When a Novel is a Masterclass in Suspense

Lessons from Tracy Sierra’s debut thriller, NIGHTWATCHING

“There was someone in the house.” 

This is the first chilling sentence of Tracy Sierra’s unputdownable thriller, Nightwatching, and as soon as I read it, I knew I was in trouble. This tense novel tells the story of a mother and her two young children hiding in a secret room inside their 300-year-old New England house during a blizzard while an intruder turns the place upside down looking for them. 

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this book for months, haunted by the best question one writer can ask of another: how in the world did you do that?!

Let’s take a spoiler-free look at a few techniques Sierra used to craft such a wildly suspenseful story and how we might even apply those techniques in our own work.

Carefully balance action and backstory, but favor action

Sometimes when I’m writing, I stumble off the path of present action and meander into backstory land. Have you ever been there? It’s a magical place where a writer convinces herself that her readers won’t understand anything unless she gives them ALL the backstory. 

The Backstory Gremlin in my head.

When I’m tempted to pull away from the most urgent action to jump backward in time, it’s usually because I believe the story won’t make sense otherwise. But readers are smart. They want to be plunged into what’s happening right now in the narrative. They want action. They want to experience what the protagonist is experiencing at this very moment. Sierra does this masterfully by focusing, from page one, on the very urgent thing happening right now (SOME GUY IS IN THE DAMN HOUSE!) and revealing relevant backstory gradually over time. 

There’s no doubt when you open this book that the action is urgent, and you’re IN IT whether you like it or not. You, dear reader, are right there with the mother and her kids while they’re trapped and terrified. You hear the man’s footsteps above their heads as he trashes the house searching for them. You feel the chill of the blizzard outside the walls and we see the snow piled up on the only possible path to freedom. 

Even the active language speaks to the urgency of what’s happening:

“The old house let the wind hiss through and crack its ribs. The sounds of it bracing against the storm, its staggered breathing, were familiar. But through it all came noises that rooted her to the spot. Also familiar, but not at this time of night. Not when she had been sure she was the only one awake. 

In the brief hush between frozen gusts came the wheeze of weight on the stairs.”

WTF, did you hear that??

But Nightwatching isn’t without backstory. It’s woven through the novel strategically and doled out at just the right moment for maximum impact. 

Some chapters are told in the present, while other chapters dip into various past timelines, establishing context for what’s happening in the present. In a story as tense as this, alternating between timelines has a twofold benefit: it allows Sierra to dedicate space to the backstory without slowing down the main storyline, and it’s a chance for the reader to catch their breath. (I needed those breathers, let me tell you.)

Plus, leaving the present timeline on a cliffhanger and shifting to the past at the right time makes it almost impossible for the reader to put the book down. We simply have to know what happens next and will keep reading to find out. 

Try this yourself by taking an excerpt you’re working on and highlighting the present action in one color and any backstory in another. How much real estate do you give each one on the page? Is backstory slowing down the momentum anywhere? Can you reveal it later without causing confusion or problematic gaps in the reader’s understanding of the story? 

Or maybe you try completely removing all backstory from your excerpt and gauging if the scene’s action can stand without it. Sometimes we initially write backstory where it doesn’t quite belong because we’re still figuring out the story. That doesn’t mean it has to stay there, though! 

Knowing when to hold backstory and when to spend it is a delicate balance in fiction. We want our readers to ask questions, but not to the point of frustration because they don’t understand what’s going on. When in doubt, keep the reader’s attention on the most urgent action. That’s likely their favorite part anyway. 

Stack obstacles against your protagonist (then add more) (and then a few more)

I don’t know about you, but I always need to be reminded to throw more obstacles in front of my characters. Some might even say I go too easy on them in early drafts. But the challenges we force upon our characters make the story enjoyable for both the writer and the reader.

In Nightwatching, Sierra doesn’t give her protagonist one or two obstacles. No, no, my friends. She gives her protagonist an ungodly amount of them, but somehow, it never feels excessive.

Here’s a sampling of some obstacles the Nightwatching protagonist is up against:

• It’s the middle of the night during a major blizzard

• She’s home alone with her children, ages five and seven (so young, so bad at being quiet)

• There’s a stranger in her house and he’s armed with an unidentifiable weapon

• She soon sees, through a vent from her concealed vantage point, that her cell phone is in the stranger’s back pocket, making it useless to her

• The home has no landline, and the computer she might be able to access has no internet connection 

• Reaching the nearest neighbor requires a walk through the woods

• Did I mention the blizzard? The several feet of snow? What about the bitter cold? And the two small kids? 

• She’s wearing only a t-shirt and bathrobe, with no easy access to winter gear for herself or the kids

• Oh, and one more thing. She gives herself a nasty head injury while hustling her children into the secret room (thanks, old house/weird ceiling angles), so add a possible concussion/traumatic brain injury to the list

• They have no food or water (beyond one sippy cup) or bathroom where they’re hiding

Cool, cool, cool. That list of problems wouldn’t send me into orbit or anything. 

You should be, protagonist. You should be.

FYI, these are just the obstacles she faces IN THE BEGINNING of the novel, so buckle up. 

This Very Bad Situation works because the obstacles are all interconnected. There are no random challenges thrown in just for the sake of causing trouble. Instead, each obstacle emerges from the central point of conflict and each one further complicates the plot, upping the suspense. The protagonist’s problems are like dominoes falling after the initial one is tipped. First, she finds an intruder in her house in the middle of the night. After that, every obstacle that she encounters (at least for a while…no spoilers) is, in one way or another, the effect of whatever came before.

Try this out by listing the current obstacles and/or potential obstacles in your story and brainstorming possible ways to subvert the solutions so each one presents a new dilemma instead of a way out of the problem. 

For example, an easy solution to discovering an intruder in one’s house is to call 9-1-1 for help. But in Nightwatching, instead of having her cell phone in her hand, the protagonist has left it in her room to walk her 5-year-old back to his bed. As she’s leaving his room, still concealed by shadows, she sees the intruder down the hall, but he doesn’t see her. She hustles her kids into the secret room, and from there she learns that using her phone to call for help is no longer an option.

“He faced away from the vent, toward the old double doors on the front of the house. There was a lump in his back pocket.

The weapon?

Bright pink, rectangular.

Your phone. He has your phone in his pocket.

She rubbed her mouth, her lips, to try to make it feel more real.

At least you saw it. At least you know. Because what if you made a run for it, tried to get to your phone, only to be cornered in the bedroom, no escape, no way to phone anyone?

Cold comfort.”

He’s hijacked the easiest solution. Removing the phone from the equation (and putting it in the hands of her biggest problem) subverts the solution of “call for help” and twists the screw of tension even tighter. Suspense increases exponentially as each potential solution is eliminated. You can try this in your work by looking for opportunities to bend possible solutions in the wrong direction so new challenges arise.

Make the suspense as universal as possible, and keep it taut for as long as possible 

I’ve told every person I know about this book, and they all shudder at the thought of a stranger breaking into their home in the middle of the night. The premise of this novel is truly the stuff of nightmares—our collective, universal nightmares. 

Sierra takes something most people relate to (the primal fear of a home invasion) and pulls that tension tight as a wire. What makes Nightwatching especially impressive to me is how Sierra keeps this universal fear taut, and for how long she manages it.

Taut and long.

The tension for the first 200-ish pages was so extreme that I did something completely out of character: I jumped ahead to read the final page. I needed to know if these characters would ultimately be okay or if this novel would wreck me. I never read ahead, but Nightwatching made me do it.

So, how did Sierra get me so nervous I had to peek at the ending?

First, of course, by tapping into something terrifying that could happen in real life. Forcing the reader to witness the utter lack of control the protagonist faces (and how little control anyone would have in the same situation) stokes the fires of suspense. Uncertainty is scary and it’s nearly impossible to guess what might happen next in this book. At any moment, things could turn even worse, but the reader never knows when or if that moment will come. 

There’s also the overarching question of who this intruder is. Early on, the protagonist feels glimmers of recognition when she observes him through an air vent. For the reader, the desire to learn who this guy is and why he’s doing this is a highly effective way to keep the tension high. 

In a similar vein, the wisely placed backstory helps with this, too. Sierra uses backstory chapters like keys that unlock parts of the main storyline. Each time the reader unlocks a new piece of information via backstory, the present situation becomes more dire and the stakes intensify.

And the final point I’ll mention is the setting. Isolated settings are suspenseful—that’s just a scientific fact. But Sierra turns it up by using layers of isolation to amplify suspense. The protagonist and her kids are hiding in a small, cold room hidden in the walls of their old home. Zoom out and you have their house, isolated by a blizzard and its far distance from neighbors. She’s isolated by her inability to call for help and also feels social isolation when she realizes there’s no one in her life she even could call. 

In your own work, try using the setting as a means of building suspense. Physical isolation is always a winner, but there are countless ways the setting could impact suspense. What threats does the setting hold? How does your protagonist relate to the setting, and where is the friction between her and that environment? What are some ways the setting itself creates obstacles the protagonist has to overcome? 

I could go on and on about Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra, but I’ll leave it there for now. This book is a masterclass in suspense writing and I encourage you to read it if you have the guts! 

Thank you to Caitlin and Andromeda for having me here today! I’d LOVE to chat about this book in the comments if you have read it. What else would you add to this list of suspense techniques? Did this novel keep you awake at night, too?

Kristin Offiler is a fiction writer based in Rhode Island where she lives with her husband and son. She holds an MFA from Lesley University and has taught creative writing to both adults and children. She writes suspense novels and short fiction. When she’s not writing, she can be found reading on the porch of her old house, homeschooling her young son, or posting too many pictures of the beach and her hydrangeas to Instagram stories.