If you can have a great story that people can follow the mystery and get the suspense, and then you have those moments of tension and a splash of visual fun, then you kind of get everything. You get your money's worth.
The negative attitudes toward the genres - romance, science-fiction, westerns, suspense, etc. - are fallout from the academic world's long-standing fascination with existential philosophy and modern theories of psychology and sociology.
I read what I like to write: romantic suspense. I also love thrillers and novels of suspense, but I can't handle extreme violence and torture.
I'm a bit more of a suspense reader on the adult side, but my favorites were the ones I grew up reading.
I can't wait for everyone to read 'Don't Look Back.' It's something very different for me, my first romantic suspense novel, so I'm very excited to be sharing the book, finally.
I think suspense should be like any other color on a writer's palette. I suppose I'm in the minority but I think it's crazy for 'literary fiction' to divorce itself from stories that are suspenseful, and assign anything with cops or spies or criminals to some genre ghetto.
The mystery form was very helpful for me as a beginning writer because mystery novels and suspense novels have a beginning, a middle and an end.
Great horror movies are earned. 'Halloween' is an earned picture. Every moment of grotesque violence is earned by the suspense they're able to maintain getting there.
I wanted to be Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton, Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, Ridley Scott, James Cameron, and Hitchcock. I'd wanted to be a director since 13, and horror and the suspense thriller were the most powerful genres to me.
Films do have suspense and tensions and scares and jumps, and I like to write things that have both in them, comedy and horror, but sometimes they are hard to balance.
