Category: Writing Matters

Tension: The Secret to Storytelling Tension Series Part 1

Fiction is magical: that’s something I’ve always believed. When we read fiction, the real world falls away. The characters are made up and yet we care deeply about them. Their problems worry us to the point that we can’t bear to stop reading until they’re resolved. The insights gained in a story can lead to changes in our real lives. We don’t feel that way about a simple description of a character or a list of issues he or she faces or a collection of insights delivered as platitudes.

Tension is the secret: the storyteller’s deepest magic.

Tension is your story’s beating heart: the conflicted character, the crucial stakes, the daunting obstacles, the pressure of time, the risks that should never be taken, the mysteries that need to be solved. Tension refers to both the strain and the harmonic balance of opposing forces. It can be as subtle as the awkward silence between a husband and wife who are keeping secrets from each other. The existence of tension can transform the ordinary into the compelling.

I would go even further: tension is fundamental to how we bring readers to care about our characters and what happens in our stories.

Readers absorb tension – actually feel it on a visceral level – and carry it forward. Once they sense it, they listen hard to hear more. Readers are affected not only by the tension being experienced by the main character, but can also feel tension directly because of things of which the main character is unaware. When we talk about tension, we’re talking about both an effect that the writer creates on the page and a way that the reader feels in response to that effect.  Your ultimate goal is to generate tension in the reader. Tension in the reader sustains the channel of emotional engagement.

Imagine a scene in which a woman listens behind a door as cold air slips through a crack and brushes over her skin, raising hairs. Reading that, we can physically feel it, and share in the apprehension that comes with that sensation. Tension speaks to the deep places in our unconscious where we store emotional reactions and sensory data. Where we have an almost universal response. When tension works in a story, we feel it: we’re tense. And not only do we feel tension when we read it; we, as writers, should feel it when we write. The writer’s own experience of physical tension is the best indication that readers will feel it too. (See Writing as a Full Body Experience.)

Once tension is established in a story, it reverberates under the surface, akin to the music carrying mood in a movie, with this distinguishing feature: we carry the music of tension in our guts. The writer is both the composer and the conductor. Tension arises from what you put in your story – the content – and from how you tell it. Even word choice makes a difference, sentence length, rhythms, the mesmerizing music of language. You can build tension up or quiet it down, blending the different sources like the music of instruments.

Orchestration gives us a way to think about tension that takes into account its complexity and importance, as well as its nonlinear aspects. Some tension builds in a progression, but other tension can come in from the side. A multiplicity of possible sources exists. Tension can and should come from character and plot, but that’s not all. Even the little things can contribute: how close your characters stand, whether they touch, how harsh the lights are. Because of the way tension resides in our guts, a range of sources can contribute. Tension can augment tension. But some kinds of tension may undermine others; it’s not a complete free-for all.

As writers, we need to cultivate the ability to think on more than one plane. To experience our work as readers, at the same time as creating it as writers. To use our bodies as well as our brains. Orchestrating tension means being aware of the physical experience of tension – like a reader – at the same time as generating the effect of tension – like a writer. Tension is a place where the mind and body meet.

The magic, in short, is in you.

My Tension Series examines the many opportunities for tension in fiction and ways to exploit and combine them. Next month: Tension Begins With Character.



Voice is a Verb

Three riddles, all with the same answer: When we talk about inborn talent in writing, what do we mean more often than anything else? What attribute is most likely to make a novel leap off the page? What do many people write entire novels without understanding, despite its centrality and importance to modern fiction? Voice. Hard to teach and even harder to learn, except for those writers for whom it seems as natural as breathing.

Voice is often defined in terms of attitude, especially in first person, but it’s more than that. Voice gives us our lens, our scope, our storytelling rhythms, our sensibilities, our figurative language, and our potential for insight. Each new voice opens up fresh territory to us and confines us at the same time. Mark Haddon does a brilliant job of rendering the narrative voice of an autistic boy in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, but it has none of the edgy self-reflection which Joseph Heller brings to Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. How could it? When a writer finds a voice, she or he also finds a particular take on this world – a unique way of experiencing and processing life. In first person, the writer essentially inhabits the main character, akin to playing a part.

The ownership of voice is more complex in third person. At one end of the continuum are novels in which the narrator is clearly distinguishable from the characters and makes comments, such as in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte or, more recently, White Teeth by Zadie Smith. At the other end are novels in which the third-person narration seems to be at one with the words, thoughts, and attitudes of the main character. The technique of free indirect style may be used to achieve a certain elasticity, at times moving closer to the main character and then farther away. This allows the writer to open up dramatic irony, as in Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, when Olive stands next to Jack Kennison as he lies in bed, both of them widowed, aging, and alone (pg 269):

“God, I’m scared,” he said, quietly.

She almost said, “Oh, stop. I hate scared people.” She would have said that to Henry, to just about anyone. Maybe because she hated the scared part of herself – this was just a fleeting thought; there was a contest within her, revulsion and tentative desire.

These insights somehow belong both to Olive, the character, and to the barely visible narrator. It’s as if the writer has stepped into the character and written from that inside place, but at the same time retained a kind of privileged discernment. Still, the dominant personality of the voice remains the character’s own. This type of voice may also progress through a series of characters in turn, colored differently for each one, as is the case in Strout’s book. In Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann, the voice shifts in every section, sometimes in first person, sometimes in third, each time taking on a markedly different set of attitudes and manner of speaking, in a tour de force on the power of voice.

I say elsewhere in these pages that fiction is the art of human empathy. Voice is that empathy given flesh. When we refer to “finding” a voice, we’re talking about the work of sympathetic imagination. Voice isn’t simply a noun, a thing, a conclusion; it’s also a verb, an action, a state of becoming. To voice is to express, to make known, to reveal. Voice is the ultimate show rather than tell: the distillation of our main characters’ personalities and histories into the very way in which we tell their stories.



Foibles and Fixes

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Creative writing requires recommitment from time to time. Not writing is much easier than writing. Curiously, what many of us find is that although we want to write in theory, we keep letting other things get in the way. If those things involve our health, family or job, then writing may have to wait. But if the problems are our own foibles when it comes to writing, then they may be a form of anxiety avoidance which these strategies may help us to surmount:

1. You love to write, but can’t think of anything to say.

The most common answer to this problem is usually to read. Immersing yourself in great books in your genre will motivate and inspire you. The only difficulty is that sometimes those great books will make you feel more lacking. What could you possibly come up with that hasn’t already been said? My suggestion is that you try reading in a different discipline than your own: poetry to get a fiction writer thinking about character; fiction to lure a poet into diving deeper inside; real-life news articles to spur novelists into creating new “what if”s. Or extend your reach further, such as to the visual arts or music. Try attending a play and jot down notes in the dark. No form of artistic expression is exactly the same in terms of what it does best. If you’re a writer, you’ll sense the holes that writing would delve.

2. You freeze up when faced with an empty page.

This is similar to the first issue, but your anxiety is more formless. You’re so swamped with self-doubt, you can barely bring yourself to try. For this, I strongly recommend Julia Cameron’s advice in The Artist’s Way. She urges writers to start every morning with three pages of free writing. The only rule of morning pages is that there aren’t any rules. You could start each entry with “I hate blank pages” and complain for ten minutes. Cameron believes all that anxious stuff needs to be expunged. You may also find that within that time, you can’t help but shift from paralyzing fear to a more writerly preoccupation with expression. You think: What a great line of swearing. I should have a character say that! And you’re off. If you don’t want to write morning pages, instead try to limit your writing commitment with a timer. Agree to write for ten minutes – how bad could that be? Most writers find themselves resetting the timer again and again. In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott reminds us that it’s okay to write shitty first drafts. Try not to be so hard on yourself.

3. You get stuck in the middle of a piece.

Sometimes you write yourself into a corner. The plot sticks or the character becomes unconvincing or the tension flatlines; you know something is wrong, but you don’t know what to do. Staring at the page in a panic only makes the problem worse. In her excellent New Yorker article, “Where Do Eureka Moments Come From?,” Maria Konnikova explains that a focused gaze works with analytic problem-solving, but when further insight is needed, we need to step away and allow ourselves to think more diffusely. In other words, try coffee first, but if that doesn’t help, then go for a walk. Or switch your attention to another project and mull this one over in the back of your mind. If you prefer to stay on task, another trick for writers is to build up the details of the scene. Convince yourself more completely of its reality. Sometimes it helps to go back to an earlier point in the story and work forward from there. You could also try to free write the scene a few different ways. If nothing else works, go out for a drink with a trusted writer friend and free talk the damn thing.

4. You revise and revise, but never finish.

Many writers struggle to complete anything. As long as you’re still working on it, your novel, story or poem could always improve. You can dream and hope without fear. Rejection only happens if you finish and try to put your work out there. Unfortunately, if you never take that risk, then your work may never be read by others. You need to consider what it is you truly want. First and foremost, you should try to finish a piece for your own satisfaction. Think of seeking publication as a separate event. If you decide to pursue it, but are afraid of rejection, then you could try starting small. Send out a version to test the waters. At the same time, make a list of five more places. Some writers benefit from revising between submissions, but if this is your foible, you may want to resubmit as soon as a piece comes back. If it helps, think of yourself as two people: the creative writer and the businesslike submitter. Strip the process of emotional content as much as possible.

In a novel, when a character really wants something, we expect that to increase the stakes. Unless you have an ego of steel, anxiety is part of being an artist. Whether you’re sinking into other people’s art for inspiration or writing your morning pages or taking your issues for a walk, in every case, what you’re trying to do is block out the negative voices and let your focus return to the work. Resilience is key. Recommit as often as you need to.