What is tension? A useful guide.
I wished somebody told me this earlier:
Tension is the number of unique, meaningful timelines the story could branch into at any given moment.
Instead, every time I looked for an article for what the hell is ‘Tension’ in storytelling, I kept stumbling across guide after guide telling me to add tension into scenes by… (after digesting the words for a bit) adding tension. This was hugely unhelpful, and tautologous.
If I heard that quote up at the top of the page way back then, I would have perfectly understood what tension was. Assuming you are not a carbon copy of me from several years ago, I’ll see if I can elaborate with a few examples to help you understand.
The Classic approach
Traditionally, tension is viewed as invisible/mental conflict. E.g:
When two characters meet, find out they hate each other, but need to work together for their respective goals.
Provided you’ve established agency for both of those characters, then your audience should be unable to guess if:
A. They both play nice,
B. One snaps, before the other
C. One doesn’t snap at all
Voilà, we’ve created tension! Some definitions of tension are simply this, and in my opinion do the abstract concept a great disservice. Let’s rewind one step in the example:
Your character is about to meet a stranger, needing their help for a goal.
Here, there’s no actual conflict. But there’s tension. And more tension than the first example, because you’re no longer wondering just what they’ll do, but also who they are. To borrow from engineering terms, it’s another degree of freedom.
If you’re not convinced the latter has more tension, try imagining either example lasting for over an hour.
Another Take
Since tension clearly isn’t just another name for mental conflict, it’s something greater. In both examples we have a sense of unease, and many online resources would have you believe they are one and the same. I’m not entirely against this.
However, it is not constructive to add tension by creating unease, or keep the audience ‘on their toes’, etc, because all these viewer reactions are dependent on the viewer and not in the text itself. I think this is a very important distinction to make.
So how would one go about adding tension to a scene?
Raise the stakes
Ah, the tried and true method of adding tension. Nothing could possibly go wrong if we just added more stakes. Right? WRONG.
The reason why raising the stakes usually raises the tension, is because the breadth of failure scenarios increase proportionally with the stakes.
For a few scenarios, let’s play with three levels of stakes, high enough to avoid any sort of interpersonal drama, Continent, Planet, & Universe.
- A wizard must stop a monster before it destroys the _____.
- A citizen decides to press a button that either saves, or destroys the _____.
To compare the increase in tension, both the citizen and the wizard should come into the situation thinking only a single city is at stake, only to learn the true level of risk.
Now, in which example is the increase in tension the greatest? It should always be the wizard.
Why? Because stopping a monster is not a boolean operation like pressing a button; A monster can be slowed before it is stopped. By increasing the stakes from city to say…Planet, you can still lose the city, but save the planet. Raising the stakes only works if you are raising the maximum level of the stakes.
Again, play out these scenarios over an hour. It’s almost inconceivable (but not impossible) to wizard has no collateral damage, but the citizen’s situation is completely unchanged, regardless of the stakes — Which brings me to another common misconception.
The Countdown
Contrary to popular belief, countdowns do not by themselves create tension, they pad time. In fact, waiting any pre-determined amount of time doesn’t create tension, because there are only really two timelines that can result from that scenario:
A. You successfully wait the time, OR
B. You don’t.
What actually raises the tension, is waiting an indeterminate amount of time. When you add a timer to the indeterminate wait, it adds tension because now it is a race.
If you must do some sort of countdown, do what Futurama did, and use a random number generator
What was that about timelines?
So you’ve skipped through the rest of the article to the part where I actually explain that definition at the top. For reference:
Tension is the number of unique, meaningful timelines the story could branch into at any given moment.
In this context, a timeline is a consequence of a choice/decision/conflict, and not an actual timeline. Following the analogy, then that means collapsing the decision/conflict superposition into a resolution ‘timeline’ will greatly remove tension in a scene.
Conversely, adding tension is as simple as giving characters more different, meaningful choices to make, and/or adding more conflicts into the mix.
But there’s a catch.
The Catch
If everyone took stories at face value with no context, there’s not much to room to stuff up adding tension. But people read into the meta-narrative.
The meta-narrative is the true villain that usually removes tension from a story. It is the ability for the viewer to guess what will happen next based on prior input.
For example, if a character previously survives a long fall off a cliff, the viewer will believe the next life threatening obstacle will be similarly harmless.
The loss of one’s suspension of disbelief is the most violent way to lose tension. So while there may be an infinite number of divergent timelines for any given story beat, as shown by the hand of the author; We can only count those where the hand remains hidden in determining the tension of a story.
