Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-26444017-20191023053921/@comment-26444017-20191024062940

The point isn't so much that it's a murder story, but that it's taking place in public and no one bats an eye, and that it's personal and visceral. In my ideal telling, you should feel a tingle in the spine when you imagine yourself in her place. Still working on getting to that point.

To address the audience problem, I'm sad to say that there are people dense enough to fall for it, even when it isn't veiled like that. But that's not the point. People don't go to a magic show expecting someone to die. They expect something they can't explain easily, that leaves them wondering. They expect cheap tricks that are only interesting because they don't know how to do them. Normally with that trick, you wonder how she's still in one piece, but you don't even wonder that anymore because everyone knows the trick. There's a false sense of security there that needs to be acknowledged. If the magician on stage tells you there's nothing to worry about, if he plays it off like everything is fine, then you don't really question it. It's all part of the act.