I think of my books now as suspense novels, usually with a love story incorporated. They're absolutely a lot harder to write than romances. They take more plotting and real character development.
I'm a big horror fan, but I don't enjoy a lot of gore and watching somebody cut their leg off for five hours. I like the older movies where it draws you into the suspense, that sort of shock and awe.
Life is like a novel. It's filled with suspense. You have no idea what is going to happen until you turn the page.
Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.
Perhaps because my town was so naturally gothic in its architecture and relative isolation - the roads often closed in winter - my stories tended toward the ghostly and the creepily suspenseful right from the get-go.
There's always a bit of suspense about the particular way in which a given school year will get off to a bad start.
Smoke veils the air like souls in drifting suspension, declining the war's insistence everyone move on.
When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.
Obviously neither 'American Idol' nor 'Dancing With the Stars' is a variety show in the classic sense, but the way they incorporate elements of drama, comedy and suspense is moderately ingenious.
You have to go out of your way as a suspense novelist to find situations where the protagonists are somewhat helpless and in real danger.
As for suspense, I like to write books that draw you into the hero's plight from the opening pages, where people put their lives on the line for something - a belief, a family member, the truth.
Every little thing that people know about you as a person impedes your ability to achieve that kind of terrific suspension of disbelief that happens when an audience goes with an actor and character he's playing.
I like to compare the holiday season with the way a child listens to a favorite story. The pleasure is in the familiar way the story begins, the anticipation of familiar turns it takes, the familiar moments of suspense, and the familiar climax and en...
Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.
Mystery writing involves solving a puzzle, but 'high suspense' writing is a situation whereby the writer thrusts the hero/heroine into high drama.
Even though I got a late start, first publishing an essay when I was 50 years old, I've since written eight suspense novels.
'Gossip Girl' came out in rapid succession over two years, so the endings always had to be suspenseful so that you couldn't wait for the next one.
When God is driven to the periphery of the public square, the human spiritual capacity longs for exercise, and it often finds it in the “suspension of disbelief” and activity of the imagination that are available in novels and movies.
It's not just what Christian fiction lacks I appreciate - it's what it offers. The variety is vast: contemporary, historical, suspense, mysteries, adventure, young adult, romance, fantasy, science fiction.
I have never read horror, nor do I consider The Exorcist to be such, but rather as a suspenseful supernatural detective story, or paranormal police procedural.
Nothing is less suspenseful than a threat that threatens the maker of the threat at least as much as the subject of the threat. Congress hasn't learned this yet, but America has learned it over and over.
