Putting it under tension…

The most common recommendations for increasing tension in a story are things like “raise the stakes, again and again,” “make sure your readers care about the characters/conflict,” “hold back information,” and “use cliffhangers.”  The basic assumption seems to be that most writers have trouble putting their characters under stress and keeping them there so that readers will worry about them.

The trouble with this is that when people are under tension or stress that lasts more than a short time, they get used to it and it doesn’t seem tense or scary after a while. It’s the “frog in boiling water” syndrome—the idea that if you put a frog in hot water, it will immediately jump out, but if you raise the temperature very slowly, the frog will just sit there until the water boils it to death. (This is apparently not true, but it’s such a good metaphor that I can’t resist using it anyway.)

Theoretically, this means that a writer who wants their book to be tense has to increase the story tension steadily as the readers (and the writer, and the characters) get used to the current level of tension in the story. Not only that, but to get the same emotional response from the reader, the tension has to rise geometrically—Chapter Two has to be twice as tense as Chapter One, and Chapter Three has to be twice as tense as Chapter Two (making it four times as tense as Chapter One).

But most stories want a rising level of tension, not just the same level all the way through. So the writer has to jack up the tension even more quickly. This kind of escalation is tricky—a lot of the commonly suggested tension-escalating writing tricks can become overly obvious or backfire if they’re used too often. Raise the stakes too high, too quickly, or in the wrong progression, and the story becomes implausible; spend too much time “making readers care about the characters/conflict” and the tension collapses because nothing is happening; hold back more and more information, and pretty soon the whole story is dead in the water because the writer is holding back everything…and after a certain point, the only way to cram in more and more cliffhangers is to make scenes and chapters shorter and shorter, which usually makes the technique so obvious that it becomes obvious and irritating, and therefore useless.

Yet people still manage to write stories that keep people anxiously turning pages late into the night, desperate to find out what happens. How do they make that work?

First off, by not keeping a steady—and exponentially—increasing level of tension in the story. Breaking the tension periodically gives the reader (and the characters) time to breathe and reset their tension-meter, so that when the tension comes back, it feels more intense, even if it’s picking up at the same level it was before the interruption. Periodically breaking the tension is most effective when the breaks are different types and lengths—a character taking thirty seconds to grab a cup of coffee in the middle of a tense planning scene can be just as effective as the characters incorrectly believing for a brief time that they have succeeded in solving the problem. (Incorrectly believing the problem is solved has less effect on the reader, because they can see how much of the story they have left to read, but it still works to a degree because the characters are getting a break, and during that time, the reader doesn’t have to worry about them as much, so story tension is still less, even though the reader knows the characters are wrong.)

Alfred Hitchcock’s famous dissection of the difference between surprise and suspense (video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0peWTSRtU4) relies on two things: first, the reader having more information than the characters, rather than less; second, a time limit or deadline. The short version of his example is: if a bunch of guys are sitting around a table talking and a bomb goes off without warning, that’s surprise. If the viewer/reader knows the bomb is there, and that the timer is ticking down toward zero, while they watch the guys sit and talk…that’s suspense.

Hitchcock is, of course, assuming that the reader is already invested in the characters, but it doesn’t matter how the reader is invested. It’s suspenseful because the reader is waiting for something they know will happen unless it’s interrupted. It doesn’t matter whether they’re waiting for the sidekick to arrive in the nick of time to get the heroes out before the bomb explodes, or for the villain to arrive in time to be blown up with the bomb.

The third thing is that, once the bomb goes off, there’s a short drop in tension while everybody checks to see who survived, cleans up, and starts looking for clues. And then they find something, and the tension starts rising again.

The mood or atmosphere of a story can supply a lot of tension, and small changes in atmosphere can be surprisingly effective ways of managing tension. The creeping feeling that something dire is sure to happen eventually can wind a reader up more and more, as they wait for the shoe to drop. Atmosphere isn’t the only way of creating this kind of expectation in the reader, but it’s not used as often as it could be, which makes it especially effective because readers aren’t used to seeing it.

Changing things up can provide both more tension in the long run, and a relief from the current tension in the short run, which makes it exceptionally useful. Switching from a central action plot to a political or emotional subplot can be both a relief from the tension of the main plotline (oh, good, we’re not going to be getting more bad news about the possible nuclear meltdown for a bit) and an increase in the tension in whatever area the subplot focuses on (why is this politician bringing a reporter to this meeting? Is he going to cut our funding? Why was the protagonist’s son dumping pills in the trash when he thought no one was looking?).

As usual, a mix of different techniques frequently ends up being the most effective way of writing a page-turner.