Shivering with antici...: re-released

This post was originally published for paid subscribers of Red Pens and Playwriting in October of 2024. I had a lot of fun writing it and think it's rather good, so now I'm releasing it for everyone to enjoy! I may have tweaked it here and there while I was at it as well...

Stories need tension.

People often talk about how you can't have a story without conflict (which will need to be unpacked in its own post in the future), but sometimes I wonder if what they really mean is that you can't have a story without some sort of tension. We tell stories, firstly, to ask questions, and then to answer them, in due course, once the audience has had a chance to stew in antici...pation. (You knew I was going to have to follow up on the joke.) If there are no lingering questions posed, no unknowns for the recipient of our story to ponder over, there's no reason for them to care. So they won't. And they'll leave.

How, then, can you ensure the continued attention of your reader? There are no guarantees, of course, as there are many factors that go into a reader's decisions, but being able to manipulate tension is a great way to keep them engaged and wanting more. The amount and type of tension you'll want to aim for will be dependent on the genre and style you're writing in; think about the difference between rom-coms, which tend to be fairly formulaic and low-stakes, and psychological thrillers, in which high levels of tension are foundational.

There are many ways that tension can be generated, such as obscuring information...

[Editor's note: this is where the paywall began on the original post. Go on, appreciate my humour!]

...and delaying or drip-feeding its release. In fact, tension is all about the dispensation of information: what does the reader know, and what do they need to know? What do the characters know and need to know? What sort of disparity is there, and how are the unknown things being teased and hinted at?

This particular type of tension-building is easy to examine in the genre of mystery novels, where the reader follows a detective as they try to discover the details and perpetrator of a crime. Mystery writers need to parcel out information very carefully, so that they don't give away the solution to the puzzle too early but also leave enough clues that the reader, and the detective, can put the pieces together by the end of the plot. The genre is also a good pattern for a variety of different ways that information can be concealed from different parties, for example:

• Someone (generally the perpetrator) is just straight up lying about what they know because they want to obscure their involvement in the crime.
• Someone else may be hiding information that they think will harm them or someone they love, even if it has nothing to do with the case in hand. The detective may pick up on suspicious behaviours and inconsistencies due to the subterfuge, but not know the reason for it.
• Characters may be providing alibis for each other, so will know the other's whereabouts. The detective may not know for sure whether the alibis are true, and there is a reasonable possibility that one of the characters has persuaded the other to lie for them.
• A character might realise that they do know something pertinent that no-one else but the perpetrator knows. Usually, this results in that character being silenced once they reveal that they know something, but before they can share what it is.
• A character might hold vital information, but not be aware of its importance until they happen to mention it in front of the detective.
• Detectives often like to play things close to their chests, and don't always share their suspicions with other characters, or with the reader.
• The novel may include scenes giving the reader a little bit of insight into the commission of the crime that no other characters would have any knowledge of. (This is an example of dramatic irony, a very key technique for tension-bulding.)

Note that none of these techniques are limited to mystery stories; they can easily be shaped for whatever genre or context is needed. A fantasy story may include a shifty advisor out for his own ends who turnes out not to be as evil as the protagonist thought, or a horror story might use "monster-vision" to reveal things to the reader that no human character lives to recount.

For sweeping epics on the scale of A Song of Ice and Fire, or even just cross-continent adventures like Dracula, being able to spread the action over a great deal of space and hop between characters in completely different locations can be an effective way of creating dramatic irony, as the reader knows more than any single character possibly could. The reader will also be able to connect events and knowledge from separate storylines, and might even be able to foresee how characters' actions in location A are going to throw a spanner in the works for what the characters in location B are planning. Very tense!

As well as the spread of information, another key element of developing tension is the stakes. What are the consequences if the protagonist screws up, and how likely is that to happen, given what they may or may not know?

It's important, first of all, that the stakes matter. There's a big difference between dropping a carton of eggs on the floor when you're trying to make breakfast and dropping a priceless Fabergé egg while robbing a museum. The less reversible the consequences are, the more tension the possibility of failure carries with it. But the stakes also need to be meaningful. Saving a busload of strangers is a morally good thing to do, but if we know that the hero's little sister is on the bus we gain a much more personal investment in the rescue. Just pushing the stakes higher and higher doesn't necessarily maintain high levels of tension; without a strong personal connection to the outcome, saving the world yet again just starts to feel a bit abstract. (This is, by the way, a common problem in serialised fiction such as TV shows—they have a bunch of sequential story arcs that each somehow need to top all the previous ones. It gets pretty unsustainable after a while, especially if you started out with something on the level of stopping an apocalypse.)

Note that I haven't said anything specifically about surprising your readers. Having unanswered questions that need figuring out is one thing, and plot twists are entirely different. In fact, an unexpected plot twist is antithetical to building tension: you get tension from the anticipation of knowing something is coming, but not necessarily what it is, or how it's going to happen, whereas the point of a plot twist is that it is entirely unanticipated. When tension is properly resolved, your readers should have an "aha!" moment, not be left with a "wait, what?" There are, of course, times and places for plot twists, but they cannot be used effectively as a replacement for proper suspense.

To finish, I'll leave you with a quote from the king of suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock:

Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!"

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense.