I’ve been writing a lot recently about keeping your script reader hooked in the first 10 pages and beyond through various methods like scene structure, stakes, and even character intros. The common thread is that you need to give your reader a reason to keep reading your script.

In this post I want to give you two more interrelated tools to keep your reader dying to turn the pages of your script to see what happens next: suspense and tension.

Suspense and Tension

Let’s start out by defining our terms. You'll find a lot of different definitions, particularly for tension, but this is how I think of it:

Suspense is wanting to know the answer to a question.

Tension is worrying about how things will work out.

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You’ll probably notice that they overlap. You can want to know the answer to a question and also worry about how it will turn out. Try thinking of tension as the discomfort you feel in the moment and suspense as something that’s pulling you forward.

Both of these elements induce your reader to keep reading because they put them in a state of discomfort and uncertainty.

That might seem counterintuitive. Why would you choose to make your reader feel uncomfortable? Wouldn’t that make them stop reading your script? Not necessarily. Discomfort is a part of drama. Think of all the questions and uncertainty you have as you watch a great movie or TV show.

The idea is to create an itch that your script reader is dying to scratch. The only way they can scratch that itch and return to place of comfort is to keep reading your script. On the other hand, if you don’t create that itch it’s easy for them to put down your script. It costs them nothing since they don’t need to keep reading.

How to create suspense - The big questions

Let’s start by looking at suspense, which I defined as wanting to know the answer to a question. Of course, in your script you’ll probably have many questions. There will probably be one or two big questions at the heart of your story, for example “Who is the killer?” or “Will they stop the villain?” or “Will they end up together in the end?”

The logical first step in the process of creating suspense is to set up the scenario where the question arises. If you want the reader to wonder who the killer is, you present a murder, clues, suspects, and someone who is invested in answering the question.

This last piece is the most important in my opinion. Suspense is all about characters. (Honesty, everything in screenwriting comes back to the characters.) There is a chain of caring required for suspense. Your character cares deeply about the answer to the question, and the reader or audience cares deeply about the character. Think about the question “Will they end up together in the end?” If we care about both people being happy, and the writer has shown us that they’ll be happiest together, we’re going to be invested in the outcome. That’s suspense!

This romcom example is important because suspense isn’t just for mysteries or thrillers. All genres can use it to engage their readers.

The small questions

I mentioned earlier that there are going to be lots of questions in your scripts, some of them are the big ones, but there will also be smaller ones at the scene or sequence level. (Just a reminder, a sequence is just a series of scenes that are linked together in the same story beat.) In a murder mystery you don’t just wonder “Who is the killer?” You also wonder small things like, “Why did that person lie?” or “What does that clue mean?”

These small doses of suspense are important because your reader’s attention span is probably shorter than your script. The small questions keep them engaged from scene to scene.

How to create tension

Let’s look now at tension, which I defined as worrying about how things will work out. This is most often at a scene or sequence level. You create the tension, build it, and then release it. You might recognize that structure as similar to the structure of an entire script or a scene. It follows the same pattern! When we write we’re building the big arc of our story out of a lot of smaller arcs.

There are a lot of different kinds of tension that you can create in your story. Here I’ve broken it down into four categories.

Tension of the Task

I think tension of the task is one of the most interesting forms of tension, because it’s deceptively simple. Tension of the task just means that you give your character something to do (hence, “task”) and create uncertainty about whether they’ll be able to accomplish it.

The key is to make accomplishing the task important to the character, and failing to accomplish the task come at a cost. (We call this stakes!) This makes mundane things tense. For instance, a character needing to remember to close his front door isn’t inherently interesting, but needing to remember to close the door so that his partner’s beloved cat doesn’t escape is interesting.

Similarly, going to the airport isn’t an inherently interesting task, but running late and being in danger of missing the flight you have to be on to get to the wedding, big meeting, surgery, child's birthday party, or other important event is interesting. We're in a state of anxiety and won't be able to relax until we see if the character makes it on their flight!

Tension of relationships

Relationships are another juicy source of tension because they are often at the center of what's important to our characters. These are the people they love, like their romantic partners and children, and the people who have a direct impact on their lives, like their bosses, teachers, and landlords. Any tension in these relationships is going to greatly affect your characters, and by proxy it will be destabilizing for the reader.

Tension of mystery

The tension of mystery draws on the power of what the characters and reader don't know. Think of this as gut-level tension you feel when someone is walking through a haunted house wondering what’s behind that next door. In scenarios like that you sometimes want something to jump out and scare you because that release of the tension is preferable to the state of suspense as you wait for it to happen.

Tension of surprise

Surprise is interesting because in some ways it’s the opposite of suspense and tension. With suspense and tension the whole point is you're anticipating what is going to happen, so the anxiety and questions keep building, but with surprise the event comes out of nowhere so you haven't had any time to feel anything in advance. Therefore with surprise the tension comes not before, but in the aftermath of the event. The character has been caught off guard, as has your reader. They’re in a new reality they weren’t prepared for and long to get back to surer footing.

In which case, yep! They have to keep reading.