If significant amounts of time go by without suspenseful action - which is often most powerfully motivated by backstory - the story loses momentum, and readers lose interest.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
You run the risk, whenever you build your story around a central mystery, of either letting it go too long, or revealing it too soon and then taking the wind out of the sails of the narrative.
I tend to tell stories that have a lot of momentum; it's not like 'and then months later...' I like things where the momentum of one action rolls into the next one so everything is the sum of that.
Suspense is very important. Even though this is humor and they're short stories, that theory of building suspense is still there.
The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.
You set up a story and it turns inside out and that is, for me, the most exciting sort of story to write. The viewer thinks it's going to be about something and it does the opposite.
For me, there is urgency in fiction, even though writing is, in itself, an act against the corrosiveness of time.
You can have the greatest characters in the world and write beautifully, but if nothing's happening, the story falls on its face pretty quickly.
I think suspense is a big thing.
Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn't a rule about this. But there's a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.
I think it's more interesting to throw people into a story and let them catch up instead of explaining and feeling like you have to slow down for them. I think audiences, for the most part, they don't want to be ahead of you.
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