To write a suspenseful opening for your story, start in the middle of the action. Rather than introducing the characters and giving a back story, start your narrative with a major event already in progress. Create a stressful situation for your characters and leave it unresolved so your readers will want to turn the page.
Instructions
1. Decide on a suspenseful situation for your story. It can be a severe car accident where you leave the reader wondering if your characters will live. Or, you can have your character creep around the house in the middle of the night, attempting to track down the source of an ominous noise.
2. Write your story with short sentences. Short, tight sentence structures imply stress; as you want the suspense to build, clip your phrases.
3. Leave your opening sequence unresolved at the end of the first section or chapter. If you resolve a stressful situation right away, there's no reason for the reader to keep going.
4. Use all of the senses to illustrate what the characters are hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting and touching. The more of the senses you employ in your story writing, the more realistic it is to the reader.
5. Use realistic dialog in your story writing. People rarely speak in full, grammatically correct sentences. Slang is common in daily speech, so it should also be intermingled in your dialog as well. Keeping the dialog realistic helps your reader identify with the characters in your story.
