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

I’m brushing up today on creating tension in a scene. There are lots of “tricks” and techniques to get the “tension in every page” Donald Maass recommends. While I don’t really go in for resorting to tricks to create suspense, little techniques can really establish, increase or build the tension within a scene.

The list:

1. Give a character a goal in each scene
2. Setbacks to a character’s goal in a scene
3. Uncertainty—often from a lack of information
4. Worry—plenty of bad information
5. Doubt, especially in one’s self (the character, not the writer )
6. Raise the stakes—put more people or a bigger, more valuable objective in danger



7. Increase the odds against the character
8. Make the characters care more—greater emotional stakes
9. Make things more challenging
10. Surprise character or event to change things up
11. Nonhuman obstacles—setting or weather interfere
12. Using the POV of a character that doesn’t know something vital (something we’ve established in another POV)
13. End the scene with a foreboding foreshadowing
14. Play on a character’s inner anxieties—push them to the limit (and beyond)
15. Let the characters blow up—what are the consequences?
16. “Minidisaster”—a preview of what could happen in the big disaster, by showing a small version of their impending doom.
17. A close call
18. A character purposefully withholding info from another
19. Jump cutting to another scene/storyline immediately after a disaster
20. Make characters’ goals look impossible. Or just make them impossible.
21. Stating a chilling fact.
22. Danger—dangerous, skillful work.
23. Deadlines approaching
24. Foreshadowing a coming confrontation



25. An unfortunate meeting
26. Trapped in a closed environment (perhaps a crucible?)
27. Fears coming true
28. Set up any of these situations and prolong them, rather than relieving the tension
29. Remove characters’ supports
30. Disable characters’ strengths
31. Undermine characters’ belief systems (not necessarily in a religious sense, but in a “I’m fighting for the greater good—holy crap, what do you mean the victim’s a bad guy?” kind of way)
32. Move up the deadline
33. Avoid low-tension scenes (sequels, really):
    • Thinking (esp while driving between one scene with live action and another)
    • Decompressing or cleaning up
    • Coffee breaks
    • “Aftermath” scenes
    • Sometimes, even love scenes—a sex scene releases all the sexual tension you’ve established, so then you have to reestablish that tension with something to keep them apart. Though this can be done well, often, this is where we get the contrived or entirely external conflicts that just aren’t that compelling.
34. Leave out the parts people skip —distill scenes to their essential parts
35. Cut small talk (unless you’ve worked hard to establish that the small talk is covering something else, something with a lot of tension, or you’ve got a lot of subtexting)
36. Make one character’s scene goal conflict with another’s scene goal
37. Make us root for the other guy—make the antagonist a sympathetic character, so we want both sides to win.

Sources: Revision And Self-Editing by James Scott Bell, Stein On Writing by Sol Stein, Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass, and me, of course.

What do you think? What do you do to create or increase tension in a scene? How can you implement these ideas in your work?

Photo credits: nail biter—Cavale Doom; knuckled grip—Alex Schneider