Faire salon | French Only

Faire salon with André Marois: writing suspense offers a lively, accessible learning experience deeply rooted in the pleasure of storytelling. Built around the French language, literary creation, and narrative craft, this resource invites students to discover how suspense is created: through word choice, the order of information, details revealed too early or too late, silence, clues, false leads, and the growing desire to know what comes next.

With André Marois, an author well known for stories in which mystery slips into everyday life, students discover that suspense does not belong only to detective fiction or major criminal plots. It can emerge in a school, in a yard, in a hallway, in a house, in an unfinished sentence, in a misplaced object, or in a strange remark. Writing suspense becomes a way of playing with the reader’s imagination, holding attention, and creating the desire to keep reading.

The activity book guides students through the main techniques of suspense. They learn to identify words that create an uneasy atmosphere, sentence patterns that slow the narrative, details that create doubt, clues that guide interpretation, and openings that build anticipation. Through games, close observation, comparison, and creative writing tasks, students discover that suspense depends as much on precision of language as on the structure of the story.

The resource also introduces several forms of suspense in literature. Students explore psychological suspense, investigation, everyday mystery, family secrets, disappearance, invisible threat, false calm, rising tension, and the final twist. They observe how a text becomes more gripping through sentence rhythm, selective revelation, shadows, silences, and the art of suggesting without fully disclosing.

Across five learning sessions, students move from vocabulary to creation. They begin by playing with a bank of suspense-related words and expressions. They then continue opening sentences in ways that create tension. Next, they work with clues in a workshop focused on controlling information. They rewrite a news article by giving it a more mysterious tone. Finally, they imagine a suspense novel by inventing its first sentence and its last sentence, reflecting on the invisible path that links the beginning to the end.

The resource also creates a strong link between reading and writing. Students observe how writers build atmosphere, delay revelation, redirect attention, or create unease from an ordinary detail. They discover that suspense is an art of control. It is not only about surprise, but about preparing, suggesting, guiding, and making the reader wait. In that sense, this resource helps students read more closely, write more effectively, and better understand the effects created by a carefully shaped narrative.

Faire salon with André Marois: writing suspense offers a complete pathway for exploring narrative tension, enriching vocabulary, developing imagination, and refining writing strategies. Students discover that suspense can be humorous, unsettling, subtle, or disturbing, but that it always relies on the same force: giving the reader an irresistible desire to turn the page, or here, to write the next line.

• A 5-session pathway to discover and practise suspense writing.
• An activity book for observing, playing, reading, discussing, and creating.
• Vocabulary work focused on mystery, doubt, anticipation, clues, threat, silence, traces, and false leads.
• An exploration of narrative techniques such as pacing, withholding information, rising tension, endings, openings, and striking final lines.
• Creative activities to extend sentences, build atmosphere, rewrite a text, and imagine a suspense novel.
• A lively literary approach showing that suspense can emerge from everyday life, humour, mystery, and the power of words.