You sit down with the Sunday crossword. You read the clue: five-letter word for the color blue. You don't know it. You sit there. You think teal, four letters, wrong. You try cyan, four letters, wrong. You keep trying. You're locked in. Now you get the first letter from a crossing word: A. The suspense increases. You are closer to the answer but still don't have it. Azure. The moment the word resolves, you feel a small specific pleasure — the suspense closing into resolution. Matt Dicks: Crossword puzzles are just suspense devices. They just say: there's a four-letter word for the color blue. What is it? And now you have to know.1
That's the architecture. Suspense is strategic exclusion of information alongside strategic inclusion of information. I'm going to tell you some of it but not all of it. It's a metal object rather than saying spoon.2 The storyteller withholds enough to create the anticipatory gap; they include enough to make the gap feel closeable. The audience can't help leaning toward the resolution because their cognitive architecture is built for closing information-gaps.
The principle that surprises most beginners: the more information you provide, the greater the suspense increases.3 Dicks repeats this because it inverts the intuition that suspense = hiding. Suspense is not hiding. Suspense is partial revealing. Each new partial reveal increases the audience's sense of being close to the answer, which intensifies their need to close the gap. Wordle works this way. Crosswords work this way. Stories work this way.
Suspense as Dicks defines it has three properties:
1. Some information is shared, some is withheld. Pure withholding produces confusion, not suspense. He held something. That's withholding without inclusion — the audience has nothing to engage with. He held a metal object is suspense — metal object is partial inclusion (we know it's metal, we know it's object-shaped, we know it's small enough to hold) and partial exclusion (we don't know what specifically it is). The audience has enough to engage and not enough to resolve.
2. The information-gap is closeable in principle. The audience has to believe there's a real answer waiting. Suspense fails when the gap feels infinite or fabricated — when the audience suspects the storyteller is just being mysterious without a destination. The crossword works because there is a five-letter word for blue; the puzzle is engineered so the answer exists and is retrievable.
3. More information increases rather than decreases suspense — up to a point. This is the counterintuitive property. If you don't know what it is, it's suspenseful and almost frustrating that you don't know. And the beauty of suspense is the more information you provide, the greater the suspense increases.4 Dicks's azure example: So if you don't know the five-letter word for blue and I say, "Oh, we figured out the first letter, it's an A," your suspense increases. You've either solved it and now you feel good — because the solving of suspense makes an audience feel good — but also the perpetuation of suspense makes an audience feel good because they want you to keep talking.5 Each new bit narrows the possibility-space, which makes the remaining gap feel closer to resolution, which intensifies the want.
The technique is the operational backbone of Dicks's middle-mastery work. Most of what beginners experience as the story dragging in the middle is actually suspense calibration failure — the storyteller is withholding too much, or including too much, or moving too slowly between inclusions. Properly calibrated suspense keeps the middle alive.
The cognitive mechanism behind suspense is closure-seeking. Human brains are built to close open patterns. When a pattern is fully closed (full information), the brain disengages — there's nothing to do. When a pattern is fully open (no information), the brain disengages — there's nothing to work on. When a pattern is partially closed, the brain locks in: this is exactly the kind of problem it's optimized to work on.
The partial-closure state is what suspense produces. The audience's brain is actively working on the closure. They cannot disengage because their cognitive machinery is engaged on the puzzle. Wordle is guess a five-letter word. I'll tell you if you're right or wrong. But that suspense over — is my guess correct? Where does this letter go? What is this word? — that causes Wordle to get sold to the New York Times for a million dollars.6 A puzzle so trivial structurally is so commercially valuable because the partial-closure state is one of the deepest engagement-locks human attention has.
This is also why Dicks uses the cinematographer metaphor for suspense-deployment. Start with the narrowest lens possible and then begin to expand the lens over time, because what you don't say is what's going to cause people to want to hear the next sentence.7 The narrow lens is initial-information (the metal object); each expansion is a new partial-inclusion (it's small, it's silver-colored, it's in a child's hand, it could be a knife). Each expansion increases the partial-closure intensity. The audience's want grows.
Suspense is the engagement-engine floor for middle-of-story work. Stakes and suspense aren't [complicated]. So I say lean in on those two at least to begin.8 Together they carry the bulk of audience-attention-management. The Mount Rushmore has four engines but stakes and suspense run continuously while surprise and humor punctuate.
Suspense interacts with elephant stakes at the opening. The elephant gives the audience something to root for; suspense gives them an information-gap to close. The two together produce the strongest opening-engagement — emotional investment plus cognitive lock-in.
Suspense is the active counterpart to hourglasses. Suspense creates the want; hourglasses stretch the moment of want-satisfaction. They deploy in sequence: suspense builds the gap, hourglass delays the closing.
Suspense relates to breadcrumbs but operates at higher amplitude. Both work through information-management; breadcrumbs leak content quietly, suspense actively manages the include/exclude balance.
The technique is what makes Dicks's leverage audience imagination principle structurally coherent. The reason you don't describe things in full detail is not just for compression — it's because withholding partial description is what activates the audience's imagination-engine. Suspense and imagination-leverage are the same technique seen from two angles.
Three illustrations across two scales:
The Crossword.9 There's a five-letter word for the color blue. What is it? Information included: word-length (5), category (color), specific color (blue). Information excluded: the specific word. The audience locks in. They start running through candidate words. When the first crossing-letter (A) arrives, the possibility-space shrinks — azure, maybe a few alternatives. The shrinking increases the suspense because resolution is closer. When azure resolves, the pleasure is the closure of the gap.
The Wordle.10 Wordle is essentially the crossword's suspense-mechanism stripped to its core. Five-letter word. You guess. You get color-coded feedback. The information-inclusion is incremental and the audience is doing the closure work themselves. Wordle is so commercially valuable specifically because the closure-loop is engineered to maximum efficiency. That suspense over — is my guess correct? Where does this letter go? What is this word? That causes Wordle to get sold to the New York Times for a million dollars. The mechanism is identical to storytelling-suspense.
The Metal Object.11 Dicks opens the spoon-of-power story with a little boy inside the leaves and his hand emerges and he's got a metal object in his hand. Information included: child, leaves, hand-held, metal, object. Information excluded: what the metal object specifically is. The audience locks in immediately. They start running candidate-predictions: knife (dangerous), gun (more dangerous), some kind of tool, something innocuous. The piece can now do its work because the audience cannot disengage — they need to find out what the object is.
Within 90 seconds the object resolves to spoon. The first suspense closes. But Dicks has already installed the next suspense — the spoon-of-power declaration creates a new gap (why is he calling it that? what's going to happen?) which keeps the audience locked into the next chunk of the piece.
The three cases collectively show: suspense scales from puzzle-form (crossword, Wordle) to narrative-form (the metal object) with structural identity. The mechanism is the same. The medium changes. What unites the cases is the engineered partial-closure state that locks audience cognition into closure-pursuit.
You have a draft. You're going to do a calibration pass to identify where suspense is mis-deployed.
Read the draft aloud. After each significant moment, ask two questions: what information did I just give the audience? and what specific gap did I leave open? Write the answers down. You're building a map of inclusion and exclusion across the piece.
Look at the map. Find moments where you included too much — moments where the audience now has full information and there's no remaining gap. These are de-engagement moments. The brain disengages. Tighten the inclusion: remove specifics that don't bear on later structure. I dropped a bowl of blueberries on the kitchen floor gives the audience enough to imagine the scene (they'll fill in their own kitchen) — I dropped my hand-thrown ceramic Heath Ceramics bowl of organic California blueberries on the white oak kitchen floor my husband installed last spring is full-inclusion that strangles the suspense.
Find moments where you included too little — moments where the audience has no closure-target and the cognitive machinery has nothing to work on. These are confusion moments. The brain disengages here too, but for opposite reasons. Add partial-inclusion: something was different about the way she stood (partial closure-target) vs she was there (no closure-target).
Find the good moments — well-calibrated partial-inclusion where the audience has enough to lean toward resolution. These are the engagement peaks. Note their pattern: typically you'll find you wrote them more carefully than the surrounding draft. Use them as templates for fixing the weak moments.
Working storytellers report that suspense-calibration is one of the highest-return revision activities. Most middle-section drag is solvable through this pass; most opening-attention loss is solvable through better partial-inclusion in the first 60 seconds.
You withhold without inclusion. Something happened that day. That's mysterious, not suspenseful. The audience has nothing to engage with. Add partial inclusion: something happened in the kitchen that day that I still can't explain.
You include without withholding. I dropped a bowl of blueberries on the kitchen floor on Tuesday morning, March 15th, at 7:47am, while my husband was in the shower and our dog was outside. The audience has everything. There's no gap. The brain disengages.
Your withheld information isn't actually closable. Something I cannot describe happened. The audience suspects you're being mysterious without a destination. Trust dissolves. Make sure the gap has a real closing.
The closure-target keeps moving. You set up suspense around question A; you start to resolve it but switch to question B; the audience never gets closure on A. Frustration accumulates. Resolve each suspense-thread before opening the next.
Your inclusions don't narrow the possibility-space. Each new bit of information should make the audience feel closer to resolution. If new bits make the possibility-space wider, you've miscalibrated the inclusion. The azure example: each new letter narrows the candidate set. If a new letter made the candidate set wider (somehow), the suspense would dissipate rather than build.
You over-deploy without resolution. Suspense without resolution exhausts. Audiences need closure-pleasure to validate their closure-pursuit. Pieces that install suspense after suspense without closing any leave audiences with chronic open-loop fatigue.
The suspense definition is named explicitly in both Dicks transcripts and is treated as foundational across his methodology.12 It is consistent with Lewis's treatment in the masterclass synthesis.13 The crossword/Wordle analogues confirm the technique operates on universal cognitive mechanisms, not just on storytelling-specific psychology.
A real tension exists with traditional thriller-writing advice that treats suspense as withholding the bomb — keep the reader/viewer from knowing whether the bad thing will happen. Dicks's definition is broader: suspense is partial-inclusion at any scale, not just at the level of major plot events. The traditional advice is a sub-case of Dicks's broader principle. Both are operative, but the Dicks framing is more transferable across non-thriller contexts.
A tension also exists with leverage audience imagination — they are technically different principles. Imagination-leverage is about delegating description to the audience's mind; suspense is about managing information-gaps to lock attention. They overlap (both involve under-describing) but they're not identical. Imagination-leverage is the broader principle; suspense is one of its applications.
Open question: do meditation and contemplative aesthetic traditions reject suspense as a manipulation? Whyte's prolonged attention as poetic method explicitly does not deploy suspense — it asks the audience to stay with the present rather than lean toward a future resolution. The two traditions are not necessarily in conflict (Whyte's audiences self-select for contemplative engagement), but they suggest suspense is one attention-management mechanism, not the only one.
Dicks and Bilton converge on suspense as engagement-engine. Bilton's cliffhanger architecture is suspense-at-chapter-scale: include enough information to lock the reader on a gap; close the chapter on the gap-open state; trust the reader's closure-seeking to bring them back to the next chapter. Same mechanism, different medium-scaling. Where they diverge: Bilton's suspense operates at the structural-unit level (chapter); Dicks's operates at the sentence/paragraph level (within continuous oral delivery). The technique fractal-scales across forms.
Dicks and Whyte split sharply. Whyte's prolonged attention as poetic method explicitly bypasses suspense-mechanisms — the poetic method asks the audience to stay with, not lean toward. The split reveals that suspense is one of (at least) two major attention-management modes: forward-leaning (Dicks) and present-staying (Whyte). Both can produce sustained attention; they engage different audience cognition systems. Most working writers use both at different moments; very few use one exclusively.
Suspense is fundamentally a closure-seeking-mechanism activation — the technique exploits a deep cognitive habit (the brain's pursuit of pattern-closure) to lock audience engagement. That mechanism has direct analogues across disciplines that depend on attention-management.
Behavioral mechanics: Six-Minute X-Ray (Hughes) — Hughes's elicitation work uses partial-disclosure explicitly. The elicitor reveals a fragment of what they know, which creates partial-closure cognition in the target — the target's brain locks onto closing the gap and reveals more than they would have under either full-disclosure or no-disclosure conditions. The mechanism is structurally identical to storytelling-suspense: partial inclusion plus partial exclusion produces engagement-lock. What neither domain produces alone: Dicks teaches the storyteller to use partial-disclosure for audience engagement; Hughes teaches the elicitor to use partial-disclosure for target-extraction. The cross-orientation parallel reveals that partial-information management is a meta-skill applicable across live-craft disciplines with different ethical orientations. Practitioners who develop the skill in one domain can deploy it in others with minimal retraining. The underlying cognitive mechanism is the same; what changes is intent.
Eastern spirituality: Dhvani — Suggestion as Soul of Content — Sanskrit aesthetic theory treats vyanjana (suggestion) as superior to vacya (statement) precisely because suggestion-mode communication leaves productive gaps that the receiver closes through their own imaginative work. The classical tradition theorizes suspense's underlying mechanism: when the audience does the closure-work themselves, the resulting aesthetic experience is deeper than when the artist provides closure for them. Dicks's suspense is the practical operational form of vyanjana at the structural level. What neither domain produces alone: classical aesthetics supplies the philosophical depth (why audience-completed aesthetic experiences are richer); Dicks supplies the working technique (strategic exclusion plus strategic inclusion produces sustained engagement). The cross-tradition convergence reveals that contemporary working storytelling and ancient Sanskrit poetics independently arrived at the same insight about why partial-information mode beats full or no information mode for engagement.
Eastern spirituality: Sādhāraṇīkaraṇa — Universalization — Sanskrit aesthetic theory's concept of sādhāraṇīkaraṇa describes the mechanism by which a particular detail becomes universally applicable to audience-experience. The suspense technique works partly through this mechanism: when the storyteller withholds specific details, the audience fills the gap with details from their own life, which produces a stronger recognition-effect than fully-specified details would have. The metal object is everyone's metal object. The withholding is what enables the universalization. The dual handshake — dhvani + sādhāraṇīkaraṇa — shows that classical Sanskrit aesthetics had a developed theoretical framework for what working storytellers like Dicks rediscover through practice. Working storytellers can borrow the theoretical depth to understand why their practice works; classical aestheticians can borrow the practical implementations to ground their theory.
The Sharpest Implication Suspense implies that the audience does most of the engagement work themselves — the storyteller's job is structural enabling, not content delivery. This inverts the default assumption that good storytelling is good content-delivery. Good storytelling is good gap-engineering: the storyteller creates the partial-closure states that the audience's cognitive machinery cannot resist working on. The audience experiences the result as the storyteller being engaging, but the actual work happens in the audience's own brains. The implication is that storytelling craft is more like puzzle-design than content-delivery. Most amateurs don't recognize this — they think their content is what should engage and the audience's job is to receive. The technique inverts this: the content is the partial-closure state, and the audience's job is to close. Once the inversion is internalized, the whole craft re-orients around gap-engineering.
Generative Questions