Editor’s Notes: Ramping Up The Tension

BY JESSICA SHEN

While plot and character and setting are all well and good (I mean, I GUESS those components are important…) what will really keep your reader up to ungodly hours of the night flipping pages is tension. Tension, conflict, peril—these all compel us to keep reading to find out what happens next. You could have a great plot and fascinating characters, but if you don’t have tension, you’ve got a bland story that hasn’t got a hope in hell of keeping anyone’s attention.

So, how do you introduce tension into your story? Assuming you’ve already nailed down your characters and your plot (I can’t do all the work for you, right?), here are a few things to think about:

1. Make things hard for your characters. We like to see them struggle—that’s what makes a good story! Would we all love Harry Potter as much if all he had to do to defeat Voldy was look up his address in the phone book and avada kedavra him in his sleep? Okay, that’s a bit extreme, but how much less compelling would it have been if he hadn’t struggled in school, or fought with Ron and Hermione, or had any of the hundreds of small difficulties he went through? If your character is riding a bike for the first time, don’t give him a natural talent for bike riding. If she has to mix up a potion, make her a terrible cook.

1. Use examples from other media and/or everyday life as source material. One of the most effective pieces of advice I’ve given was to an author who had written a battle scene. It was a decent battle scene, but it was missing that extra bit of oomph. I told him to watch the first ten minutes of Saving Private Ryan, then to go back and rewrite the scene.
   If you haven’t seen the movie before, here’s what happens: Tom Hanks lands at Omaha Beach in the beginning of the Invasion of Normandy. It’s horribly chaotic and messy and gory. At one point, he loses his hearing from a grenade blast, and—here’s the clincher—our hearing gets knocked out as well. The audience is thrown headlong into the action. It’s a phenomenal representation of the horrors of wartime, and a cinematic masterpiece, and the author came back with fantastically nuanced and powerful scene that blew my socks off.
   If you’re having a hard time with a particular scene, look to another source that does well what you’re trying to do. I’m not saying that you should copy it, but hopefully it can give you some good perspective and inspiration. (By the way, the author was Ben Ireland, and the scene is from Kingdom City: Resurrection.  Go buy it today! How else will you know what I’m talking about?)

Now, for some more technical advice:

1. Passive voice. Try not to use it. It’s inevitable that you will, but try to keep the ratio of passive verbs to active verbs around 1:4. Passive voice sits primly with her hands crossed across her lap. Active voice climbs trees and shakes leaves down on unsuspecting passersby. The problem of passive voice is that it so often is the default. Do a search and replace for passive verbs and try switching them to active verbs. It may not seem like much, but over the course of a paragraph, a page, a chapter, you’ll find that the text is lighter, bouncier, stronger, more alive.
2. Dynamic language. Use it. Why say something is bad, when you can say it’s terrible, awful, heart-rending, or horrifying? I’m not saying you need to replace all your $0.02 words with $0.25 words, but don’t be afraid to be bold. You can always turn down the drama if it’s too much.
3. On that note, don’t use the same words to describe something boring and something exciting. Let’s say we’ve got two pictures: one of a girl (perhaps her name is Passive Voice) staring at a wall, and the other of another girl (Active Voice) hiding behind a tree while a bear approaches. You could say that both girls are still, or unmoving, but why not say that A.V. is, for example, paralyzed in fear? Our minds are powerful things, and make connections where there might not be any—so when you use the same words to describe two very different things, especially over and over again, we begin to associate one with another.
4. Vary your sentence structure. Use literary devices. Keep things interesting for your reader, both in content as well as visually.

One last thing to keep in mind about tension: it should always be increasing. Yes, it will fluctuate up and down throughout the story, but the general trend should always be upward as you build up to the climax.

As you flesh out your characters and add those twists and turns to your plot, don’t forget that while the components that make up tension can often be small and unseen, they in some ways will be the most important part of your story. Tension determines whether your book gets put down at bedtime, or accompanies your reader in long into the night.

Jessica Shen lives, works, and edits from her home in northern California. Kingdom City: Resurrection by Ben Ireland, was released in February 2014. Her latest project, Vanguard Legacy: Reflected by Joanne Kershaw, was released in March 2014.

Jessica’s next project, On The Isle of Sound and Wonder, a Steampunk fantasy by Alyson Grauer, is slated for release in November 2014.