Fiction Craft Essays

Dustin Heron explores how suspense is a crucial element in fiction, not just in thrillers or horror, but in any story where readers are invested in the outcome. True suspense comes from withholding information, allowing tension to build between what the writer knows and what the reader wants to know. Effective suspense, he says, isn’t just about big reveals or physical threats—it’s about the emotional tension that comes from uncertainty, doubt, and delay.

Sarah Stone discusses how to effectively begin a story or novel by balancing mystery with clarity, avoiding over-explaining while still giving readers enough context to stay engaged. Strong openings, she says, ground readers in a specific character and emotional reality, even if the broader world remains partially veiled. The key is narrative urgency: placing characters at turning points where their choices matter, and inviting readers to follow those choices into the unknown.

Alyson Mosquera Dutemple analyzes how Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The River” builds suspense and dread from the start—long before the story's tragic ending, where a young boy named Harry drowns. Though the surface events of the story seem mundane, O’Connor skillfully uses setting, characterization, narrative distance, and pacing to infuse the story with an underlying sense of danger. O’Connor crafts suspense not through overt action, but by using ordinary moments and childlike perception to evoke unease. Finally, Mosquera Dutemple shows how O’Connor's manipulation of narrative distance, eerie settings, and deliberate pacing sustains a mood of quiet dread throughout the story.