General Strategies for Increasing Tension

[Heliotrope]

There has been some talk about tension recently, and I have been reading a ton of great books, so I thought it might be fun to make a list of some of the ways that we can create tension.

Here are some of the great ones I have discovered:

1) Combine characters.

So you have a story where James is cheating on Jennifer with a co-worker. You have four characters. James, Jennifer, The 'girlfriend' and Jennifer's best friend who she confides everything to. What if you combined the girlfriend with the confident? Made them one character? So now Jennifer is confiding to her best friend about her husband's affair, and the confident is actually the girlfriend? Now you have some serious tension.

2) Shortening Timelines.

This is used to death and people never get bored of it. "Oh no! Our space craft is hurtling off course and we only have enough O2 to last three more days!" …. midpoint… "Oh no! An alien craft smashed our O2 reserves and we only have enough for six more hours!"

3) Take away weapons.

Instead of having a sword fight, why not have a guy lose his sword, and now you have two guys and only one sword? Or, one guy has to try to dodge the blows while crafting a new weapon out of whatever random object happens to be in the room?

4) Place your characters in a dangerous setting.

Instead of just a sword fight, why not a sword fight on the top of a moving carriage? Or on horse back? Or on the topmost peak of a burning castle?

There are TONS more… so if anyone wants to add to the list please do! I will probably add more eventually when I have more time…

 

[Heliotrope]

5) Make it worse.

Whenever you have planned a scene or story, sit back and brain storm, how could this be worse?

Try to come up with ten answers, then stretch your brain and come up with ten more.

Example:

Two guys are having a sword fight, one guy loses his sword and now it is two guys with one sword.

How could this be worse?
- They are in the princesses room where there are literally no weapons except some perfume bottles and some lingerie.
- MC gets sprayed in the face by perfume and is partially blinded.
- He has to try to make a weapon out of the princess's lingerie… but it is cleaning day and there is nothing in the drawers.
- The only lingerie available is currently on the princess.
- The princess is his sister and last thing he wants to do is have her take her clothes off.
- The poor princess has to take her clothes off and now he is evading the swords man, swinging, blinded, from the rafters of her room (or the top of her canopy bed?) trying to craft a weapon from her delicates.
- the princess is actually not the princess at all, but an assassin disguised as the princess and taking his clothes off will reveal his identity.
- The assassin disguised as the princess trys to conceal himself with a sheet, knocks over a candle and lights the canopy bed on fire…

Etc.

Make it worse.

*maybe it isn't as assassin at all, but the king's footman, who likes to go to the princesses room and wear her underwear? And if he is caught then he would be executed? And the prince is too blinded from the perfume to notice?

 

[FifthView]

I posted a somewhat humorous video in Chat, of a monkey leading a dog via leash across stone steps bridging a rushing river, as a "tutorial" on creating tension. For me some of the key aspects can be related to what I posted elsewhere re: types of conflict.

Types of Conflict

• Hurdles/Obstacles
• Actual Physical Conflicts (Fights/Battles, Environmental Opposition)
• Interpersonal Conflicts (Relationships, Personalities)
• Internal Conflicts (Doubts, Desires/Fears, Madness/Confusion/Illusion, etc.)

How these intersect w/ motivation and goals for the two characters plays a role, also.

The steps are types of hurdles/obstacles, insofar as they are spaced out and must be traversed—a long step or hop. But the river itself is also an obstacle, if the goal is to get to the other side.

Near the end of the journey, there is a fight between the monkey and dog, as one pulls on the leash and the one on the leash is like, "Heck no!"

The previous point is also an example of interpersonal conflict. The leash is a great symbol also, since one is "master" and one is "follower/servant."

Internal conflict can be seen at the very beginning and throughout, as the monkey is shown first doubting even crossing the river, then doubting an early step, and then doubting the final leap. The dog also has doubts about that final leap. You can see desire/fear in conflict for the monkey, in his doubting the final leap. You see fear in the dog at that point.

I would add a couple other features:

These two characters are just barely competent for their task. The final leap, especially in slo-mo, shows the minimum/maximum of their competency. But also, important for the viewer, these are two non-human animals. What level of intellectual capability do these two possess? There's something very precarious about the whole situation.

There's always the suggestion of danger. Those close-up views never fail to show the rushing of the river water. Both monkey and dog naturally sense this danger; to the degree that they have intelligence (and they do), they are aware of the precariousness of their situation (which is another important point: being aware of the danger.)

I suppose you could also add the mysterious on-looker, that human. The video is so much better when viewed on mute.

 

[Heliotrope]

6) wHat monsters do is much scarier than what they look like. You can spend weeks crafting a Lovecraftian style beast, what what is really important is that they do something terrifying.

Do they only eat the victims eyes, and then plant larvae in their brain?

Do they plant their young in the victims chest, to burst out of the live victim when mature?

Do they inject the victim with a venom that liquifies their innards and then they suck the liquid out of the body with tentacles in their mouths?

Being creative in what the monster does is important. Show the reader what the monster does, but save the visual reveal of the beast for closer to the end.

 

[Heliotrope]

• Hurdles/Obstacles
• Actual Physical Conflicts (Fights/Battles, Environmental Opposition)
• Interpersonal Conflicts (Relationships, Personalities)
• Internal Conflicts (Doubts, Desires/Fears, Madness/Confusion/Illusion, etc.)

How these intersect w/ motivation and goals for the two characters plays a role, also.

The steps are types of hurdles/obstacles, insofar as they are spaced out and must be traversed—a long step or hop. But the river itself is also an obstacle, if the goal is to get to the other side.

Near the end of the journey, there is a fight between the monkey and dog, as one pulls on the leash and the one on the leash is like, "Heck no!"

The previous point is also an example of interpersonal conflict. The leash is a great symbol also, since one is "master" and one is "follower/servant."

Internal conflict can be seen at the very beginning and throughout, as the monkey is shown first doubting even crossing the river, then doubting an early step, and then doubting the final leap. The dog also has doubts about that final leap. You can see desire/fear in conflict for the monkey, in his doubting the final leap. You see fear in the dog at that point.

I would add a couple other features:

These two characters are just barely competent for their task. The final leap, especially in slo-mo, shows the minimum/maximum of their competency. But also, important for the viewer, these are two non-human animals. What level of intellectual capability do these two possess? There's something very precarious about the whole situation.

There's always the suggestion of danger. Those close-up views never fail to show the rushing of the river water. Both monkey and dog naturally sense this danger; to the degree that they have intelligence (and they do), they are aware of the precariousness of their situation (which is another important point: being aware of the danger.)

I suppose you could also add the mysterious on-looker, that human. The video is so much better when viewed on mute.

Also, another thing to add is "Clear goal stated." The title of the video you posted was: "Monkey helps dog to cross river" so the viewer knows exactly what the goal is.

My son watches a show called Ninjego about some Lego Ninja kids and their adventures. Every episode starts with one of the characters explicitly stating the goal and the stakes if they don't succeed:

A = Where are we?

B = We are all in space!

A = We have to try to get out of here or it will mean destruction for all of Ninjego!

B = Yeah, but the controls are all broken and we can't even get through the hatch to the control room!

Thus starts the episode…

Too often I do see it in the showcase where a piece is presented that has no clear goal or stakes, thus significantly lowering the tension of the piece. What exactly are they trying to do and why? When you give that answer to the reader then the reader can follow along in anticipation instead of scratching their head as a clueless by-stander.

 

[FifthView]

Also, another thing to add is "Clear goal stated."

I think that's a good point. I'm wondering if the goal needs to be stated clearly, necessarily, but it needs to be known by the reader. So for instance, you could have a scene where an MC learns that his beloved may have been unfaithful, and in the next scene he could be racing to her rooms in the castle. It's pretty obvious that his goal is to clear up the issue, to confront her, but you never have to state this explicitly.

I'm wondering if I should have numbered some of the points I previously made, in keeping with your listing system. So maybe I'd make:

7) Put your character into a situation where he may have little competency but the stakes are high. Playing off the idea of two animals trying to cross a river, one leading the other....i.e., limited intelligence, I could throw out examples such as

a) The young thief breaking into a wizarding school trying to steal a magical item (been done lots of times.)
b) The naive young lady being thrown into the midst of a king's court & all the high-stakes, life & death political machinations.
c) The kidnap victim escaping his captors after he's been hauled into a foreign land where he speaks none of the language and doesn't know any of the customs.​

More generally: Play off your character's inexperience or limited competency.

 

[Heliotrope]

More generally: Play off your character's inexperience or limited competency.

Yes, which brings me to number

8. Raise the Stakes

A cute monkey leading a cute doggy over a stone bridge is cute.

But, if the doggy had life saving medicine around his neck, and had to take it across the bridge to his owner who was dying of diabetic shock (and he is a world class surgeon on his way to perform life altering cleft palate surgery on tiny African orphans), but the dog was terrified of water because he was almost drowned as a puppy, so the monkey had to help him across or the man would surely die (and the orphans would not be able to drink from a bottle and so would eventually starve to death or be cast from their village). Then you have tension.

Would we have cared as much about Forrest Gump if he wasn't needed by so many people? If he weren't so important to Jenny and his mother and Luitenent Dan? Raising the stakes... Making your character valuable to the world outside of just himself, increases the tension.

 

[MiguelDHorcrux]

Keep em coming, peeps. I'm having a bad case of writer's block and I need all the help I can get.

 

[Heliotrope]

9. Make it personal.

All too often "high stakes" comes to mean "destruction of the world as we know it".

This is all well and good, and public stakes are very important... But public stakes need to be balanced by personal stakes.

How many people do you know in Syria right now fighting for the refugees? Are you hopping on an airplane to fight for Syrian children? Probably not. Why? No personal stakes.

What makes the characters in stories like War of the Worlds or World War Z so plausible is that they have families they need to protect, raising their personal stakes.

If we look at Jaws part of the main tension is that each of the main characters personal stakes conflict with each other.

- The policeman has a young family and after the initial attack wants to close the beach to keep his family safe.

-The mayor is worried about the fiscal season of the town, and refuses to close the beach because they are a summer town and no beach means no income.

-The man hired to destroy the shark saw all of his navy comrades destroyed by sharks off the coast of Japan and will stop at nothing to kill every shark he can find. This means that when the other men want to turn back, he sabotages the boat so that they are forced to stay and confront the shark.

Raise the personal stakes of your characters and you will create more plausibility and more tension.

 

[FifthView]

If we look at Jaws part of the main tension is that each of the main characters personal stakes conflict with each other.

- The policeman has a young family and after the initial attack wants to close the beach to keep his family safe.

-The mayor is worried about the fiscal season of the town, and refuses to close the beach because they are a summer town and no beach means no income.

Which of course leads us to...

10) Create conflict between the members of a group of allies. Again, the conflict can take many forms, from a simple clash between personalities to conflicting goals & motivations to a conflict of ideas about how to proceed. Think, Frodo and Boromir; or, Harry Potter and Ron Weasley in Goblet of Fire.

 

[FifthView]

Here's a big one:

11) When using multiple POVs, have the characters (whether friendly or antagonistic) operate with a limited awareness of what the other POV characters are doing, so that any given character's actions may be at cross-purposes with another character's goals—or, potentially, helpful in that other character's goals. E.g., the good-guy protagonist's actions may actually be helping the villain, unbeknownst to him; or, one good-guy character sets off on a course of action that will thwart the goals of another good-guy POV character (although neither knows this is coming.)

 

[FifthView]

And #11 naturally leads to....

12) Secrets. Have your MC's keep secrets from each other. This is the oil in the machinery of soap operas, whether daytime soap operas or the prime time teen/YA soap operas (CW network, anyone?) I very much hesitate to include this one—because it is so easy to do, it's way, way, way, way overused. You know what I'm talking about: If the characters would just talk to each other once and tell each other what they know, the whole story would be resolved, everything would come to its conclusion. But they don't.

NOTE: Two great cases of this method have solid reasoning behind them, in my opinion. One was Smallville. Clark Kent, were he to reveal his identity, would have caused ever-so-much more harm than he does by hiding his identity. The other was Dexter. Both cases involve MC's with dual identities.

But it's still a good method and can be used well—as long as it's not used in a facile way.

 

[Heliotrope]

13. What if my main character failed?

This is the ultimate stakes test. Sit back and ask yourself this question. What if half way through, or at the end of your story your main character kicked the bucket? Would someone else be able to pick up where they left off no problem? Would the rest of the world carry on as if nothing had happened? Would anyone know or care?

Why did Gandolf need Frodo? Because he was the least likely to be affected by greed and the rings power. If something had happened to Frodo Gandolf could not be certain that any other member of the party could be fully trusted with the ring. Frodo was invaluable to the quest.

Try to make your character indesposible. What makes them significant? What is it about them in particular that makes them special, or the only one suited to the task? When your character is critical to the plot then any bump in their path will be felt by the reader.

 

[Heliotrope]

14. Tension is not anger, bickering, or foot stomping.

Simply having characters fighting and being rude to each other is not conflict. This does not raise tension. Characters should have conflicting goals or motives. Simply having them argue with each other for the sake of the appearance of conflict just makes them look childish and mean and will annoy readers.

 

[FifthView]

Simply having characters fighting and being rude to each other is not conflict. This does not raise tension.

...unless there is a nascent love affair. OR, if the conflict truly threatens to blow up a solid, working partnership that will be important to reaching the final goal. (Like Harry Potter vs Ron Weasley in Goblet of Fire—we know that these two will stay together; but seeing a favorite duo on the brink like that can create uneasiness.)

Edit: But I suppose the above could be covered under "Characters should have conflicting goals or motives," so never mind.

Edit#2: OTOH....at the end of Part 1 of Season 5 of Teen Wolf, the MC, who's the pack leader, has basically lost his pack. They've been fighting, there have been breaks because of conflicting goals & motivations, etc. But the danger is still present and we viewers know they are going to have to be working together in order to have even a chance of not being slaughtered by the end of things. So I do wonder if simply having such petty disputes can actually create tension when the reader knows these people need to stay together.

But I don't want my concerns with #14 to...cause tension between us.

 

[Caged Maiden]

With secrets, failure, and anger, comes:

15. FEAR. While it's essential to show characters arguing, or terrified by a monster, (and I think you guys have done a great job of creating a list here, so I'm not trying to argue any of the points previously made), fear can take many forms. I use self-doubt as a very real tension-builder. My MC ran from his past and must now take up a sword again for his king and country, but CAN he? Is he too rusty? Is he past his prime? Can he even hang in a battle run by mages?

Maybe "fear" isn't the perfect word to sum it all up, but it's a simple word, one we all understand, and have experienced. We fear for our friends who are in danger, and it makes us do something silly because we don't trust they can get themselves out of trouble without our help. Or, we fear for our loved ones back home, and so we maybe do a shoddy job on something in a hurry to return home, or we make the difficult decision to abandon our party, because our thoughts are elsewhere and we've become a liability.

I think the internal fears of characters are one element I use in about every story, maybe because I'm a fear-driven person myself. I just wanted to mention it as another separate element from the common fear of being in a burning building or facing a monster. That anxious fear one feels can sometimes become an antagonistic force all of it's own.

This list is great!

 

[Heliotrope]

Thanks fifthview. You helped to clarify my point, actually. I used to see a phrase used on this site that went something along the lines of "disagreements should be arguments and arguments should be fist fights" as a way of heightening tension. Having your characters fight with each other without a plausible motive just makes them look childish and is not effective.

Cage maiden: yes. I think yours might be labelled Self Doubt. Having a hero charge into battle with full confidence and no emotion or self doubt is not interesting. Self doubt is a highly effective tool for creating a sympathetic character.

 

[FifthView]

Helio: I got what you meant from the beginning; you were pointing a finger at the pseudo-conflicts, facile bickering, etc. It's a good point.

 

[FifthView]

13. What if my main character failed?

This is the ultimate stakes test. Sit back and ask yourself this question. What if half way through, or at the end of your story your main character kicked the bucket? Would someone else be able to pick up where they left off no problem? Would the rest of the world carry on as if nothing had happened? Would anyone know or care?

Why did Gandolf need Frodo? Because he was the least likely to be affected by greed and the rings power. If something had happened to Frodo Gandolf could not be certain that any other member of the party could be fully trusted with the ring. Frodo was invaluable to the quest.

Try to make your character indesposible. What makes them significant? What is it about them in particular that makes them special, or the only one suited to the task? When your character is critical to the plot then any bump in their path will be felt by the reader.

I'm going to add a related one:

16. Use try/fail cycles. It's been said (e.g., on Writing Excuses, many times) that a character should be shown trying and failing multiple times. This sets up some doubt about whether he's competent enough to accomplish his goals; and, these are occasions for instigating character growth. But these are great for creating tension also. If you show a character failing similar tests multiple times, then whenever another related event happens, the question of his success is brought up front, heightening tension. So for instance if it's a question of using a new magic ability, and every time he's tried it he has failed, then when the stakes are high and it's the only way he can successfully avert disaster....the reader's going to be on pins and needles.

[On second thought, I wonder if it's related so closely to the other one. It is related to competency, increasing stakes, etc.]

 

[Heliotrope]

17. Conflict is not the characters fighting with each other. It's them fighting with themselves.

Changes are difficult to make. We know we should behave one way, but our instinct is to behave just the opposite (especially when we are stressed, or pressured, or in fear). Often when a person is angry, he's angry with himself or with an unresolved situation Dig deeper. This is three-dimensional characterizing. Having a character think one thing or want one thing but do the opposite is interesting - and it's his own personal conflict.

Think Mean Girls. The MC knows how she should behave. She knows that her behaviour is effecting her old friends and isolating her from those she loves, but her drive to "fit in" makes her behave in a way that she knows is wrong.

Conflict should be based on your character's goals, backstories, and motivations. It should represent opposing forces that comes from within the characters themselves.

- Writing With Emotion, Tension and Conflict by Cheryl St. John