What makes a story compelling? What makes a book or screenplay one you can't put down? Or a DVD one you have to watch all the way through, as opposed to one you can easily stop at any point in the movie?

As I see it, storytelling, in whatever medium, is about raising questions, and good storytelling is about providing satisfactory answers. In a mystery, the story’s central question revolves around “who done it?” Or, in some cases, like the movie “Naked City,” why done it? (Why the perpetrator committed the crime?) Or, in another variation, “how catch ‘em ?,” that is, we know who did it, but we still want to know how the police will catch the culprit, as in the TV show “Columbo.”
The questions can be explicit or implicit. What is the significance of the title “The Four Feathers?” Or, in "Twenty thousand Leagues under the Sea,” of the character’s name, Ned Land, a French Canadian with the English name Land, who’s a sailor, no less.

Then there’s the implicit question of how a scene is going to turn out. In an earlier essay “Neil Simon and Sword of Damocles,” I discussed Simon’s method of creating suspense by setting appointments for characters to meet (a job interview (“The Out-Of-Towners”), a theatrical performance (“The Goodbye Girl”), a rendezvous with gangsters (“Lost in Yonkers”). These are scheduled events that hang over the characters’ heads. The characters may dread these upcoming appointments, but the audience looks forward to them, dying to know how they ultimately turn out.

Of course, there’s a central question at the heart of all fiction: How is the story going to play out? That question remains, even when the author gives away the ending. Shakespeare, for instance, tells us about the warring families’ “ancient grudge” and the “pair of star-crossed lovers” who take their life, in the prologue to “Romeo and Juliet.” We still want to watch to discover how these events transpire. That’s true also for Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla.” In both, the author tells us the whole story on the first page and then, for the rest of the novel, retells the same story, only the long version.

I can’t promise that you’re next piece will be a real page-turner, but if you think about your story in terms of questions and answers, the tale can only be more suspenseful.