What inflames an audience?
New tech-savvy graphics can lure with eye-candy, musical scores with pop-culture repetitive chimes, but the true audience retention is in a combination of writer imagination and actor prowess. Your playwright, manuscript, or novella, can be amplified to escalating proportions by incorporating a little restraint.
Meet the professionals – The Matadors of Literature.
With a few well-placed attacks, a seasoned matador can quickly and easily dispense with a violent young bull. However, the true crowd pleaser will restrain from ending the contest between them and the angry beast. A lingering contest of skills, however inhumane, will always hold a crowd at bay, while a quick kill hardly gives the audience their money’s worth.
Creative, lingering, and taunting life and death struggles between protagonist and antagonist will forever hold audiences spellbound and give quality actors scores of trophies to brag about. Unfortunately, a ‘quick kill’ scene would likely be construed as a thirty-second blurb on the evening news, whereas associated quotes such as ‘Make my day’ and ‘I’ll be back’ will be remembered for an entire generation.
Remember to build tension in your fiction until your protagonist is walking a tight-wire for that next breath while your audience is holding theirs.
Write on!
David Pyle
