If assessing your own tension is hard, critiquing your own suspense level is even harder. But there are a few things we can try to look at objectively to help us find the places where our suspense gets weak. Examining the pacing, the promises and the parallels can point us to places where we need to punch up the suspense.

Pacing

The first place we can look is at the pacing. At Edittorrent, Alicia Rasley once defined pacing as “a measure of how frequently important plot events happen in your story, how closely occurring they are.”

To examine this, make a list of the 10-20 most important events in your story (things like Plot Point 1, the Climax, the Dark Moment, the Resolution, the Inciting Incident). Then go back to your scene chart and highlight those scenes (note that some of them may take more than one scene). Literally—select the whole row in the spreadsheet or draw a big, fat star on the card with a marker.

Then look at the whole—zoom out until you can see all the rows on the spreadsheet or layout the cards in order and stand back. Where are the big gaps between important events? That may be a point where the suspense is starting to wear thin—so take a careful look at those long stretches of unhighlightable scenes. Make sure they’re giving the reader something to look forward to, some reason to move on to the next scene—like a promise.

Promises

Promises are key to creating suspense. Suspense is all about anticipation—and when we promise the reader some event, we put them in suspense. You can add another column to your scene chart of promises made in a scene, and another for promises fulfilled. (In the example below, I used lettering to keep track of the promises, and rated the importance/tension of the promise on a scale of 1-10, to make things easier and keep track of the relative importance of the promise.)

Note that not every promise we make must be fulfilled in the next scene, or the next time we come to it. In fact, delaying promises, while reiterating that they’re coming and how important they are, is a great way to increase the suspense. (Plus, this handy chart makes sure we don’t forget anything .)

Those in-between sections from the highlighting exercise can be a great place to look for these (since the important events are probably already setting up and fulfilling a number of promises). So has it been a long time since we’ve seen any promises made, fulfilled, delayed or denied?

Tomorrow, we’ll look at how parallels can show us places to punch up the suspense.

What do you think? How can we look at our pacing? What else can pacing and promises show us?

Photo credit: John Bounds

When you’re editing yourself, it can be hard to see which of your scenes are low in tension. For tension, a scene-level edit is a definite must. For each scene, ask yourself:

• Character’s goal: Is it clearly stated or irrefutably implied? (That scene goal in the scene chart thing? Yep. Plus, a scene chart and/or spreadsheet is a really convenient here.)
• Bring on the conflict: Can/should I cut to where the conflict for that goal starts? Is that the worst conflict I could use here?
• Bring out the conflict: Have I stated why this is a difficult/delicate situation?
• Length: Is the scene an appropriate length for its significance? (That applies to both word count and the passage of time in the scene.)
• Setting: Could another setting lend more tension to this scene?
• Purpose: Does this move the story forward? Is my reason for having this scene good enough to justify this scene, or any scene at all?
• Ending: Does the scene end with a disaster for my POV character’s goal? Do we cut away at the worst possible moment, something that will induce the reader to find out what happens next?
• Finally, rating: as Noah Lukeman recommends in The Plot Thickens, rate the scene tension on a scale of 1 to 10.

Another method here is to read the story backwards, scene-by-scene. Or, I guess, you could jump around as long as you made sure you covered everything. That way, you know each scene will stand on its own—but if you change anything important, especially near the beginning, you’ll just have to go through and fix all that again. (Which can cut both ways, of course.)

Of course, this whole method requires brutal honesty. No rating a scene higher because your heroine gets off a few zingers, no keeping a scene that doesn’t serve any real purpose because it has that beautiful paragraph that it took you a month to write. Cut and paste your favorite parts (or the whole scene) into another document and you never have to actually “lose” anything.

Finding and fixing low tension scenes is just the beginning of making sure your story keeps your readers hooked. Tomorrow we’ll look at finding problems with the overarching suspense in your story. (Gulp!)

What do you think? What do you look for to find low-tension scenes?

Photo credit: Samuraijohnny

There are probably as many ways to edit a story as there are to write one. Today, I’m thinking about “macro” edits—looking at structure and scene placement, rather than the individual words and style.

One of my favorites has been the scene chart, inspired by a post on Edittorrent. The original post suggested creating index cards for each scene, listing a number of important features—everything from where and when the scene is set, to first and last lines, to “promises” made to the reader, to important details like descriptions. Then you could move the index cards around to resequence events or scenes, or play with the story without hurting your MS.

Like many of the commentators on the post, however, I used a spreadsheet to do this in a very small space. I also combined this with probably the most important thing I learned from Jack Bickham’s Scene & Structure—the structure of a scene and the importance of a scene goal—for the character, not just me as a writer.

When I used these techniques together, I found that the scenes that lacked a goal for the character (or a unique goal, as opposed to one that the character’s had four times now) were often the unfocused scenes I needed the most work on—or to cut altogether. I could also bring out hidden scene goals, find new ones to add layers to a scene and strengthen the scenes by enhancing the goals, conflict and disasters.

So here’s an example of the kind of scene chart I used, partially filled in for an imaginary story (anybody recognize the plot? Hint: it’s from an old card game). I didn’t use all of these columns myself (and if any of them aren’t clear, feel free to ask what I mean).

That’s just one thing I’ve tried, and I liked it so well, I’ll definitely use it in the future.

What do you think? Do you use a form of scene charts? What’s your favorite “macro” editing technique?

Photo credit: Aaron Brown