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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 2168169" data-attributes="member: 5171">Hmm. Not sure. I think they're both valid techniques, but I also think that you can twist around either to mean the other one.For example: In the novel I just sent out, a major character gets run through by the bad guy with about three chapters to go. The chapter ends with the character looking up at the moon, trying to get up but with no strength left in his arms -- the usual "Oh, I've been run through" stuff.  My mom called me at this point and said, "You didn't really kill ___, did you? Because I'm worried about him. The chapter ended, and now we're with other people, and I'm concerned."  So that would be my mom (God love her, she reads anything I write), concerned because of something she doesn't know.But then, a chapter and a half later, we're in another character's head, and ___ shows up and appears to be fine, and after a fight with bad guys, the other character says, "Hey, ___, it looks like you got cut, there," noticing a smear of blood.  And ___ says, "Just a scratch. Don't worry about it. In fact, forget you ever saw it at all," or words to that effect.  At which point my mom called me again, and this time, she was in suspense because of something that she DID know -- that this guy did NOT just get a scratch, that something had happened, and it was very very wrong that he was up and about and acting as though nothing had happened.  So that would be concern regarding something the reader knows that the character doesn't.And then you've got movies -- heck, Hitchcock movies being a great example thereof -- in which the director builds suspense by giving us something misleading, something that the audience infers incorrectly and does not, in fact, know.  Like when an ominous-sounding conversation that we thought was related to a hunt for a murderer turns out to be two police officers playing chess over the radio or something. That's different from a legitimate suspense-build, because it's not actually due to something we know -- it's due to something that the director faked us out with. The end feeling is the same, but the source is different.I mean, at a base level, suspense seems to come from the reader or audience being concerned that something bad is going to happen. That can be because the audience knows something the characters don't, because the audience doesn't know something, or because the director is messing around with the audience, but at the end, it seems to all break down to "We, the readers or viewers, are afraid that something bad is going to happen."But a statement like that rarely generates much conversation.</blockquote>

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