Writing Suspense: How to Write Stories That Thrill in Any Genre

Benjamin Percy teaches this class the way he says he studied Flannery O'Connor: by taking a story apart on a legal pad and naming what each piece is doing. The class runs on that same instinct. Rather than walking through a single manuscript from page one, Percy isolates four or five reusable mechanisms and illustrates each with a barrage of references, from One Hundred Years of Solitude to Jaws to his own Batman comics work, then hands out a short writing prompt before moving to the next tool.

The spine of the course is a graph Percy sketches early on: a horizontal narrative vector and a vertical emotional vector, twisted together like a double helix. He uses this to reframe Freytag's triangle, marking the inciting incident, the midpoint reversal, and the "dark night of the soul" not as static plot beats but as points where narrative event and emotional cost have to land at the same time. It's a serviceable model, and he backs it up well by tracing it through The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars, though the lesson leans on lecture more than demonstration. There's no on-page rewrite where a flat scene is worked into a charged one, so the model stays conceptual until the viewer applies it alone.

Where the course earns its runtime

Two techniques justify the class on their own. The first is "temporary blindness," Percy's term for withholding information at the scene level, illustrated through a basement scene in Cormac McCarthy's The Road where a father and son creep toward a locked cellar door. The second, and stronger, is triangulation: the instruction to never seat two characters at a bar or park bench to talk through a conflict, but instead give them a task, like scraping old paint off a porch railing, so the emotional content leaks out through action and subtext instead of direct dialogue. He backs this with a genuinely strong example from Kent Haruf's Plainsong, where two awkward bachelor farmers express care for a pregnant teenager by driving her to a store and buying baby supplies without ever saying the sentimental thing out loud. This is the kind of concrete, transferable instruction that separates a craft class from a pep talk.

The "turnstile of mysteries," Percy's term for stacking reversals so each answered question reveals a bigger one, is taught almost entirely through summary of his own Batman comic and a breakdown of Jaws' USS Indianapolis monologue, rather than through an exercise that forces the technique onto the viewer's own material.

The gaps

The class never engages with prose at the sentence level. Diction, pacing within a sentence, point of view mechanics: none of it. The exercises, like writing three reversals into a half hour ferry ride, are useful prompts but are dropped without any model of what a strong response looks like, so writers are left to grade their own homework. The class also never addresses revision. Everything here is about generating suspense during drafting; nothing addresses how to find it or fix its absence once a draft already exists.

The framing device, a running bit about a friend who spends a decade chasing the punchline to "how do you make a tissue dance," is charming and does double duty as a live demonstration of delayed gratification, but it also eats several minutes that could have gone toward a worked example.

This is best approached as a toolkit to bolt onto an existing writing practice, not a start-to-finish course on how to write.

What you will learn

• ·How to map a story onto two intersecting arcs, the narrative vector and the emotional vector, and keep both moving instead of favoring one
• ·How to build 'temporary blindness' by withholding information at scene and chapter level to keep readers reaching for an answer
• ·How to stack reversals into a 'turnstile of mysteries' so every resolved question opens a bigger one behind it
• ·How to use 'triangulation' to give characters a physical task during emotionally loaded dialogue instead of writing static conversation scenes
• ·How to identify a character's core wound and layer multiple simultaneous conflicts (professional, financial, romantic, narrative) onto a protagonist
• ·How to end a scene, chapter, or story so the reader's mind keeps working after the page turns