Tag Archives: tension fix

Technique

Varying the tension level to keep your readers’ interest

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This entry is part 25 of 26 in the series Tension, suspense and surprise

Or, How writing is like spicy mac

A couple weeks ago, my family went out to lunch. We got a side of macaroni and cheese that was advertised, correctly, as having a little kick to it. The spice was too much for the kids, so my husband and I ended up eating almost all of the macaroni and cheese.

Macaroni and Cheese @ Seersucker RestaurantThe first few bites were really tasty (and I’m really picky about mac’n’cheese). Within a few bites, the spice began to set in. It wasn’t too spicy—no tears, no runny noses—but I could see why my kids needed water.

But once we were halfway through our meal, my husband and I both realized that we weren’t really tasting the mac or the cheese. After a while, all you could taste was the spice.

Early on in our writing, we usually learn early on that we need tension and conflict in our scenes. Tension, suspense and conflict are vital, and few people will read fiction without that “spice.”

However, sometimes it’s easy to go overboard on this vital element. At the climax, we’ll probably have a long passage of high-tension scenes, but if every scene of the book features world! threatening! consequences!, all you can taste is the spice—and the book feels just as one-note as if every scene had no tension at all.

Spice isn’t the spice of life—it’s variety. So change up the tension levels in your scenes.

Ten ways to change up the tension in your scenes

Flatline1. Use humor. A joke can reduce the tension in a scene, or just give the readers a break from unremitting THE WHOLE PLANET WILL DIE!!! drama.

2. Switch storylines. Changing to another group of characters doing something else often helps to vary the tension level. This also works in reverse—if the tension gets too low in one storyline, switch to another, then change back to a point where something more interesting is happening.

3. Bump up your character’s proactivity. Maybe your characters aren’t facing chase scene after chase scene, but they’ve been kidnapped and they’re being dragged around the country, and they’re freaking out the whole time. That level of tension, that helpless response, makes the tension (and the characters!) seem one-note. Don’t let your characters just wring their hands and whine. Do something!

4. Change your character’s goal. If we’ve had five scenes in a row of your characters trying to do the exact same thing, and encountering the same problem, or the same level of problems, something’s got to change. (You know what they say about the definition of insanity?)

5. Change the source of the threat. Maybe your last eight scenes have been at a 7 on the tension scale. You might be able to bump some of them up

6. Use dramatic irony. Dramatic irony is when the audience knows something the characters don’t, usually something that will pull the rug from under the characters. If you have scenes from the antagonist’s POV, for example, you can set up dramatic irony (and switch to that storyline to intercut the tension).

7. Have your characters reach a goal. Throughout the book, we mostly try to frustrate our characters’ goals because it increases the suspense and tension. To change things up, have them accomplish something—it could be something small, like retrieving an important artifact, or it could be something major, like defeating the bad guy (who turns out to be only a minor villain).

8. Give us a campfire scene. Let the characters celebrate and relax, if only for a minute. Especially good after a victory that turns out to be false.

9. Use a sequel. You may not have the time or place to have a celebration scene right now, but if your character has a minute, he or she might be able to go through the stages of an emotional reaction to the action, naturally a bit lower in tension.

10. Show the recovery. You’ve got hearts racing, stomachs clenching and palms sweating (dude, gesture clichés). But do your characters ever stop doing those things? Do they strive to (or just naturally) get their visceral responses under control? Take a deep breath, take a look around, take a minute to reorient your goals before you plunge in again.

Again, tension is absolutely vital to a novel—but having all your scenes with equally high tension is just as stultifying as all scenes with low tension. We don’t want every bite of our meal to taste like plain noodle or like plain spice. Vary the tension of your stories to create a truly engaging taste reading experience.

How else can you vary the tension in your scenes?

Photo credits
Macaroni and cheese by David Berkowitz
Flatline by Myles Grant
both via Flickr/CC

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Technique

Fix-It Friday: Info Dump Dialogue Makeovers

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fifInfo dumps, or long, unnatural passages of exposition, are a good way to bore and lose your reader. Sometimes we try to sneak in that backstory through dialogue, but it isn’t always better to have a character say the info dump than to think it!

Find your dialogue info dumps

How can you tell if you’re dumping in dialogue? Here are a couple tips:

  • If one character is sharing something with another character who should already know this—that might be an info dump
  • If you’re really trying to talk to the reader with the dialogue—that might be an info dump
  • If it’s more than a sentence or two of backstory—that might be an info dump
  • If it doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on in the present scene—that’s an info dump.

Fix those info dumps!

Here are a couple made-up instances of “info dumpy” dialogue. How would you fix them?

“As you know, my darling, we’ve been married for seven years, and our two children, Tina and Tommy, are almost perfect angels.”

“Yes, my love, and we’ve lived in this same house for three years, but we’re thinking about moving.”

“That’s the reactor or coil. It’s a a passive two-terminal electrical component which resists changes in electric current passing through it. It consists of a conductor such as a wire, usually wound into a coil. When a current flows through it, energy is stored in a magnetic field in the coil. When the current flowing through an inductor changes, the time-varying magnetic field induces a voltage in the conductor, according to Faraday’s law of electromagnetic induction, which by Lenz’s law opposes the change in current that created it.”

“Do you remember Jimmy? The guy from high school who was virtually president of the A/V club, but then went on to make it big in the dot-com boom? He managed to get out before the bubble burst, and he’s still living large in Silicon Valley. I heard he actually sold Page & Brin the name for Google. It was originally called Backrub, of course.”

“Look, I know you’re going through a hard time with your breakup, but I just need to tell you this right this minute: when I was seven, I had this puppy, and he got lost and we looked everywhere for him . . . [ten pages later] . . . and that’s why I don’t like cheese.”

Share your solutions in the comments and we’ll take a look at some fixes next week!

Photo by HomeSpot HQ

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Technique

Secret sauce: tension check

This entry is part 9 of 16 in the series Spilling the secret sauce

THIS is what made the real leap to publishability for me more than any other ingredient in the secret sauce! (Naturally, this will vary from writer to writer and manuscript to manuscript, but it really made a difference for me!)

An actual envelope factory. Love it.I firmly believe that tension is necessary in every scene. That doesn’t mean every scene has to be a nail-biter or a fistfight or an argument—but there does need to be some source of tension, some uncertainty, something to compel the reader to find. out. what. happens.

I use these steps (still!) to figure out if I have that in my scenes and my story.

Step 1: Assess the current tension

I like to use that handy-dandy scene chart to do this! As I mentioned before, for each scene, I list the POV character’s goal. Scene goals aren’t just for the beginning and end of scenes. You can use The goal can be the source of tension—and if there’s no goal, there’s often no tension.

One way to look at this visually is to use a numerical tension rating in your scene chart. In most spreadsheet software, you can create a line graph from that column of data—Kaye Dacus calls this an “EKG” for your story (you know, an electrocardiogram? Like a heartbeat chart?).

Also in the scene chart, I like to devote a column to writing out what the source of tension is supposed to be in the scene. Is it hoping the character achieves the scene goal? Is it the fact that she’s undercover? Is it the romantic tension?

Step 2: Identify problem scenes and sections

While there are also good uses for parallels, scenes with the same character goal are often a sign that the character isn’t making enough progress. While we definitely don’t want to make things easy for our characters, watching a character fail repeatedly at the same thing wears down the suspense. We may begin not to care whether they’re going to succeed or not, unless each scene has high tension—or the character goal can be refined to relate to the specific events, conflict and disaster for that scene.

But probably most important in the EKG are the sections where the tension level doesn’t change or varies only slightly for several scenes in a row. In Writing Mysteries, one writer shared some advice from an editor: “I must not try to keep everything at high pitch all the way through a story. Excitement, if too steady, can be as boring as having nothing at all happening” (109).

Naturally, at the climax of a book, the tension will be quite high, probably for several scenes. But is the tension flat in there? Are there other “plateaus” or “plains”? Does the tension start out much higher than it ends?

If the end isn’t satisfying because it doesn’t match the tension of the rest of the book, don’t lower the suspense! Fix the end!! Change things up in plains and plateaus—if you can, add what looks like a reprieve, or a rest for a little bit before plunging them back into danger, and keep the danger or at least the tension going until as close to the end of the book as you can. Find another source of tension for those wrap up chapters if you have to. (This is where I STILL need work on early drafts!)

Step 3: Fix!

For low tension scenes (in fact, for my “secret sauce” manuscript, I did this for EVERY scene), I look back at that “source of tension” column in my scene chart. I look for ways to incorporate that source of tension more:

  • Refer back to the scene goal. By reminding the readers what the character is after—and showing the growing disparity between her goal and reality—we can draw the reader along through the scene.
  • Remind the reader of the stakes or impending doom.
  • Add or increase an emotional response from the POV character to the source of tension
  • If that’s not possible—say, if the source of tension is something that the reader knows but the POV character doesn’t—have another character highlight or allude to the source of tension
  • Again, if the source of the tension is something that the reader knows that the POV character doesn’t, see if you can add another scene (usually immediately before this one) to remind the reader of the dramatic irony (yay 9th grade English!)
  • Highlight the source of the tension in a few character actions and thoughts throughout the scene. The exact number depends on the length of the scene, but it’s always good to hit on it near the beginning, and at least twice more in an average-length scene (whatever that might be for you).

On the other hand, sometimes that’s just not enough. If the source of tension is non-existent or insufficient, I look for ways to increase the tension, usually by asking myself questions like these:

  • What is the character’s goal for this scene?
  • How can things get worse?
  • How can I raise the stakes?
  • What is the source of conflict in this scene and how can I make the conflict bigger?
  • How can I weave in the antagonist, the plot, a subplot or a character turning point?
  • Who is the worst person who could walk in right now?
  • What would happen if this scene took place somewhere else?
  • What is the character feeling and have I shown it enough on the page?

Janice Hardy also offers a list of things to look at to help make your scenes matter (and there’s some overlap, but I wrote out my mental list before reading her post):

  • What is your protag doing?
  • Where does this scene take place (setting)?
  • Who else is in the scene?
  • Where structurally does this scene take place (act one, midpoint, act two, etc)?
  • What happens right before this scene?
  • What happens right after this scene?
  • What’s your theme?
  • What are the stakes?

Sometimes, it’s less the scene itself and more the context it’s in—either the spikes in your EKG are too sharp, or you’ve got a major plateau. My critique partner, Emily Gray Clawson, wrote a great post on keeping up the tension in your story by switching between types of tension or storylines.

Finally, I have a whole series on Tension, Suspense and Surprise with 35 pages on the importance of those elements in your story—and dozens of ways to fix them if they’re off—now available as a free PDF.

What do you think? Have you checked your tension lately? How do you fix low-tension scenes?

Photo credits: tension envelopes—Chris Murphy; question mark—Alexander Drachmann; high-tension wires—Redvers

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Technique

Personal, timely stakes for suspense and immediacy

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This entry is part 26 of 26 in the series Tension, suspense and surprise

One of my writing friends, Marnee, is working on digging deeper and raising the stakes on her WIP. I loved the way she described this:

I wanted all my characters to have a stake in the outcome of their actions. And, I wanted that “stake” to be something immediate. It couldn’t be something without a timeframe. My hero only has a certain time to catch the villain because once the villain realizes he’s on to him, he’ll disappear and my hero will lose his chance. My heroine needs to take the “job” my hero has offered because she needs the money—fast. My villain can’t run and hide even when he’s foiled because of . . . well, something I haven’t figured out yet.

Their needs have to be immediate and volatile and in complete opposition. And they have to be completely invested. No turning back.

I like the combination of personal stakes and a deadline—a great way to create suspense and immediacy, as Marnee points out.

I also like that she’s taking the time to do this for the villain (even if she hasn’t gotten the answer yet). “To be evil” is not a sufficient motivation for the villain’s heinous action. We want our villains to be rounded characters with believable motivations, not just amorphous evil that our hero’s got to defeat. They have to have a dog in this fight or they’ll cash in their chips and go home. So why this person? Why this (despicable) action? It could be something as simple as money—but there are lots of ways to make money. Why this way?

What do you think? How do you do this in your works?

Photo by Dayna Mason

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Technique

Suspense fix: Raise the stakes

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This entry is part 3 of 26 in the series Tension, suspense and surprise

Although I came across this advice over and over again, I hadn’t planned to include it. I thought it was already covered in the 37 ways to build tension and suspense, and I didn’t want to just list those again. But just mentioning “raise the stakes” probably isn’t quite enough for how important this technique is.

Quite simply, if the stakes aren’t high enough in your book, other fixes may not be able to compensate. If Grandmama’s prized teacup poodle is the only one who’s going to suffer if the bad guys win, other attempts at suspense and tension may seem forced. (Is Butch really going to pull a gun over Gigi?)

Donald Maass (Writing the Breakout Novel, 59-80) and Noah Lukeman (The Plot Thickens, 121-123) both specifically point to raising the stakes. In the suspense structure we looked at earlier, establishing the stakes was a crucial goal of Act I, as was raising them in Act II.

So, how do we do that? Maass gives a few ways: establish a high value on human life (especially if this hero[ine] is going to have to kill), and create public and private stakes—ways in which the public at large and the characters on a personal level will suffer if they lose. In Revision And Self-Editing, James Scott Bell also gives specific ways to raise those stakes:

  • Plot stakes: brainstorm new ways things might go wrong for your Lead—and push yourself. Go crazy; there are no bad ideas. Come up with at least 6 ideas.
  • Character stakes [Maass’s personal stakes]: put the character into a dilemma. Stick him between a rock and a hard place and make him choose. List all the reasons why he must take option B and why he shouldn’t take option A—even though he needs to (and will) take option A. And/or make it personal—threaten or hurt the Lead, or better yet, someone they care about.
  • Societal stakes [Maass’s public stakes]: How might society be hurt if things go wrong? How can you show that, on a small scale or through extrapolation? (231-233).


Finally, Noah Lukeman points out that even seemingly small events can have big personal stakes—he uses the example of getting the trash to the garbage truck in time. Not a major stressor for most of us, but if you’ve forgotten for the last three weeks, and your landlady’s going to evict you if you don’t get that garbage out of your place, suddenly it matters.

So give Gigi a rest.

What do you think? How else can you raise the stakes?

Photo credits: black poodle—Rachel K; white poodle—buhreee

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Technique

Tension fix: Dumpy dialogue

This entry is part 19 of 26 in the series Tension, suspense and surprise

This is very related to yesterday’s point on getting information in there while keeping the tension. Sometimes the dialogue that’s used to convey that information is losing readers and we can’t find any secret agent monkeys or secret bad guys to help out. (And sometimes the dialogue is just dull. Fix that first, and then see if the scene needs more tension.) Now what?

I’ll turn the time over to two of the books I’ve been reading for this series: Don’t Murder Your Mystery by Chris Roerden and Revision And Self-Editing by James Scott Bell.

Bell can start us off with a point we’ve touched on: “Your Lead should be dealing with change, threat, or challenge from the get-go. At the very least, whenever she is in dialogue with another character, that inner tension is present” (97). Bringing out the inner conflicts can add subtext to even the dullest small talk. (But please, make sure that the small talk isn’t so small that it can’t support subtext 😉 .)

Roerden adds several techniques specifically for increasing tension in dialogue, since mysteries may require a lot of talky investigation. (And really, how many people would poison a PI’s potato chips?) She mentions bypass dialogue, borrowed conflict, simulated disagreement and flat-out editing (179-184).

Bypass dialogue is when two characters speak but don’t communicate. Naturally, this can be boring, but it can also be used to increase tension: make sure that the speakers have opposing agendas and different priorities, even if they’re friends. (“Transforming allies into temporary adversaries not only increases tension but also builds the reader’s empathy with your protagonist . . .” [180]).

You can also borrow conflict from a background source (a bit like yesterday’s fix). Roerden uses an example from a novel, a reporter interviewing a couple with a tennis game on TV in the background. When she asks about the victim, the husband suddenly swears. The reporter thinks she’s onto something—but he’s just upset about the game.

Simulated disagreement is a bit more tricky—obviously, the name refers to when two characters seem to disagree without actually doing so. In the example Roerden cites, two female characters are trying to relate a creepy occurrence (which we’ve already seen dramatized) to a male third character. He has no real reason to disbelieve or oppose them, but he repeatedly interrupts them (increasing the tension) with stories of his own. One of the women (his wife), gets on his case for interrupting, further heightening the tension.

Finally, flat-out editing can help—especially for phone calls. (Eesh. I hate those!) Roerden uses the example of a phone call from a novel where the protagonist is in her car, realizing she needs to get a clue from her husband. She’s already thought about the context—when they heard it, what bit of information it is exactly—so why show that in a phone conversation? Indeed, after the words “she called him,” the author skips right to the husband’s answer: “‘Yeah, I’ve got it right here. . . ‘”

CLOSING CAUTION: Overusing any technique or tension fix can be gimmicky or hackneyed—and can actually undercut the tension. Mix up your tension techniques to keep your readers reading without getting bored.

What do you think? Any good examples of the above fixes? Any other tension fixes? (Next week, we’ll look at suspense fixes, so let me know if there’s another tension fix you’ve used successfully—and if you’d like to guest post about it, just let me know!)

Photo credits: fraying rope—Govind Chakravarti; acorn hanging by a thread—Karen Dorsett

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Technique

Tension fix: Boring but true—keeping the suspense while we give info

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This entry is part 18 of 26 in the series Tension, suspense and surprise

Sometimes, you just really need to info dump. The characters have made a discovery and must now explore its full significance—and if they don’t, the readers are going to be totally lost.

Are you totally lost by the generalizations there? Let’s try it this way: Indiana Jones and faithful sidekick Sallah finally get someone to examine the inscription on the medallion—but we know the Germans have already done so and are currently digging at the appointed spot. Basically, we’re watching someone watching someone reading something. Yeah, the bad guys already have it—and they’re using it. No tension. Audience nodding off.

In the story conference for Raiders (I can’t believe I’ve never linked to this before; this is great stuff!), creator George Lucas, director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan came to the same conclusion. They had to get this information to the audience, and there didn’t seem to be a better way to do it.

And then they hit on the solution. Do you remember? Maybe not. Without watching it again, all I remember is the German staff is the wrong height and—“Bad dates.” They added a situation in the background to enhance the tension—poisoned food which Indy comes perilously close to eating several times.

Mystery Man, in a column at the Story Department, talked about this kind of exposition (emphasis added):

What’s to be learned from this example? Great exposition is always in the context of something else. A scene should never be about exposition only. You should feed the exposition in the context of some other scenario that’s going on in the scene whether its poisoned food that’s eaten by a bad secret agent monkey or whether it’s something else interesting going on between the characters, such as a contest of wills, a budding love story, or perhaps exposition that’s being told to a secretly bad character who will use that information against the protagonists.

This also requires giving the audience more info—a look into the kitchen, a scene where we see this character is really in cahoots with a major baddie. That kind of info can often be dramatized, of course, but this is another example of the “give the audience more information” philosophy that Alfred Hitchcock pointed out created suspense. It’s letting the reader take a peek under the tablecloth or watch the baddies planting the bomb there, and suddenly, everything else they talk about is fraught with tension.

What do you think? How else can you imbue an almost-info-dump with more tension?

Photo by Yasmin & Arye Photographers

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Technique

Tension fix: Bring out internal conflicts

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This entry is part 17 of 26 in the series Tension, suspense and surprise

Sometimes, there’s nothing wrong with the scene set up: we’ve put Mitch into a situation where he would be uncomfortable, unsure of himself, or required to perform a monumental feat. And yet somehow, the scene still doesn’t get the reception we want. Critique partners note that the scene—a turning point for the character—drags.

We need this scene—so now what? Can’t they see how this situation would be stressful and tense for Mitch? Doesn’t that automatically imbue the scene with tension?

Uh, no. Not if we didn’t put that there. Yeah, even though we’d all spent 300 pages together, if the feelings we know Mitch would have weren’t on the page, readers won’t see it.

Simply introducing more more tension—more conflict—through the narration can increase the tension in a scene. If Mitch just sits there and takes this pivotal situation, the readers won’t be engaged in his change—and it won’t be as believable.

Camy Tang wrote an article about this, taken Donald Maass’s “tension on every page” axiom to the next level—tension in every line. She used a great before and after comparison of a cut scene from one of her novels—one without the “tension commentary” and one with (going for tension with a humorous tone).

Weaving in your character’s emotions and observations—whether they’re a “why me” comedic effect, a “not me!” suspense effect or a “can I do this” character effect—can help to increase the tension in a turning point scene.

But don’t beat your readers over the head with it. If this is the fourth scene in a row where your protagonist is battling his Inner Demon, we readers are probably familiar enough that the conflict doesn’t have to be mentioned in every paragraph. In fact, if this is the fourth scene in a row with the same inner conflict, it might be a good time to see if all of those scenes are really necessary. Also, too much internal monologue can slow down the action of a scene, so try for a balance.

What do you think? How can you bring out your characters’ internal conflicts more?

Photo by Penguincakes

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