villain’s punishment, my readers will be happy, and that’s the most important thing for me!

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