How to Create Tension – Am I Keeping You in Suspense?

Suspense is the tension that is created when you are waiting for something to happen. You might be waiting for news of a loved one; you might be waiting to see if the creak on the stair which sounded suspiciously like a footfall sounds again; you might be waiting, lottery ticket in hand, to see if your numbers have come up. Often, it's a period of magnified inactivity which anticipates a moment of action.

What interests me about suspense, which is often so gripping for your reader, is that it usually occurs when nothing is actually happening.

If this is a contradiction that you'd like to explore further in your work, why not write a scene in which nothing at all takes place, but the tension is excruciating?

The Literary Come-On

 Ooh, I've been writing so hard I feel as if my head is spinning and I could easily have parked my bicycle high on the wall of this French restaurant and in fact perhaps I did!

 Although I hardly know whether I'm on my head on my heels, I do recall rash promises of talking about tension and suspense, so here are a few brief thoughts...

Tension, suspense, anticipation – all of them delicious emotions if you experience them in moderation, although the extreme versions take you into murky, E L James, pain-and-pleasure territory, so it's probably best to stay within the parameters of delicious and allow your reader the thrill of having their expectations built up, before they are fulfilled or thwarted.

There are a few ways of doing this.

• You can announce that something is going to happen up front and then leave your reader in an agony as to how and why.
• You can drop hints – the use of portents and omens a la Thomas Hardy can be very useful here – without being too specific, just enough to whet the appetite.
• You can take your reader right to the brink of the crisis, and leave them there.
• You can convince your reader that one thing is going to happen and then surprise them with another.

It's a form of structural flirtation, a literary come-on. In a way, plotting the novel is an extended seduction, so we're back in EL James territory once again. You want to confound your reader, but not too often. You want to leave them hungry for more.

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas My True Love Sent to Me...

...Twelve Drummers Drumming! I imagine the sound as urgent and climactic, rallying the listener (and in this case the reader) onwards. Drums, whether at a gig or on the field of battle, are there to energise and inspire, setting the pace for a song or a march, and pace is something extraordinarily important when you are writing fiction.
Whereas tension is linked to suspense and has to do with the facts of your narrative - discovering who  murderer is, or whether true love will win through - pace has more to do with the way in which you relate these facts.
Uniformity is the enemy of pace. There should be variety within the structure of your novel. This applies from the macro to the micro: try and make sure that your chapters, your paragraphs, your sentences, and even your individual phrases are of different lengths so that your work doesn't become predictable. If you are writing about something dramatic, keep things short; if you are in more laid-back mood you can afford to meander (but not too much). Just keeping an eye on this simple technicality will have an enormous impact on the readability of your story.
Another way of manipulating the pace of a piece of fiction is through contrast. Just as you should go slow, slow, quick, quick, slow or long, long, short, short, long in structural terms, it's important to contrast the types of scene you are writing. If you have ratcheted up the emotion during a particular sequence of your book, give your reader a break and introduce something lighter. Think Hamlet and the gravedigger scene.
Pace has elements of texture and tension and contrast within it. It's what gives your writing dynamism. It's an essential ingredient in any good book and you should always be conscious of it when you are at work.

An Alphabet of Better Writing # W

W is for...Warp and Weft

...and weavers, who when they are working (so much alliteration), stretch one set of threads across their looms (the warp) so that a second set (the weft) can be woven through it.  When you are weaving this creates fabric, when you are writing it creates texture and tension.

The key thing about warp and weft is that they are going in different directions.  This is what creates the tension. When you are writing something sad, you can give it added depth by locating traces of humour, the faintest watermark, within it. You can counterpoint a high voltage action sequence with a split second of revealing reflection. Within the warp of dialogue, you can have the weft of silence. 

It's not simply a question of contrast - one thing  followed by something sharply different - it's finding a way of integrating two opposites, superimposing comedy on tragedy, or the interior world on the exterior, or whatever.  That's how you achieve texture.  The end result should be like shot silk.