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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/46319
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

# Yes, provided that it were not inevitable from the outset

Suspense and uncertainty are vital ingredients to many a great novel. When it comes to making a good **narrative** , the outcome itself is less important than how we get there. Readers are often excited by outcomes which could have gone another way but for a few unlucky occurrences (for a classic case study, see _Romeo and Juliet_ -- Friar Laurence's crucial message to Romeo fails to reach him owing to quarantine occasioned by plague, causing Romeo to think his wife had died... one almost wants to shout at Romeo "do not take the poison -- she is not actually dead!"... and then Juliet wakes just after Romeo had taken the poison... if only she had woken a bit earlier), or by an "underdog" triumphing against the odds (or coming close enough that he/she almost triumphed). However, the "underdog" need not be a "good guy". Many great authors, in fact, have managed to cast the main protagonist as an apparent "good guy" despite having done horrific things (a brilliant example is Tolstoy's novella _Hadji Murad_, whose eponymous character is undoubtedly a brutal and ruthless killer, but with whom we are made to sympathise, and whose death we are made to mourn).

We can maintain tension by one or more of:

- keeping the outcome unknown until the end (usually associated with a strictly chronological narrative); or
- making the outcome known, but inciting curiosity as to **how** it happened (usually associated with an epic narrative or with journalism); or
- disorienting the reader by bringing into question the reliability of the narrator(s) (usually associated with first-person narratives).

Original score: 4