…Make characters that readers care about and don’t want bad things to happen to them – and bring in subplots.
I have a lot of characters in my books and that helps to create subplots because every character has their own goals and those goals don’t mesh with each other which creates subplots.
When you’re writing a scene that’s particularly suspenseful or high energy like a chase scene – you should use shorter sentences. This means that the readers is moving faster through the story and they can feel the energy. You also don’t want any internal thoughts or monologues or anything in that scene that’s going to slow it down.
When it comes to page turning chapter endings, I’ve had people tell me that I do this really well. That when they get to an end of one of my chapters, they are more than likely to turn the page because they must know what happens next. I think I learned how to do this just from reading a lot from other authors who do this well.
Most of the time, I don’t leave my readers with a cliffhanger at the end of a chapter, I think if you do this too much your readers would get a little exhausted. instead, I leave them with a question, an unknown that they want to know more, or a what if, or it’s a hint at what’s to come. There is that occasional cliff hanger though.
International Award winning Southern Gothic Mystery writer and author of A Curse of Silver and Blood, writer Kimberly A. Banks. Had this to share about page turning thrillers.
“Be cruel; dangle your character over any metaphorical cliff you find. Create horrible situations that let your audience emotionally relate to them, and when your character loses their footing, end the chapter. It’s human nature to search for answers to the unknown, and when readers are denied answers, they keep going until they find them. So, pose questions that will have answers later that rip your audience’s feet from under them and cause them to fall head first into your story alongside your character.”
And if Kimberly A Banks is anything like me, she’s probably actually thrown a character off the cliff.
Notes:
Check out Kimberly A. Banks. Her most recent book is “A Curse of Silver and Blood” which is a gothic mystery. It won best Southern Gothic at Killer Nashville for the year of 2022: https://kabanks20.wixsite.com/kimberlybanks
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