I read a very nice article this morning in the New York Times by Lee Child called “A Simple Way To Create Suspense“.  Refreshingly free of pretence (yes, I know … ‘pretense’, but Child is British).  So far, my toe-dip into the enormous corpus of literature on writing seems to indicate that most of it is not very helpful.  This article was a welcome exception.  Child mentions that writing instruction is often like explaining the recipe for baking a cake … ingredients, mixing and cooking protocols, etc.  He points out that the writer’s more important purpose is to “make the family hungry.”