Prose Pointer: Building Tension (Patreon)

I talked a little bit about tension in my last Prose Pointer on writing action scenes, so this time around, I want to expand on it – particularly the building of tension using high stakes and consequences. Now, there’s both large-scale and small-scale tension. Or, there’s tension that builds throughout the story toward the climax, and there’s tension that lasts for shorter periods of time. Let’s talk about overarching tension first.

There are a lot of reasons for a reader to care about your story. The characters and the main conflict they’re in are two big ones, but in the end, it’s tension that keeps us invested. For example, behind an artist’s witty but biting sarcasm is a tender heart that’s scared of being rejected again, and for the reader who loves her, there’s tension in the fear of that happening. Or maybe a character sets out to go after an infamous cure for a zombie outbreak because his partner got bit and time is limited, and all the reader can do is watch the metaphorical clock tick.

With those two examples in mind, you can recognize perhaps the most important aspect of large-scale tension – the stakes. In order for your reader to feel the same tension that your characters do and want to keep reading, the stakes need to be high. If I wrote about our digital artist applying for her dream job from behind a desk at her current workplace, you might not care much about the results. But if she gets rejected because her portfolio isn’t broad enough, and quits her job to focus on building it while her savings dwindles away, there’s suddenly more at stake. And we as a reader, who started because we were endeared to her sarcasm, keep reading because we want to see her succeed in spite of mounting odds.

Once the stakes are established, they must be maintained, and that means there needs to be real consequences for failure. What if, early on, our artist drops her expensive tablet, and it breaks? She might find a used one for sale online and take out cash to go buy it, but on the way there, she loses the cash. That money is gone and she’s not getting it back, and now she has to make other sacrifices in order to buy that used tablet. Maybe the consequence is something tangible, like she can barely afford food for the next couple weeks. Or maybe it’s an emotional consequence, like that’s the first time she questions if she’s on the right path and thinks about giving up her dream.

By enforcing consequences on your characters, it ensures a maintenance of tension in the face of the stakes. Your reader won’t keep bothering to root for your character if a win is guaranteed. Nor will they stress or feel fear with your character if there’s no repercussions to mistakes and bad decisions. Not only does enforcing consequences maintain tension, but when we face obstacles and consequences as that clock keeps ticking, as the character and reader get closer to the end without having fulfilled the goal or reconciled the stakes, tension builds.

That being said, you can use stakes and consequences on a smaller scale too. I’m going to skip other tips because I talked about pacing in my pointer on action scenes - short sentence length and action verbs make for tense snappy moments, and focusing on finer details can slow things down and draw tension out instead – and you can apply these techniques to other types of scenes as well. But if you want to make a scene tense without changing the pace of it, then stakes and consequences are the meat and potatoes.

Continuing to use our digital artist as an example: landing her dream career is the overall stake, and the consequence of failure will be losing everything or going back to a soul-crushing corporate job. Great, we know the large-scale of it. So, let’s set up a scene on a smaller scale.

She discovers she has a friend with a connection. He knows someone who already works at her dream job, and she wants to throw a small get together/party to introduce herself to this person and possibly present her portfolio. This wouldn’t change the overarching stakes of the story. However, it would introduce a temporary, scene-specific tension as she tries to navigate her nerves and the etiquette of making professional connections at a social gathering.

Maybe her nerves coupled with high heels make her stumble over the carpet and spill a bit of wine, and she’s worried it made her look drunk. Maybe she pronounces the person’s name wrong, or fears that the worn, beaten look of her used tablet makes her look unprofessional as she tries to present her portfolio. Maybe she spent too much of her remaining money on the party and is scared it won’t work. Or maybe all of these things are true and happen throughout the course of the night. The stake in this situation is a potentially life-changing relationship, and the consequence of these blunders (failure) is making a bad impression instead of a good one. That type of risk vs. reward can introduce an immense amount of tension, and all without changing the pace of the writing.

When all is said and done, nothing builds tension like giving your reader something to worry about. In the next Prose Pointer, I think I’d like to talk about breaking tension, but hopefully this has given you some more ideas about how to develop it in the first place. Happy writing!