“As novelists, we should ask or imply a question at the beginning of the story, and then we should delay the answer,” he said. “Readers are human, and humans seem programmed to wait for answers to questions they witness being asked.” Child sees every book as a series of big and small questions: who killed the victim? Why did they do it? How will the protagonist discover the killer? And so on, down to the subclause level. He went on: “Page to page, paragraph to paragraph, line to line — even within single sentences — imply a question first, and then answer it second. The reader learns to chase, and the momentum becomes unstoppable.”