Prose Pointer: Breaking Tension (Patreon)

In the last Prose Pointer, I talked about building tension, so it only follows that we talk about breaking it. It’s important to know that breaking tension is just as crucial as building it. The same way your characters can’t go from event to event without eventually needing some rest in between, your reader also needs time to recover lest they start to feel fatigued.

One way to ease the tension when going from one event to another is to slow things down in between those events. In writing, you have some tools for pacing at your disposal that other forms of media don’t – yes, I mean sentence structure… again. I know it keeps coming up, but it’s important to know just how powerful flow can be. Last time I talked about how slowing things down could build tension, but it can also break it. If you’ve just written a fight scene or an argument where sentences were snappy, short, blunt, and every other adjective to provoke intensity, then don’t underestimate how much relief your reader can feel from you simply slowing things down. Rather than focusing on the minute details of action and movement like you would to build tension, focus on the space your character has to breathe, or on the slowing of their pulse, or their relief as they take in the state of their surviving companions.

Another way to let your main characters take a breather after a big fight is simply to let them rest. This is why there’s frequently emotional bonding or reflective periods after action scenes, and I want to use an actual example from The Last of Us on HBO (if you haven’t seen it, I wouldn’t say this is spoiler heavy, but I apologize if there’s anything here you didn’t want to know).

In this scene from season 1, episode 4, Joel and Ellie get out of a hairy fight, and while they’re waiting to keep running, they have a few quiet minutes to rest. During these few minutes, they talk about what just happened. In his own dysfunctional way, Joel expresses a concern for Ellie’s emotional well-being over what happened, which is a big deal for him and the viewer. In turn, Ellie also opens up to him a little bit, and then they have a bonding moment over Joel teaching her the proper way to hold a gun. Thus, we get to see some emotional warmth in a story that’s otherwise brutal and bleak, and when we get the feeling from their talk that they’ll be okay, it provides us with some necessary relief from the tension of their violent world.

Another thing that really helps break tension, even in this scene between Joel and Ellie, is humor. The talk they have still contains some of its own tension, as emotional scenes often do. Joel’s concern for Ellie’s emotional/mental health doesn’t get relieved because she admits to having shot someone before, and then there’s the contextual tension of Joel caring for her despite himself. So, even within the scene itself, the writers use humor to help us relax, like Ellie sarcastically agreeing with Joel that he’s bad at expressing emotions. Or how the writers signal the ending of the scene with another bit of humor, as Joel tells Ellie to put the gun in her backpack instead of the back of her pants because “You’ll shoot your damn ass off.” The viewer gets to laugh, the scene can transition, and with that bit of rest and relief from the intensity of the fight and their talk, we’re ready to get back into some action.

The way you break tension might be a heart to heart between action scenes like Joel and Ellie’s, or you might want to break tension mid fight to let your reader get one gasp of air before plunging back in (like Starlord’s “dance off bro” in Guardians of the Galaxy). However you choose to do it, whether it’s completely unique to your story and characters, or if it’s a more common tactic like the ones I mentioned, don’t forget how important it is. Your characters aren’t the only ones who need a little rest and recuperation after things get tense, and we all need to recover our emotional stamina so we aren’t exhausted and numb when tension inevitably builds again.