In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.
Most crime novels offer a curious kind of escape, to places that jag the nerves and worry the mind. Their rides of suspense give a good thrill, but it’s rarely a comfortable one.
Show me a character whose life arouses my curiosity, and my flesh begins crawling with suspense.
Suspense is worse than disappointment.
I’m big on having a blistering pace. That’s one of the hallmarks of what I do, and that’s not easy. I never blow up cars and things like that, so it’s something else that keeps the suspense flowing. I try not to write a chapter that isn’t going to turn on the movie projector in your head.
The way I express ideas is through the plot, Suspense is an important part of expressing an idea.
‘Harry Potter’ shouldn’t be children’s first experience with suspense and plot turns.
I think suspense should be like any other color on a writer’s palette. I suppose I’m in the minority but I think it’s crazy for ‘literary fiction’ to divorce itself from stories that are suspenseful, and assign anything with cops or spies or criminals to some genre ghetto.
I wanted to be Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton, Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, Ridley Scott, James Cameron, and Hitchcock. I’d wanted to be a director since 13, and horror and the suspense thriller were the most powerful genres to me.
Hitchcock had a charm about him. He was very funny at times. He was incredibly brilliant in his field of suspense.
Though they don’t always have to be set in fog, weather is incredibly important in ghost stories. As is suspense: you’ve got to turn the screw very, very slowly.
The rules of suspense are that you do know, and you just don’t know when. In the Hitchcock rules of suspense, you are supposed to know that there is a bomb on the bus that might blow up, and then it becomes very tense – but if you don’t know that there’s a bomb and it just blows up, then it’s just a surprise.
Suspense is very important. Even though this is humor and they’re short stories, that theory of building suspense is still there.
I think people like to be scared. I think people like tension and suspense in a movie.
Gore, like blood and guts and stuff, I am fine. Suspense, I get super sensitive. I can’t handle it.
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