Monday, August 6, 2018

Exercise for the day, August 6: Make them wait four hours for dinner



Lee Child separates the question of good writing from the mechanics of getting the reader to turn the page, in his essay "A Simple Way to Create Suspense."

Read it, then look at his very short story "Guy Walks Into a Bar." 

To see what the story is doing, print it out or cut and paste it into a doc, so you can make margin notes. Every time Lee poses a question, make a note next to it: Q1 for the first, Q2 for the second. Then note where each question is answered: A1, A2 . . . Draw an arrow in the margin between each question and its answer.  This really lays out how the questions, answers, and partial answers lead you from one paragraph to the next.

Here's the first paragraph:

SHE was about 19. No older. Maybe younger. An insurance company would have given her 60 more years to live. I figured a more accurate projection was 36 hours, or 36 minutes if things went wrong from the get-go.

Are you going to read on? Why?






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