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40 A PRACTICAL MANUAL OF SCREEN PLAYWRITING
Telegraphing. A major fault that robs many stories of suspense is to be found in "telegraphing"— revealing a story point prematurely so that an imminent incident is robbed of its full dramatic value. A prize fighter is said to "telegraph" his Sunday punch when, as a preparatory maneuver, he cocks his fist, wrist, and elbow in such a manner as to inform his opponent that an intended haymaker is on the way. This same fault is to be found in many badly written stories.
Telegraphing can be visual and verbal. It would be verbal telegraphing, for instance, to have one of your characters announce, "I'm afraid we're going to have trouble with that guy!" The audience will then expect that trouble and be on the qui vive for it, so that when it does eventually come it will have lost its dramatic impact.
Other common errors of this type are such statements as, "You'll be sorry for this," and, "He doesn't know what's in store for him," and, "You'll find out soon enough"— in short, any predictions of dire consequences that tend to vitiate suspense.
Suspense
The quality of suspense involves degrees of mental uncertainty, curiosity, anxiety, and, in an oblique manner, sympathy. When these qualities are evident in a picture they can be transferred to the audience so that they, too, by empathy, can suffer the same anxieties and uncertainties as the characters.
Suspense can contribute to the flow of continuity. By forcing the audience to want to know how things are going to turn out, suspense thus makes for a constancy of attention that moves along with the unreeling of the picture.
In the British film The Spider and the Fly, for example, the audience's curiosity, anxiety, and sympathy are centered on Phillipe in that extremely suspenseful scene in which he tries to make a desperate getaway after the bank robbery by walking across the overhead girder. The device is simple and old. The old-time serials used it at the end of every episode.
But when your hero is thrown into a seemingly inescapable situation, he must be able to extricate himself not by accident, nor by