It's There in Black and White – and Grey?

We are complex beings and our behaviour frequently lands us in complicated situations, something you should try and reflect in your fiction writing. Things are rarely cut and dried in the real world, so it is a good idea to tie some intriguingly complicated knots in the story you are working on. Your heroine may love somebody but not be in love with them; she may be frightened of the consequences of being successful in either her professional or her personal life; your hero may be attractive yet unsympathetic all in the same breath. It is within these areas of ambivalence that tension grows and tension is an extremely handy tool to have in your writing armoury.

Things are rarely black and white -- it is in that ambiguous,blurred area that most of us live and where interesting fiction is often kindled. Although you should always be aiming for clarity in your writing: the well-realised character, the taut plot, not to mention crisp, new-minted prose, try not to exclude a little bit of healthy ambivalence at the same time. Instead, go for grey and see where it takes you -- my hunch is that you will arrive in an interesting space full of creative uncertainty.

An Alphabet of Better Writing # T

T is for...Tension

Tension is the sense of drama and suspense which makes your story interesting.  It has elements of excitement and compression and its function is to sustain your reader's curiosity. Your story must have some innate drama to make it interesting in the first place; how you handle the tension will dictate whether your reader keeps turning the pages until way past bedtime or discards the book in favour of something else.

Maintaining narrative tension is rather like knitting -- you need to keep the thread pulled tight otherwise holes will start to appear and the whole thing might unravel. Every scene should have a function that helps to move the narrative along -- use the editing process to cut any which are superfluous - and each one should be economically written.  The delicate skein of your story will not be able to support the weight of too many words.

To maintain tension you may need to change yarns occasionally - cut away from a climactic moment of drama to something totally different, so that your reader has to keep going in order to find out what happens next. In the same vein, altering the mood of scenes, contrasting something heart-rending with something lighter and more humourous, creates an internal dynamism which will stop your narrative from falling flat.

Tension exists at the micro as well as the macro level: cut the dead wood out of every sentence, every paragraph, so that your prose is concentrated and well sprung; remember to vary the length of your sentences, too. Short ones carry more tension.

The Yin and Yang of Creative Writing

Much of the power of fiction derives from the tension between what is present and what is missing (the Yin and Yang of creative writing?)  Often, it is a sense of yearning or curiosity to explore this gap which drives a plot forward, so this is a factor which is well worth considering when you are planning a story, or thinking about how you can improve the construction of it.

This intriguing idea of discrepancy can be expressed in a number of different ways:

• Between the past and present.
• Between reality and aspiration.
• Between the known facts of a situation and the unknown ones.
• Between what you've had and what you've lost.
• Between the dead and the living.
• Between how your character sees herself and how others see her.
• Between power and impotence.

I'm sure you can think of hundreds iof examples of your own and -- who knows -- one of them may be the springboard for a new story or a useful way of fixing up an old one.

Perhaps this tension is also what lies at the heart of my fascination with doors: the interplay between the present, outside the door, and the unknown country that lies across the threshold....

Summer Shorts - Tension

Here are a number of suggestions for ways in which you can notch up the tension in the story you are telling:

• Plot twists
• Cliffhangers
• Red herrings
• Change the tone
• Change the pace
• Change the point of view
• Change the location
• Finish a paragraph
• Finish a chapter
• Introduce some dialogue
• Vary sentence length

Mix and match - experiment!

The Suspense Is Killing Me....

As a writer, you want keep your reader in a state of extreme tension, at least for some of your story, although it is not a bad idea to let them have time off for good behaviour occasionally.  Since I'm in mythical mode at the moment (see my previous post on Christopher Vogler) I thought now might be a good time to think a little bit about the use of omens.

Thomas Hardy has more or less cornered the market here and if you really want to dedicate yourself to mastering this dark art, reading just about any of his novels will get you started.  An omen is a foretaste of impending doom, it hints at dire things to come and in that way is fantastic for notching up the tension.  There is a brilliant scene in Tess of the D'Urbevilles in which Tess has just murdered her nemesis, Alex, stabbing him in their bedroom, and his blood forms a stain in the shape of the ace of spades on the ceiling below, signposting the tragic ending which has been set in motion.  Melodramatic stuff, but used delicately and with a light touch, it can be a great way of increasing suspense and adding to atmosphere, and it can even advance the plot..

Suck it and see - it might come in handy and even if it doesn't, it will have been fun trying.