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42 A PRACTICAL MANUAL OF SCREEN PLAYWRITING
readily, will add to the suspense. But suspense must not be injected for the sole purpose of creating suspense. It must be completely justified. It must flow out of the characters and out of their actions. And it must flow smoothly into the eventual revelation which suddenly makes the audience aware of the full significance of what has previously been unknown.
Don't withhold. Suspense cannot be sustained if important— but necessary— items of plot information are deliberately ignored by the writer and conveniently withheld from the audience. This fault is apparent in many mystery stories where important clues are not given, or are glossed over, so that the real killer's identity can be continued to be hidden. Such suspense may work for a while. But the time will come when the revelation is essential. And the audience will sense a definite feeling of having been cheated. The result will be a denouement that will fizzle out completely.
The otherwise fine work of William Irish— also writing under the nom de plume of Cornell Woolrich— contains numerous examples of another type of suspense which, if used ineptly, tends to confuse, mislead, and disappoint. His people always become involved in situations which seemingly have little to do with the main story line. Occasionally, at the end of the story, the author justifies the use of these irrelevant scenes by tying them in with the denouement. But more often than not, most of these extraneous episodes remain unexplained, even to the very end of the story.
Such suspense defeats its purpose. Too much of it, for instance, becomes boring. At the same time, any and all unexplained suspense episodes that are not paid off at the end remain like stickle burs in the audience's subconscious, and tend to detract from the effects of legitimate suspense episodes the author has created.
The pay-off. Every dramatic element in the story must pay off. That is to say, they must all come to some satisfactory conclusion after the denouement. The running gag— which will be dealt with shortly— must be capped with a "topper" (a humorous denouement) . The hidden papers must eventually be found. The missing heir must turn up. The character traits of an individual actor must result in something positive. Information that has been withheld must be revealed to achieve its full measure of suspense value. If