Overuse of Suspense

            Lately I’ve been seeing a trend in a lot the shows I’ve been watching. It is the overuse of suspense.

            Suspense is an incredible tool for any form of entertainment. It’s what keeps the audience on the edge of their seats, engaged, and coming back for more. However, like all tools, it must be used in moderation.

            Unfortunately, the TV world is run on ratings – to get those ratings, as many people as possible need to be watching the show. What’s the easiest way to get people watching? Suspense. Putting a cliff-hanger at the end of every episode is a sure-fire way to keep the audience interested – and talking about – the show until the following week or season.

            But then the suspense begins to lose its effectiveness. The audience starts to expect it and not only does it stop compelling them to come back as much, it becomes... well, boring. Predictable. The moment everything is seeming to work out, the audience already knows that something terrible is about to happen. The urgent desire to find out what happens next is replaced by an exhausted, “What, this again?”

            When I was learning about suspense for my writing, I picked up one very important tip: give the audience a break sometimes. It is essential when working with suspense, because otherwise the suspense has the opposite effect from what was intended. I good tip for making a plot interesting is to chase your character up a tree and then throw rocks at them, but there’s one very important thing to remember: sometimes, the character has to succeed. If there are no victories, there’s no hope – and hope in impossible situations is what really keeps the audience engaged.

            The other thing to remember is that suspense can be subtle. Everything can turn out well at the end of an episode or chapter and the audience will still come back for more if there are questions left unanswered. There doesn’t always have to be a cataclysmic, plot-wrenching disaster.

            So, use suspense, but use it in all of its forms. Apply it with a brush, not a roller.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her life coaching website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

We Need Diversity

            Something I see talked about a lot in the online writing community is getting accurate diverse characters written into books (people of different ethnicities, LGBTQ, people with disabilities, etc). Why? To ensure that everyone from every background and belief has characters they can relate to and, more importantly (in my opinion), to show people how much variety there is in the world and make them more accepting of people different than themselves.

            This is actually something that is very challenging to, for several reasons. The biggest challenge is fighting the social conditioning we have that leads to us simply using stereotypes – we’re exposed to them through all the media that’s out there already. Many of the books that inspire current authors are written either with an absence of diverse characters, or with them represented in stereotypical ways. It’s far too easy to follow the well-trodden paths.

            Then there is fighting the comfort zone. We are brought up with many taboos, and some can be very uncomfortable to push past. How do we write about people with different colours of skin when we’ve been told all our lives that pointing out someone’s skin colour is racist? How do we write about a disability or a gender identity we haven’t experienced ourselves?

            That leads into the third challenge: research. Research takes a lot of time and energy. It’s so much easier to run with the stereotypes, or just avoid unfamiliar topics altogether.

            Yet, we live in a diverse world, and therefore we must push past all out boundaries to include everyone in our writing. Once we do that, we need to choose how to present this diversity: do we highlight it, by making the story about modern issues related to it, or do we blend them in and treat them like we would any other character?

            While there is a need for the first, I feel that the latter option is the most important for the future. There are many parts of society that have been characterized in certain ways, marginalized or outright abused throughout history. This had been built into our media – movies, shows, games, books – and many of them will last for generations to come. We’ve become aware of the problem, and it’s getting talked about more and more – but it won’t be solved until we stop talking about it and make it normal.

            What really needs to happen is for diverse characters to be added into the media, but without them being treated any differently than anyone else. By doing so, we normalize them, and by extension show future generations that not only is it normal for people to be different – but it’s perfectly okay.

            Gone are the days when everyone needed to be made with the same cookie cutter. As a society, we are moving closer and closer to accepting people for who they are. By allowing people to be true to themselves the world becomes a happier place. But we can never achieve complete acceptance until our sources of entertainment – which shape us and our ideas in more ways than we realize – represent diversity as normal. Diversity in media starts here and now, by making the extra effort to put it in and make sure it’s accurately represented.

            The world is a diverse place. We need to celebrate it, not stifle it, and make it perfectly normal to be whoever we are.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Best Board Game Everrrrrer

            No, seriously, if you haven’t played this board game, you need to. It is Firefly The Game and it’s loads of fun.

            What is it like, you ask? Well, I can best describe it as a combination of Monopoly, Settlers of Catan and Dungeons & Dragons. Incidentally, if you haven’t played those either, you’re missing out. Except maybe Monopoly, that can be hit or miss.

            Anyway, even if you aren’t a fan of Firefly (which, if you’re not, it probably means you haven’t watched the show, a problem you should go fix right now), the game is great – although you miss many of the references. It has a simple concept – you are the captain of a Firefly class starship. You need to find a crew, find a job and keep flying.

            Throughout the game, you fly around between planets doing jobs, hiring crew members and upgrading your ship while working towards certain goals. You get to choose the jobs from various contacts and the work is either legal or illegal, moral or immoral, with some paying better and some being riskier (with the potential of getting issued arrest warrants or even having crew members killed). The jobs can vary from carting cargo and passengers between planets to robbing banks.

            As for the goals to win the game, they change! That’s the best part about the game – there are different story modes to play. There’s even a solo mode (which I had so much fun with I played for 5 hours straight one day). The different game stories change the strategies needed for playing and make for a fresh game each time. I figure you can even write your own game modes for it (I’m planning a fantastic co-operative story).

            The only downside is that it does take a while to set up – but it’s worth it. It’s also one of those games where the rules seem really complicated when they’re being explained, but they begin to make sense really fast as you’re playing.

            So, yes. Firefly. Play it.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

A Geeky New Year

            Welcome to 2015! According to Back to the Future, we get hover boards this year, so we have that to look forward to. For all those sciency people out there, I have two words for you: electro magnets. Make it happen.

            Anyway, Colleen and I had a great New Year’s Eve – we celebrated by staying home and making our way through a geek countdown. What’s a geek countdown, you ask? It’s when we count down from ten geeky movies, shows and games to midnight instead of seconds. The catch is there had to be a numerical value associating the activity with the number of the count.

            Our countdown went like this: We started by watching the episode Blink from Doctor Who (with the 10^th Doctor), then watched an episode of Deep Space 9 (the Trouble with Tribbles crossover episode). Next, we played some Super Mario World (an 8-bit game) followed by the 7^th episode of Firefly (Jaynestown). After that, we watched Star Wars episode 6, Return of the Jedi, the 5^th Element and the Fantastic 4. We finished off by playing a little bit (because we were running out of time) of Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, Portal 2 and the 1^st Little Big Planet.

            Yes, we managed to squeeze that all into one day (all before midnight) and it was a blast. We’re thinking of making it a New Year’s tradition – with different activities, of course. We’ll have more time to plan for next year, so we could get really creative.

            I hope all of you had as great a New Year as we did and that 2015 is fantastic for everyone.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

The Effectiveness of Suspense

            One of the most important tools in a writer’s arsenal is suspense. It is what keeps the readers turning the page, the viewers watching and the gamers playing. The desire to know what happens next – or for an explanation about why something happened – compels us to come back for more.

            Can it be over-used, though? I never really thought about it until tonight, after watching the season three finale of Sherlock. The season, on the whole, was excellent (although I felt it wasn't quite as good as the first two seasons) and the ending left me asking many of the questions. But, it wasn't as many questions as the previous seasons and I didn't feel the same driving need to know more. I was happy with what I knew and content to wait the year or two until the next season to find out what happens next.

            A similar thing happened with the Assassins’ Creed series. At the end of all three of the first three games, I was left staring at the screen, jaw on the floor, demanding: “What!? What!?!? What!?!?!?” (No, really – ask my wife; she was there, I was really demanding that the game tell me what happened next). The following three games, however, didn't have that effect on me. I still wanted to play the next games, but, again, the driving need to know what happened next wasn't there.

            At first, I thought it was because the cliff-hangers weren't as good. I guess that’s still possible, but I think that it may also be that I've been de-sensitised to the style of suspense. It makes sense, now that I started thinking about it. Humans are known for their adaptability; we can adjust to anything. If we’re fed enough cliff-hangers and suspenseful endings, we start to expect them. Then they become normal and, like everything else that’s normal, they blend into the background.

            It was a bit of an eye-opener for me and I think it’s something all writers can learn from. Moderation is the key in everything; change it up. If the same tricks and tools are used all the time, they lose their effectiveness. What good is suspense if...

            Find out next week, on: J.C. Rutledge and his inane ramblings!

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Life Under a Rock

            One of these days I'm going to sit down to write a blog and have no clue what to write. Although, to be fair, that describes almost every week. What I really mean is that I’ll have no clue and I’ll remain clueless so long that I’ll be left without a blog.

            I guess it would help a bit if I didn't live under a rock. If you consider that I rarely leave the house more than once a week, I don’t have access to TV (and wouldn't watch it if I did), I don’t listen to the radio and the only news I find out about is what filters to me through social media sites, it’s actually pretty impressive that I can find as much to talk about as I do.

            It might seem like an odd life choice to be so cut off from what are staples for most of society, but for me it comes naturally. I grew up without TV (it was replaced by my dad’s extensive movie collection) in a household that didn't even bother with newspapers. No one was interested enough for it to be worth it.

            Since the invention of the printing press, it has become more and more important for people to know what’s going on in the rest of the world. At first, it was just news being passed on, along with propaganda, but now it has evolved into entertainment. Because of that, news has become a series of one catastrophe after another – after all, the core of all entertainment is conflict. The end result is that the news is depressing and nothing is achieved by knowing it, so I figure I'm better off without it.

            I’ll admit that keeping on top of world (or even local) events is important for some people, but for me (and probably most people) it really doesn't matter. I know there are lots of things wrong with the world; I don’t need to be reminded. What will knowing about current events accomplish? I don’t have the time or resources to do anything about it. The best I can do is vote for a government that will do what they can (at which point I do research that negates the need to be constantly deluged with global issues).

            The result of this? I get to live a happier life. It could be argued that I'm uninformed, but, in this day and age, any time I need to know about something, I can just look it up. Personally, I think that living a happier life is more important than knowing about events I have no control over. I may be living under a rock, but it’s nice down here. Plus, I have the added bonus of being able to poke my head out to participate in the world whenever I want (which, admittedly, is not often).

            The moral of the story is, you can’t get stuck between a rock and a hard place if the rock is working for you. Come live under a rock and be happier. But not my rock. It’s occupied. Shoo.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.