Tighten the Tension

You know that feeling when your gut constricts and your brain starts thrumming. Your heart might even pound a little. When it happens in life, it can be terrifying. When it happens in a story, it means the author did something right. The author affected you in a real, emotional, visceral way. The author made you react.

That reaction is called tension. 

And if you can do it consistently as a writer, you’ll never fail to sell your work. 

What It Isn’t

If you research this stuff on the ‘Net, you’ll often hear this topic discussed closely with the idea of suspense. Some folks might even try to tell you that tension and suspense are the same thing. 

Don’t listen to them. They’re not. 

Tension vs. Suspense

Tension is an immediate feeling of discomfort or stress. Tension is the knot that suspense can create inside you. Tension is the uncomfortable feeling you get because a situation isn’t optimal, or even something you can cope with. Tension is the tiger roaring on the plains near your camp. 

Suspense is the feeling of anxiously awaiting a future event. Suspense is the buildup or increasing tension over time. Suspense is taking those uncomfortable feelings and combining them with anticipation. Suspense is the tiger’s roar getting louder every few minutes, making you look around for when its head eventually appears at the edge of camp. 

Tension vs. Conflict

If you have an absence of conflict, you will never have tension. However, just as tension and suspense are related but not equal, the same applies to conflict. Without conflict, there may be no tension, but tension isn’t conflict. 

It grows out of conflict. 

Which conflicts? Well, all of them. You can have great tension with a person vs. nature story (2012, 28 Days Later, The Poseidon Adventure). You can create tight tension ina person vs. society story (A Clockwork Orange, The Awakening, The Crucible, Their Eyes Were Watching God). The same holds true for a person vs. person plot (The Bourne Identity, any Bond novel, Kramer vs. Kramer). Even a solid person vs. self story can keep a reader all wrenched up inside (Hamlet, Fahrenheit 451, The Old Man and the Sea). 

A well-established conflict for your characters, particularly your protagonist and antagonist, builds a solid floor from which to create tension. 

Tension and Character

Just as you can’t have tension without conflict, you can’t have either tension or conflict without character (or characters). Character interaction is a failsafe way to ramp up the tension in your stories. Let's look at just a few examples. 

Two characters hate each other and are in competition. It could be for high stakes (stopping an atomic strike, a la James Bond) or small stakes (who gets a promotion). The ongoing back-and-forth between them while the ground shifts beneath them both and the upperhand flip-flops is fantastic for your tension. 

One character loves another. The love could be reciprocated or not. It could be romantic or familial. I think specifically of the amazing ticking time bomb (literally) in Hitchcock's Sabotage where the child is in danger, and the adults know, but the child doesn't. I dare you to watch that without knots in your stomach. 

For a romantic example, look no further than Key Largo. The budding romance between Bocall and Bogey gets you right in the gut every time Edward G. Robinson threatens either of them. Creating a flame of passion and then putting it under fire (see what I did there?) gives the story a new wrinkle to cause your readers to wonder, to worry, to want to look ahead and see how it turns out for the heroes. 

So, How Do I Tighten It?

We tossed out a few nuggets above when discussing character and how your dramatis personae can be used to ratchet up the tension, but where's the list, man? If this is a how-to, a tutorial, we're gonna need a list of helpful tips, aren't we?

Fear not. 

We've got you covered. 

Shrink Your Setting

Make the story suddenly smaller. Shove all those characters together in a place where they either don't fit or they just barely fit. Make 'em get really uncomfortable with each other. 

• A storm has knocked out the power, and a family must gather in one room around a fire to stay warm
• A tornado took out half of the building, leaving a bunch of hotel guests crowded into the lobby
• Strangers from a bar are all put into one holding cell together
• An armed stranger on a cruise causes the Captain and crew to gather the passengers in a central room together (and one of them could be the killer)
• While hiding from aliens, five strangers have all discovered the same small, abandoned underground bomb shelter
• After a boat sinks, survivors who are sworn enemies are forced to share a life raft
• A dead battery strands a divorcing couple on a desolate road with their two teenage children in a vehicle

In each of these scenarios, character and setting work hand-in-hand to turn up the temperature between the cast members. The trick is that the reason for the shrinking setting must be crucial to the story, not just a random "trick" you learned from an article on the 'Net (even this article). The event that causes the setting to tighten around the characters must be so crucial to the story that the story couldn't have happened any other way. The shrinking has to be the very thing that causes the plot to move forward. 

A dangerous storm that is only getting worse can become a sort of ticking time bomb. 

A smaller room with a potential killer can trigger the "whodunit" mystery. 

A stranded car can be the catalyst for a walk that forces a family to confront issues that can either bring them together or tear them further apart. 

Watch the Weather

We hinted at this one already, particularly with several of the reasons for shrinking a setting, but the weather itself can be an effective way to tighten tension even if it doesn't destroy half a hotel or sink a cruise ship. 

A storm can not only trap people in a location, but it can also trap them inside their own heads. The easiest way for this to increase tension is for a character to have a fear of the dark, of thunder, of lightning, or harbors a PTSD-trauma thanks to a similar weather condition that can trigger them. Have a character start to lose their shit, and see how fast the room gets tense for your characters (and for your readers). 

Don't forget, it's a tropical storm that causes the tragedy for Jamie and Teacake in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Rain may often be used as a symbol for baptism or rebirth in fiction, but it doesn't have to be something positive. It can also be oppressive, murky, discomforting, noisy, distractful. 

On the other side of the spectrum, let's look at heat. It's equally oppressive. It causes sweat. It makes it difficult to be comfortable in one's skin. Fitzgerald uses muggy heat and humidity to gradually get all the main characters of The Great Gatsby hot and bothered (sorry, not sorry) and build up the tension until everything boils over in New York in a cramped hotel room while the drinks flow freely. 

Small, Subtle Changes

Be careful with this one. It requires astute readers, you know, the folks who notice things like that throwaway line about something that feels unimportant in Act 1 but turns out to be crucial to solving the mystery in Act 3. 

This can be a tough one to pull off, especially in big ways. If you go too big, you'll telegraph something important that might be revealed too early. Did you mention an ax in the corner the last time you described the cabin's porch? Did you highlight the fact that it was missing now? If you;re at the beginning of the big showdown, you're probably golden. If not, you might be dropping that pearl of wisdom too early. 

It doesn't just apply to whodunits and killers-in-the-house story though. 

Those earrings that had once belonged to the protagonist's mother? You say they're not in the box where we saw them last? Have they been stolen? Or have they been hidden because they remind the protagonist of something he'd rather forget? If your character doesn't know and wants to or needs to, then you're building tension. 

The most obvious use of this tactic is more commonly used in horror stories. The cliche is so obvious now that it doesn't work. The painting or photo that changes in small ways to make situations for dangerous. Or the typewriter that starts to predict the future in ways that get bigger and bigger until that obvious last knock on the door after the writer types that very thing. 

So, yeah, be careful. Be subtle. But, there's a danger there too. If you're too subtle, readers will miss your tension-building hint by the proverbial country mile. It's a fine line. But it's one that works once you manage to walk that line skillfully. 

Well, that's it. There are plenty more ways to build tension, and we've covered them in other articles and interviews, but these are a few I consider my regular go-to methods, so maybe they'll help you out too.