Suspense--Terrible and Perfect

Part of working on a new draft of A DEATH IN THE FAMILY has been reworking a mystery involved in the play. I am NOT a mystery writer, but I need to figure out how to make it work better dramatically. So I've been doing a lot of research on mystery writing, and I am researching suspense right now. I came upon this very long but extremely helpful article: Ian Irvine on Suspense

The article prints out at 9 pages, but it's really helped me dig into the play and I've come up with a lot of things to work on this weekend with it. This is a good thing indeed.

Funny enough, I know this won't last--my depression is too unpredictable at this point to count on being able to write hot every day. Heck, it's less depression and more the nature of the beast of creating, but the depression just isn't helpful. But the last few days I have been plowing carefully through this article, and I think it's helping a lot.

Sure, like I mentioned in my last entry, there's a lot of stuff coming up about basically changing the ENTIRE play. But before, I was beating myself up over it. Now I am just writing it down as something that might be plausible to think about for the play.

Strange how that works.

And hopefully I can kick the mystery up a notch and really have the suspense be terrible. Terrible and perfect.