How To Create Tension In Your Novel
Other People’s Thoughts About Creating Tension In Your Story
Richie Billing is a writer with a podcast and classes and books and a blog. On that blog, he says,
“The best way to create tension in writing is to introduce conflicts or obstacles for your characters. These obstacles could be other characters, such as your villain or antagonist. They could also be internal barriers, like mental health problems. Or they could be physical conflicts like a blood-thirsty dragon.
Foreshadowing this conflict is a key part of building tension. Dropping hints of what may come can hook the reader and keep them wanting more.”
So, how do you do that?
You want your character to want something. You want the reader to care whether or not the character gets it or not. And then you want there to be obstructions that prevent that goal from being easy for your character.
Foreshadowing is just a hint of what’s going to happen.
Billings calls foreshadowing “the promise of conflict,” and I like that. It’s a big tease, right? It can also be the promise of resolution.
New York Editors actually blogs about four levels of tension here.
“TENSION WITHIN THE PROTAGONIST
As you introduce the protagonist into your story, there should be both internal conflict and conflict with some external force (whether that’s an antagonist, a series of unfortunate problems, etc.).
TENSION BETWEEN THE CHARACTERS
Show what each of the characters anticipate in every scene. What’s left unsaid between the characters?
TENSION AT EVERY SCENE
Answer the questions, what is at stake for the characters in this scene? What could go wrong? What could go right?
Create a sense of anticipation with every scene. No only should every scene move the story forward, it should also increase the tension within the protagonist in some way.
TENSION WITHIN THE OVERALL STORY
There should be an element of anticipation in the overall story also. This will most likely be resolved after the climax. However, other layers of tension, such as that between or within characters, can stretch the entire scope of the story and be resolved towards the end.
*OPTIONAL LAYER: TENSION WITH THE NARRATOR
This one won’t apply to every story, but for those of you using an unreliable narrator, you can develop a sense of tension and conflict between the narrator and the reader. Can I trust this narrator? Why don’t things add up? Who can I trust in this story?”
They suggest that to build tension, you should:
1. Shorten up your words.
2. Shorten up your sentences.
3. Build that tension over time to make your reader ponder what might happen, so sprinkle in tension-building tidbits and moments, facts and correlatives
4. Color code things to see if it’s working. I do this a lot when I talk to people about scene layering. But it’s basically you make up a color for aspects of story (senses, emotion, setting, action, reaction, exposition, dialogue) and see if your page is all one color. If it’s all one color? It’s not good.
5. Remember that conflict and tension aren’t quite the same thing. Conflict is a force working against your goals (see Billings above), but tension is an emotional connection between the reader and the character where the reader cares that your heroic firefighter might get eating by zombie gerbils.
Fiction writer and coach and editor, Rachel Grosvenor suggests:
Conflict (do you see a trend?)
Cliffhangers
Varying tension
Creating a ticking clock (they have to do this by this time or the gerbils will rule the world)
There are a lot of suggestions out there, and you see some overlap, right?
You want the reader to go after something and you want the reader to care whether or not the character gets it.
You want to not have everything be high tension all the time. So you want to have it go up and down.
You want to have conflict (see above) that matters.
You want to vary sentence structure, paragraph length, white space and even use different word choices to imply that tension.