Bronwyn Rivers: 'Suspense is all about provoking your reader's curiosity'
BY Maya Fernandes
4th Sep 2025
Bronwyn Rivers was a student on our online Writing Your Novel – Six Months and Writing a Psychological Thriller courses in 2021. We caught up to discuss her debut novel The Reunion – out now from Constable (Little, Brown).
Read on to discover the inspiration behind Bronwyn's debut, her advice for structuring dual timelines and the mystery novels that she's excited to read.
You studied on our online Writing Your Novel – Six Months and our Writing a Psychological Thriller courses in 2021. How did your time with us shape your approach to writing?
The courses were so useful! The six-month course was a really pragmatic course that helped with all aspects of the writing process. As well as providing a ready-made group of experienced writers who could give feedback and offer moral support, it gave practical instruction on specific elements of the writing craft such as dialogue and characterisation. Importantly, we were also supported to negotiate the publishing industry, for example, with help to hone our all-important first engagement with agents and publishers via pitches and cover letters.
It was painful at the time, but I did take the particular advice of one of our tutors – ‘Don’t edit, rewrite!’ – and I completely rewrote my second draft from scratch. When it comes to a subsequent draft, it’s hard not to just play with the words already on the page, but I know the second draft was stronger for the fresh start. Also, it’s much clearer to me now that you’re unlikely to improve substantially without seeking out and paying attention to rigorous feedback, so someone who can read your work properly and gives good, constructive advice is invaluable.
Many of our students find lifelong writing friends on our courses. Are you still in touch with anyone you met on the course?
Yes, we formed an online group during the course, and we keep each other up to date on our writing journeys. It has been especially pleasing to see people from the group getting book deals. While the course was online, and included writers from different hemispheres and continents, I was able to attend the Sydney launch party of a fellow Australian – Sarah Clutton, who has recently published The Remarkable Truths of Alfie Bains – and that was a particular delight.
The Reunion is a gripping mystery full of tension, secrets and the weight of a decade-old tragedy. What advice would you give to writers hoping to build suspense effectively in their own work?
Suspense is all about provoking your readers’ curiosity about what is going to happen. It can come from tone or atmosphere – that sense that something could go wrong at any moment – but also derives from the way information is given out; by raising questions that the reader wants answered. I very consciously structured my narrative so that there were always questions waiting – even if an earlier question was answered, I made sure others had cropped up in the meantime.
The Blue Mountains makes for such an atmospheric setting. What drew you to this location, and how did the landscape feed into the themes of the novel?
I was taken on bushwalking holidays in this region almost every year when I was a child, and so the awesome beauty of its forests, cliffs and valleys is very familiar to me. When I came to write a crime novel, I knew I wanted a powerful natural setting, and the Blue Mountains was the obvious choice. I did stay there while writing parts of the book, although that wasn’t actually necessary because the place is so vivid in my memory. One of the themes of the book is the holding of secrets – and so the obscured, misty horizons and the twisting leafy gullies of these mountains are metaphorically perfect.
Dual timelines can be notoriously tricky to navigate but you manage to weave the past and the present together seamlessly to build suspense. What was your process for structuring the novel in this way, and were there any particular challenges you had to overcome?
Each timeline needed its own compelling arc – and the transitions between them had to happen according to the logic of narrative progression (not just because of some arbitrary pattern of, say, alternating between past and present). A piece of advice that stuck with me was that you should only go into a flashback or flashforward to explain something necessary to the reader at that exact point in the current narrative. This helps to keep the novel as a whole moving and protects against readers getting frustrated about being taken out of a timeline that they were really enjoying. All this required a lot of moving post-it notes around on a big piece of paper in order to ensure that the plot beats and reveals fitted together logically and effectively.
Are there any mystery novels on your ‘to be read’ list that you’re excited about?
I’m part of a ‘Debut Crew’ support group of fellow Australians putting out their first novels in 2025, and I’m looking forward to reading Stillwater by Tanya Scott and Melaleuca by Angie Faye Martin, who will both be on a panel with me at the upcoming ‘BAD’ crime writers festival in Sydney.
And finally, what’s next for your writing journey?
At the moment I’m taking time to enjoy the ride of publishing my debut – but I know future works will also be set in a vivid natural Australian setting. As well as the Australian bush forests, I also love the coast and ocean, and I’ve got some ideas about how that shifting landscape would work with another mystery thriller.
Get your hands on a copy of The Reunion.
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