November 1, 2024 • 10 min read
There’s a difference between suspense and surprise. Surprise is a car crash. Suspense is watching two cars approach an intersection, knowing they can’t both stop in time, and having to wait for the impact.
Psychological thrillers live in that waiting space. The tension doesn’t come from wondering what will happen. It comes from knowing something terrible is coming and being unable to look away.
Information Is Power
The most basic tool for creating tension is controlling what your reader knows. But it’s more nuanced than simply hiding information. Sometimes the most powerful choice is letting the reader know something the characters don’t.
Think about it this way. If two characters are having a friendly conversation and one of them is secretly plotting against the other, that scene is completely different depending on what the reader knows. If the reader is in the dark, the scene feels normal until the betrayal. If the reader knows about the plot, every word of that friendly conversation becomes charged with meaning. Every smile feels sinister. Every kind gesture feels like a trap being set.
In The Psychotic Intruder, I often let the reader see conflicts building before the characters themselves are fully aware of them. You watch Johnny’s frustration accumulate. You see the small disrespects and setbacks adding up. You know something has to give. The tension comes from watching the pressure build while the character keeps trying to hold it together.
Silence Speaks Louder Than Words
Inexperienced writers often think that tension requires conflict on the page. Arguments. Confrontations. Raised voices. But some of the most tense scenes in fiction involve no overt conflict at all.
Consider a married couple eating dinner in silence after a fight. Nobody says anything. They pass the salt. They comment on the food. The conversation is completely mundane. But underneath it, everything is charged. The reader can feel the weight of what isn’t being said.
I love writing these scenes. Two characters circling around a topic they both know they need to discuss but neither wants to bring up. The fake normalcy. The careful choice of words. The moments where someone almost says something real and then pulls back. These scenes require more skill to write than explosive confrontations, but they pay off with a tension that feels earned.
Pacing Is the Invisible Hand
Tension is all about pacing. Go too fast and the reader doesn’t have time to feel the pressure building. Go too slow and they get bored and disengage. The trick is finding the right rhythm for each moment.
Generally, I slow down when I want to increase tension. This feels counterintuitive. You’d think building toward a climax would mean speeding up. But the opposite is often true. The closer you get to the moment of crisis, the more you want to stretch time. Let the reader feel every second. Make them wait.
Then, when the moment finally arrives, you can speed up dramatically. The contrast is what makes the climax feel powerful. All that slow building tension releases in a rush.
Internal Conflict Beats External Threat
External threats are easy. Someone’s chasing your character with a knife. A bomb is about to go off. These situations create immediate tension, but they’re also limited. Once the threat is resolved, the tension evaporates.
Internal conflict is harder to write but much more sustainable. A character wrestling with a moral choice. A person trying to decide whether to reveal a secret. Someone facing the gap between who they are and who they want to be. These conflicts can simmer across an entire book, creating a baseline of tension that never fully releases.
The best psychological thrillers combine both. External events create pressure, but the real tension comes from watching the character respond to that pressure internally. What compromises will they make? What lines will they cross? These questions keep readers turning pages long after the external plot has become predictable.
Let Them Breathe (Sometimes)
One mistake thriller writers make is trying to maintain maximum tension at all times. This actually reduces the impact. If everything is at crisis level constantly, nothing feels like a crisis anymore.
You need valleys between the peaks. Moments where the pressure eases and the characters (and readers) can catch their breath. These quieter scenes serve multiple purposes. They give readers a break. They allow for character development that would feel out of place during high tension moments. And they make the next surge of tension feel more powerful by contrast.
In The Psychotic Intruder, some of my favorite scenes are the quiet domestic moments. Johnny having a cup of tea with Kim. Normal conversation about normal things. These scenes give the reader a sense of what’s at stake, what could be lost. They make the tension meaningful because we care about what happens to these people.
Trust Your Reader
Finally, remember that readers are smart. You don’t need to signal every moment of tension with ominous descriptions or characters feeling dread. If you’ve set up the situation properly, readers will feel the tension without being told to feel it. Trust them to pick up on subtext. Trust them to understand implications. The best psychological tension is the kind that sneaks up on readers without them quite realizing why they feel so unsettled. That’s the goal.