Tension

Get your hero in danger--and keep him in danger!

-- H. Bedford Jones

The section on tension is largely gathered from Dwight Swain's Techniques of the Selling Writer.

Swain defines a story as "the record of how somebody deals with danger" (118). The point of a story is to make readers feel something, and what they want to feel is the tension. Yes, the satisfaction comes from the release of tension, but there will be no satisfaction if there was never any tension to begin with. Tension is what keeps the reader from getting distracted by all the other entertainment competing for her attention.

How to create tension

Raymond Chandler suggests taking something that really happens and make it happen more rapidly, to a closer-knit group of people, and within a narrower frame of logic.

What causes tension?

Fear.

What causes fear?

Endangering the character's survival or happiness.

The key is to make sure the reader is aware of the danger. If the protagonist is skipping merrily along when she gets eaten by a wolf, that wasn't a very tense story. If she hears something rustle in the bushes and continues on her walk anyway, then at least the reader starts to feel on edge.

How to release tension

Don't leave the story hanging. The satisfaction comes from release of tension.

Swain says that if the protagonist has made good choices, reward him/her. If the protagonist has made bad choices, punish him/her. Readers had some reassurance in their philosophy of how the world works or should work. Swain argues that there is, in fact, this kind of karma in the world, but we're so bent up about the injustices that we fail to notice it.

What to keep secret

In my own writing, I found that, according to my critics, the motivation of my point-of-view character Janek was not clear. People had difficulty relating to him because they didn't know his motivation. His goal was clear, but not why he had the goal. On my third draft, I added in quite early in the story where Janek talks a little about his upbringing and why he wants to become the greatest musician in the world. However, The Editor warned against giving out this information. The reader must begin to ask the question "Why does he want to be the greatest musician in the world?" before the narration answers it.

My novel also has a complex plot--five interweaving storylines. I noticed that some of my critics were forgetting important details that brought all the stories together because there was so much jumping around between stories. When I wrote my third draft, I decided to take the classic essay/presentation format and "tell 'em what I'm going to tell 'em, tell 'em, and tell 'em what I told 'em." This, apparently, was not a good idea. What I did was gave one of the characters a vision of the future (visions, to be fair, was an element in the first draft that got deleted in the second draft). This vision warned her against what could happen--a boy with a guitar could trigger the apocalypse by playing the greatest song ever composed. The vision went into repercussions including how all angels and demons would fight over the boy's soul, leaving the world to fend for itself. The Editor, as you can probably guess, advised not to give away the plot ahead of time even if the readers are getting lost. There are much better ways to clarify the story without completely killing the tension.

Changes

The tense moments are the moments when there are changes in the character's state of mind. Swain says that "Word photography isn't enough" (49). There must be changes in both external and internal worlds.

Each cause has multiple effects. Each effect has mutliple causes.