: Re: How to create suspense when the conclusion is known? How can there be suspense if the reader knows the conclusion from the beginning? I am writing an apocalyptic survival story, and I chose

If you know who lives and dies right away, you can create suspense by raising the stakes to something else. This is similar to MeDodo's answer. What I mean by that is, if in most cases the thing to be lost is a character's life, but now you know who lives and does not live, then you can move the stakes from life-or-death to something else - maybe physical health, or losing an opportunity, or a number of other things. Maybe their actions will impact a larger whole, regardless if they live or die themselves so they still have a high risk like that. Even if you know that a character isn't going to die, a lot of other stuff can hit them hard.

If you let your readers know the characters that will ultimately end up dead, but not when, or how they will die, then they have no idea when to expect the death to occur. If the character(s) is/are likable (or not likable, but if the readers give a crap about them), then readers will want them to be in the story for as long as they can. So you as the writer can make it seem like they will die at one point but then give them a narrow escape. Tease readers. The readers know that death is possible in any scenario, they just won't know when to prepare.

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: Re: How to create suspense when the conclusion is known? How can there be suspense if the reader knows the conclusion from the beginning? I am writing an apocalyptic survival story, and I chose

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: Word count for The whole project on scrivener.? I know I can see the word count for each chapter at the bottom on my scrivener page but I cannot seem to find where I can keep track of

: Writing a character that only the protagonist hears/understands (kinda like R2D2) How do you write a character that only the protagonist can hear and/or understand? I'm writing a story with this

: How can I portray a realistic "evil" religion? There is a veil which separates our reality from a parallel dimension that contains Eldritch abominations. An ancient empire has discovered that

: How can I make a disturbing first-person narrator compelling? I'm writing a story centered around a protagonist trying to live a normal life while suppressing his evil impulses and the temptation

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