tension and pacing
z_rayne had an thought-provoking post last week about elements that make a story unreadable or difficult to read for her, and quite an interesting discussion sprung up in the comments. I weighed in with some of my own factors that make my fingers move toward the back button. But there's one thing that can't be expressed in the same type of black-or-white
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The thing about good writing is that it raises these questions subtly, I think. I mean, yeah, in the dS story I mention Fraser does explicitly ask a question that the reader nods her head with and thinks, "yeah, why did he do that?", but the questions are usually the result of the reader's interaction with the story. For example, in my latest story, the first scene raises the question, "is Callum a serial killer?!?!" without explicitly asking it - or even having Hugh explicitly wonder it. He just starts speculating and worrying, and the reader wants to keep going to find the answer.
A story, I think, is a narrative that shows some sort of movement, some sort of change, whether the characters actually do something or they just change internally. (Remember from English class the different types of conflict? Man against man, man against himself, man against nature...?) But this conflict can be described in such a way as to be entirely uninteresting; it's the writer's art to draw the reader into complicity, to pose the conflict in such a way that the reader wants to know the outcome.
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