: Re: How to create suspense in a very short story? I wrote a short story (900-1000 words) about a character presenting some election process and at the end, we learn that he got elected.

@Tiffany377

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I've heard that suspense isn't about WHAT will happen, but about WHEN it will happen. When will the bomb under the table go off, when will the rival candidate's rigging of the polls be found out? If at all?

Anyway, to answer your question, you might want to increase the stakes--if the campaigner doesn't win, the rival will do something bad. You might want to stack the odds against the protagonist-- say the rival rigged the election and bribed the board to allow him/her to win. Now the protagonist has to expose the rigging to the public before the election results are mentioned. This could create more tension. What if the public doesn't care/doesn't believe the protagonist? What if the protagonist doesn't have the public support? What if the protagonist has a flaw that gets him/her intro deeper trouble/complicates stuff? What if the board sends out people to dissuade the protagonist from trying to expose the rival?

-introduce a time limit--the election results are out tomorrow and we STILL have to convince the public that a candidate used wrongful means!
-introduce sources of doubt (pile up the odds against the protagonist)
-make your character have a flaw that works against him/her achieving his/her goal.
-make the antagonist more powerful than the protagonist.
-escalate the conflict

In this way, you could expand the story, and introduce sources of doubt into the reader's mind. However, if you are aiming to write short stories, this may be better used with slightly longer stories--or just shift your focus to the point in the story where you see the most opportunity for instilling doubt into the reader's mind.

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