Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

by Patricia Highsmith

Crime and Punishment is a splendid example of this. Infact, I think most of Dostoyevsky’s books would be called suspense

books, were they being published today for the first time. But he would be asked to cut, because of production costs.

“Two people agree to murder each other’s enemy, thus permitting a perfect alibi to be established.”

“Two crimes are strikingly similar, though the people who commit them do not know each other.”

Some story ideas never develop by parthenogenetic method, but need a second idea to get them going.

The writer’s imagination

“The Terrapin,” a short story which won a Mystery Writers of America

award

If it’s a story, it’s already a story. It doesn’t need a writer’s imagination,

famous anecdote about Henry James

when a friend started to tell him “a story,” James stopped him after a very few words. James had heard enough, and preferred to let his imagination do the

r...

Murder, Inc.

Περί τίνος πρόκειται;

The Story-Teller

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A Suspension of Mercy

The germs of story ideas,

The important thing is to recognize them when they come.

ΣΗΜΑΝΤΙΚΟ ΣΗΜΕΙΟ.

I recognize them by a certain excitement which they instantly bring,

But the world is full of germinal ideas.

The best way, of course, is to stop work and all thought of work and take a trip—even a short, cheap trip, just to change the scene.

If you can’t take a trip, take a walk.

It is wise for a writer to have some sideline by which to earn some money,

the wrong kind of people around a writer, or sometimes people of any sort.

But mostly, the plane of social intercourse is not the plane of creation, not the plane on which creative ideas fly.

It is difficult to be aware of, or receptive to, one’s own unconscious when one is with a group of people, or even with a single person, though that is easier.

I have never found other writers stimulating.

Ενδιαφέρον.

and painting is the art most closely related to writing.

Πολύ ενδιαφέρον- ΤΣΕΚ.

A germ of an idea, even if slight, often brings with it a most important factor for the final product, atmosphere.

I had just made a trip to Greece and Crete in winter, and of course was strongly impressed by what I had seen.

wanted also to use the labyrinthian Palace of Knossos,

I highly recommend notebooks for writers, a small one if one has to be out on a job all day,

I FEEL I have been up to now setting down bits and pieces of information and suggestions which do not convey what it is really like to write a book. Perhaps that’s impossible.

the impossibility of laying down rules

Another successful playwright is furious with Aristotle for having said that a story needed a beginning, middle and an end.

a play should start as near the end of its story as possible: that is an old law of the drama.

I have studied playwriting, and because I like a slow beginning.

A book is not a thing of one sitting, like a poem, but a longish thing which takes time and energy, and since it takes skill, too, the first effort or maybe the second may not find a market.

of course writers with real drive will not.

Psychologically speaking, a proper and decent period of mourning for a rejected manuscript

shouldn’t last more than a few days.

not throw the manuscript out,

necessary momentum,

it is an emotional process, a sense of emotional completion,

Good short stories are made from the writer’s emotions alone, and their themes might often be equally well stated in poems.

The book is always better if there are first-hand and really felt experiences like these in it.

Πολύ σημαντικό σημείο.

a notebook to hold a record of these things,

Some gimmicks are surprise endings;

Another type of gimmick is information withheld from the reader, quite arbitrarily and unfairly, until the end of the story or book.

Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

ΤΣΕΚ!

all good stories have suspense,