I’m dissecting the article Hunting Down the Pleonasm, by Allen Guthrie, using it as a cattle prod to search for little nasties in my manuscript. Yep, you can join in the fun, too. Let’s take a looksee at topic #31
31: Spot the moment of maximum tension and hold it for as long as possible. Or as John D. MacDonald put it: “Freeze the action and shoot him later.”
Love this train of thought. This goes along with torturing your character. Don’t only torture your character!
Torture them longer!
I have this theme/problem in my current work. It is high paced, and I don’t want to slow it too much, but there is this one scene that I want to hesitate on to really drag in the emotional impact. While it doesn’t take that long, I want to really dig in to what the character feels and goes through. This is all about building tension. And nothing makes me turn a page more than wondering what the heck will happen.
Jennifer M Eaton 