“Scheherazade avoided her fate because she knew how to wield the weapon of suspense – the only literary tool that has any effect on tyrants and savages. … She only survived because she managed to keep the king wondering what would happen next. … (A story) runs like a backbone, or may I say a tapeworm, for its beginning and end are arbitrary. (It) can have only one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next.” Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster
EM Forster
So, SUSPENSE is safe to survive and will not be drowned in a sea of gorgeous sentences and ungorgeous snippets of banality delivered as tweets. The ‘tyrants and savages’ of the brave, new electronic world shall not stifle a good old suspense-driven story.What a relief!
I have thought of myself as a writer for most of my adult life. In 2011, I became a fiction writer full time. I studied creative writing as an English major in college. Then came family and career. I worked in finance and biotech and did a wonderful stint in Vienna. Now, I have the opportunity to use those experiences as the substrate for my stories. My first novel takes on the world of Big Data and the very timely issue of cyber war. The second uses the manipulation of financial derivatives as impetus for attempted murder during a trip from Vienna to Budapest on the Danube.
I have taken writing instruction at the Cape Cod Writers Conference and from The Loft in Minneapolis. I am finding writers’ groups to be very helpful as concept editors, as well as practical advice from the published authors. I am in three such groups. I have taken writing instruction at the Cape Cod Writers Conference and from The Loft in Minneapolis.
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One thought on “Ah, yes … Suspense”
I don’t tweet, but perhaps we should create a whole new genre: The Cliffhanger Tweet; a sort of combination of the classic Ellery Queen one-minute mysteries and the old Burma Shave road signs; a denouement followed by a teaser in 144 characters.
There is a book called The World’s Shortest Stories, edited by Steve Moss, which contains a hundred or so stories of exactly 55 words. Because of the brevity, nearly all of them are suspense stories with twist or surprise endings. I used to have my creative writing students write three of them as an intro to fiction writing. A number of them were certainly as clever as the pieces that Moss had collected.
I don’t tweet, but perhaps we should create a whole new genre: The Cliffhanger Tweet; a sort of combination of the classic Ellery Queen one-minute mysteries and the old Burma Shave road signs; a denouement followed by a teaser in 144 characters.
There is a book called The World’s Shortest Stories, edited by Steve Moss, which contains a hundred or so stories of exactly 55 words. Because of the brevity, nearly all of them are suspense stories with twist or surprise endings. I used to have my creative writing students write three of them as an intro to fiction writing. A number of them were certainly as clever as the pieces that Moss had collected.