Authors: Jordan Rosenfeld
Imagine you're watching a game of tug-of-war between two strong men. Between them is a length of rope stretched over a pit full of angry, poisonous vipers. One man pulls the rope his way and the other man teeters on the brink of falling in. Then the teetering man pulls back and soon it's the first man whose life is at risk. This is a visual analogy for the effect of one of the most crucial core scene elements of all: dramatic tension.
Dramatic tension is the
potential
for conflict to happen in a scene. When trouble is brewing, or resolution balances on a pinhead, the reader will be psychologically and even physically tense, and this tension, believe it or not, keeps a reader reading. You couldn't walk away from that tug-of-war match without knowing what's going to happen to both men!
Unlike suspense, which is achieved when information is actually withheld from the reader, dramatic tension relies on the reader knowing that something is about to go down—just not how, and when exactly. Tension keeps the reader waiting with breath held and fists clenched, hoping that the protagonist makes it out of the scene alive, in love, or with his goal achieved (and no viper bites).
As a core element, dramatic tension must be present in every scene on some level. It may take the shape of a prickly feeling of unease your protagonist has when he enters the dark building where the killer was last seen, or an unsettling exchange of dialogue as he wonders if he has just picked an argument with a dangerous man.
Scenes need tension to avoid being mundane or dull. A fiction narrative is a heightened experience of reality in which life is more intense, unusual, and dramatic than real life; else why bother writing about it. Therefore, you want to employ techniques that keep the world inside your narrative from resembling too exactly the quotidian life that most people actually lead. By building a sense of trouble, or the potential for it, into every scene, you will hook the reader. We'll be looking at all of these techniques for building tension in different scene types in part three, but it's useful to have an overview of how tension works first.
Dramatic tension can turn a domestic scene into a nightmare, and it all stems from letting your characters feel uncertain, afraid, and baffled as they wait for the worst and hope for the best.
Most important, tension is what keeps a scene from falling flat, and it's necessary in every scene. To create it you must:
• Thwart your protagonist's goals—delay satisfaction
• Include unexpected changes without immediate explanation
• Shift power back and forth
• Pull the rug out—throw in a piece of plot information that changes or alters your protagonist in some way
• Create a tense atmosphere through setting and senses
EXPOSITION AND TENSION
The language that runs between all the other major scene elements is often referred to as exposition or narrative summary. Just like tendons connect muscle to bone, narrative summary links your scene elements so they don't float, leaving your scene disjointed or weak-kneed. Too much exposition, however, kills the possibility of dramatic tension because it quickly bores the reader. These passages of
telling
prose should be used strategically to
build tension or to act as theater ushers, directing the reader's attention on to the important moments in the scene.
Condensing Time
No matter how fascinating your story and how interesting your characters, you can't show every moment of their lives in a single narrative. In order to select the moments to dramatize, you also must select which moments in time to condense, or to summarize. Below is an example from Richard Gwyn's novel
The Color of a Dog Running Away.
Lucas, a translator living in Barcelona, has just begun a love affair with the beautiful and enigmatic Nuria, who he met by following a mysterious invitation to an art gallery. The author has already dramatized the initial throes of attraction and the activities that the newly blissful couple have spent the past few weeks engaged in. Now he needs to speed the plot forward, so he does so with narrative summary:
In the two weeks that followed, Nuria and I spent every free moment with each other. We ate together, slept together, phoned each other when she was at work, and lived for the evenings and the nights.
Gwyn skillfully collapses two whole weeks into quick summary and then quickly returns to the action:
One lunchtime I was already on the bench, having spent some time there reading over proofs in the morning sun with a bottle of cold beer. Nuria arrived, exuberant, flushed.
By condensing small passages of irrelevant events in short windows of time, you ensure that your prose won't be flabby and that you can continue to keep tension alive.
Condensing Information
Your characters will be doctors and architects and tradespeople of all kinds. They will weave intricate designs out of silk, build plans for large skyscrapers, and study the flora and fauna of their worlds. What they do as a vocation, a hobby, or for pure survival may be of great interest to you, and may even play a crucial role in your narrative, so you may want to describe the breathtaking minutia of a heart surgery or the drafting of a blueprint because it captures your imagination. Too much description, however— whether in dialogue or through narrative passages—will read like a technical manual and offer no possibility for tension. You want to first digest it, and then filter it through the point of view of your character, offering a condensed version of the facts that gives the reader a taste, a flash, or an insight your characters.
The same is true of information that comes as a result of crime scene investigations, or any mystery that can be solved—from the ancient origins of a sacred relic, to a murder, to how an entire civilization disappeared. Any line of investigation and inquiry will naturally come with lots of clues and information that your characters will need to offer to readers to drive the plot forward and explain things.
Your job is to condense it in a way that adds to the tension and drama of your narrative. For example, in Joanne Harris's novel
Sleep, Pale Sister,
Henry Chester is a painter with a fascination for one model in particular— Effie, a young girl upon whom he projects innocence. He becomes obsessed with her and paints her many times, but rather than showing a bunch of dull sittings, Harris gives the reader an overview of all the sittings in quick, expert lines of exposition that, rather than being boring, add up in their condensed description to an eerie feeling of tension and concern:
I must have drawn or painted Effie a hundred times: she was Cinderella, she was Mary, she was the young novice in
The Passion Flower;
she was Beatrice in Heaven, Juliet in the tomb, draped with Lilies and trailing convolvulus for Ophelia, in rags for "The Little Beggar Girl." My final portrait of her at that time was The Sleeping Beauty, so like My Sister's Sleep in composition, showing Effie all in white again, like a bride or a novice, lying on the same little girl's bed, her hair, much longer than it had been when she was ten — I had always urged her never to cut it—trailing on to the floor, where a century's worth of dust lingers.
When you condense information like this, try to do so in a way that creates a feeling of trouble brewing. Add up elements that give the reader concern for your protagonist, or suggest a behavior that is a little off-center, or obsessive, or potentially volatile. If the devil is in the details, then use these details strategically to build tension when you tell the reader about the vocation and activities your protagonist (or antagonist) engages in.
OTHER TENSION-BUILDING TRICKS
There really is no good reason not to have dramatic tension in your narrative, because there are so many ways to create it. The next set of techniques can be thought of as tension tools that you can keep in your writer's kit and pull out fairly easily to infuse tension into individual scenes.
Including Foreboding
Foreboding is a feeling that something bad or unpleasant is coming for your protagonist. Unlike foreshadowing, which hints at actual plot events to come, foreboding is purely about mood-setting. It heightens the feeling of tension in a scene but doesn't necessarily indicate that something bad really will happen.
Here's an example from Don DeLillo's novel
White Noise.
In this scene, the young son of Professor Jack Gladney and his wife, Babette, wakes up one day crying and doesn't cease for seven hours straight. Though they can find nothing physically wrong with him, the crying is so abnormal that they take him to the doctor—where they get no answers. His crying instills terror in the family, and it presages a more dramatic situation that is to come later in the book—that of an airborne toxic cloud that descends over their town inexplicably. Notice how something simple like a crying child creates tension and foreboding in the following passage:
As I started the car I realized his crying had changed in pitch and quality. The rhythmic urgency had given way to a sustained inarticulate and mournful sound. He was keening now. These were expressions of Mideast-ern lament, of an anguish so accessible that it rushes to overwhelm what immediately caused it. There was something permanent and soul-struck in this crying. It was a sound of inbred desolation.
Since the child is pre-verbal, one gets the feeling that he feels on some level what is to come, and DeLillo conveys this tense, uneasy feeling without dropping any direct plot information. The scene is eerie, tragic, and unnerving, full of dramatic tension as the reader wonders what on earth is going on.
When you create foreboding, remember to think about atmosphere and mood. Invoke the senses. There's something deeply eerie about the sound of a crying child in the previous. Think about how you can use sound—like the plaintive cawing of seagulls; or smell—think of what kind of effect a foul odor will have on a character. Foreboding happens in the moment. You don't have to make good on it the way you do if you use foreshadowing. You're painting an atmosphere to establish a feeling of uneasiness and worry in the reader.
Thwarting Expectation
When a character has an expectation or desire in a scene (and characters always should!), you have a great opportunity to create tension by making the reader (and the character) worry that the expectation will not be met. This can be a large expectation, like the bride waiting at the altar, or something seemingly small, like in this example from Diane Setterfield's novel
The Thirteenth Tale.
Protagonist Margaret Lea is an amateur biographer and book lover who has been asked to write the biography of the enigmatic and famous writer Vida Winter. In preparation, she begins to read Winter's famous work, concluding with a book of stories called
Thirteen Tales.
Notice how the simple act of expectation—of reading the thirteenth tale—takes on tension as Margaret's expectations are thwarted:
It was while I was reading "The Mermaid's Tale"—the twelfth tale—that I began to feel stirrings of an anxiety that was unconnected to the story itself. I was distracted: my thumb and right index finger were sending me a message: Not many pages left. The knowledge nagged more insistently until I tilted the book to check. It was true. The thirteenth tale must be a very short one.
I continued my reading, finished tale twelve and turned the page.
Blank.
I flicked back, forward again. Nothing.
There was no thirteenth tale.
There was a sudden rush in my head, I felt the sick dizziness of the deep-sea diver come too fast to the surface.
This sets up a mood for the rest of the novel. Things are not as they seem. Pieces of the story are missing. It's a brilliant stroke of dramatic tension.
In order to carry this out, you must put something at stake for your protagonist regarding whatever it is he expects, something meaningful to him emotionally, or that has consequences in his life somehow. A man waiting to find out the results of her mother's will, for instance, has a great deal invested in the results. If the lawyer continues over a long period to read out assets that are granted to cousins and relatives less directly tied to his mother, the scene will take on tension. What, if anything, has his mother left your character?
Thwarting expectations is a technique I recommend you use frequently. For if your protagonist gets what she wants or expects in too many scenes, there will be little tension left to keep the reader hooked.
Making Changes Without Explanation
People like to know why things happen, especially when it comes to change. Therefore, if you want to create tension in a scene, you can change something in your protagonist's life without giving him an immediate explanation. The change can be life-altering, or it can be something more befuddling, like in this example from a scene in another of Joanne Harris's novels,
Gentlemen & Players:
As the door closed I saw a pile of flat-packed cardboard boxes propped up against the wall.
"Busy day today?" I asked him, indicating the boxes. "What is it? Invading Poland?"
Gerry twitched. "No, ah — just moving a few things around. Ah—to the new departmental office."