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  • The Writer

    THE ART OF SUSPENSEFUL FICTION

    Jul 16, 2019 4 minutes
    BY RYAN G. VAN CLEAVE

    I recently finished writing a YA contemporary thriller, and as so often happens with a first draft, the story was there, but it wasn’t yet…thrilling. The suspense was MIA. That makes sense, though, because the first draft is where writers tell the story to themselves. Essentially, it’s them figuring stuff out. The next draft(s) are for other people, and that’s when the suspense really needs to ramp up as we tell the story to our readers. So, how can our revision processes crank up the suspense so that readers don’t dare put the book down?

    Here are.

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