Tension maintains narrative drive in a novel. These 8 methods for elevating tension will help you raise it to white-hot levels:
Method 1: Keep complicating things
Raising the stakes and complicating your protagonist’s situation is a crucial approach to creating and maintaining tension in a novel. As the novel progresses, the situation should grow increasingly dire for your protagonist. Your story’s hero’s efforts to fix problems should sometimes fail, and in some cases these efforts can even worsen the story’s central problem.
For example, in a mystery novel, the detective could think she has identified who the murderer is. She could tell another character she believes is trustworthy about her suspicion. Unbeknownst to her, that character might accidentally relay this information to the actual murderer, playing into the murderer’s hands.
If complications are caused by a character’s actions, their actions should seem reasonable. Complications that occur as a result of characters acting unbelievably foolishly are likely to frustrate readers. Foolish actions might have a comical effect in farce but in serious drama they can stretch credibility.
Here are some other points to keep in mind when you use complications to build tension:
Method 2: Balance tension and release
The obstacles that create tension should be different sizes although the overall stakes should increase. Including tension-building plot events of different sizes creates variety. Small climaxes and small releases of tension give a story’s central conflicts more punch via contrast.
When reviewing a first draft, it’s a good idea to take notes on where you have included scenes that introduce additional tension and plot complications. Make sure the larger-stake issues are not all introduced and solved well before the climax. In fact, a climax can introduce one or more additional complications that keep suspense taut to the end of your story.
Keep in mind that story tension cannot be constant. Although this might seem to be the key to creating suspense and keeping your readers interested, a perpetual state of suspense can be difficult to maintain. Give your reader and protagonist(s) a moment to catch their breath, especially after a heavy or highly dramatic scene.
Method 3: Draw tension from diverse places
When we think about creating tension in storytelling, we generally think in terms of protagonists and antagonists. Tension comes from outside the protagonist — a malevolent or opposing external force. However, in addition to the tension created by the main opposing pair of characters or groups in your story, you can create tension using conflict between the protagonist and her and her colleagues and allies as well as internal conflict.
Example: In a romance novel, besides the conflicts that keep the protagonist apart from her love interest, she might also be having additional conflicts with her sister. Secondary character conflicts like these can be sustained across multi-novel arcs so that there is leftover tension to resolve.
Characters’ problems and motivations can be complicated by adding internal conflict. For example, the same protagonist who is in conflict with her sister may also be suffering internal conflict because she was badly disappointed in a previous relationship and fears getting involved with someone again. She thus fights against her desire to be with a new love interest.
An example of effective use of sustained internal conflict in story plotting lies in Showtime’s political thriller series Homeland. The main character chooses to go abroad on dangerous CIA assignments, partly due to emotional investment in her work but also to escape her fear of being an unfit, harmful parent to her child. This creates a sense of unresolved tension. Internal conflicts in her life leave viewers staying on to find out whether or not the character will overcome her private challenges.
Method 4: Use reversals, twists and revelations effectively
These are all excellent ways to heighten tension in a novel. For example [Star Wars spoiler alert], the moment that Luke Skywalker learns that Darth Vader is his father in Star Wars is both a twist and a revelation. The changing nature of the way the two characters are related creates internal conflict for Luke around their enmity.
A famous reversal from classic cinema appears near the end of Casablanca when Ilsa learns Rick is not coming with her.
The sense of unpredictability created by reversals, plot revelations and twists can be used to create unpredictability that raises narrative tension.
Method 5: Develop characters to create affect and investment
One important point to keep in mind regarding tension is that it is not the size of the stakes but how invested the reader is in those stakes that matters. Paying attention to the emotional aspect of story tension is critical since the reader must care about the imaginary world you create in order to care about your characters’ outcomes.
Well-developed story characters are crucial to emotional tension. Most passionate readers know the feeling of finishing a good book and feeling bereft without characters who came to feel like friends. Developing believable and engaging characters may seem unrelated to the task of building tension, but it is actually one of the most essential tasks of producing sustained dramatic tension.
Method 6: Write active characters
Active characters make things happen. They react, but they are also proactive. Passive characters let things happen to them. Passive characters are usually not the protagonist (except in some tragedies), and they rarely create tension through outward action — internal conflicts are usually the primary source of tension where these fictional characters are concerned.
When active characters keep actively striving for objectives but take missteps, story tension mounts.
Method 7: Avoid tension destroyers
There are a few things you should not do or only do sparingly in your novel to avoid dissolving tension:
- Don’t overdo backstory. Your characters had lives before the story started. Sometimes it is necessary to explain your character’s psychologies via their pasts. However, too much back story can slacken the pace of your novel.
- Don’t tell the reader everything. Tighten your writing. You might have noticed that people in movies and TV shows rarely say goodbye — they just hang up the phone. This cuts any fat from the scene. Books are no different. Stick to the most important information.
- Don’t waste time idling. Your story and your tension should always be on the rise. The tension might build quickly or very slowly, but the story should always be moving forward in some way, begging the question ‘what next?’.
Method 8: Build tension using your genre’s strengths
All novels need tension, but different types of stories produce tension from different sources. The main tension in a romance novel will come from whether or not the protagonist and the love interest get together, for example.
By contrast, the main tension in a crime novel derives from the question of whether or not the mystery will be solved; the criminal caught. Sometimes aspiring authors’ novels fall flat because they forget to focus on what should be the main source of tension for their genre.
Once you’ve identified the central tensions for both your story premise and genre, you can create secondary sources of tension. Your detective in a mystery novel might also be struggling with a thorny romantic relationship. Characters fighting to save their home from repossession in a family saga might deal with broader societal pressures.
Making your novel taut with tension keeps your reader interested, and tension is especially crucial to successful storytelling in genres such as thrillers. Raising the stakes and complicating situations with both large and small obstacles, for characters your readers care about, ensures that your novel will crackle with tension.
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Originally published at www.nownovel.com on July 16, 2015.
