Category: Writing Matters

Have Your Cake and Tension Too

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Tension is key to keeping readers engaged, no matter what type of novel you’re writing. The tension can be overt and driving, as in a mystery, thriller or sci fi fantasy adventure, or it can be subtle and pervasive, as in a more literary novel. We read to see all sorts of tension resolved. But happy or fun moments may also be an important part of your story. The trick is how to design the happier scenes so that they augment, rather than diminish, the ongoing tension.

1. Happiness under threat

Happiness under time pressure or other threat acts to increase the tension. In The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, the central characters Henry and Clare share many joyful and tender scenes, but the tension never eases. Henry’s involuntary time traveling may whip him away at any second, putting their happiness under constant threat. Niffenegger figured out a clever way to fracture the implications of mortality. But you can accomplish a similar effect without resorting to time travel, and endangered romance doesn’t need to be your central plotline. Generally speaking, if someone or something which your main character cares about is threatened by other characters or further developments, then that happiness will add to the stakes. Your readers can enjoy the fun as it unfolds, but will keep reading to make sure it continues – or returns.

2. Humor

We’re all familiar with the idea that humor breaks tension. Readers love to laugh with characters under pressure as they make wry comments on what confronts them, or at them as they make crazy mistakes. Tension sets us up for humor because of the contrast between the big picture and the smaller, wonderfully human response. Humor can also be quite revealing. Fortunately, to break tension doesn’t mean to end it, as long as the larger reasons for the tension haven’t been undermined. In The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has his characters act out hilariously as part of their own nervous reaction to tension, and in doing so make everything worse. The same is true in White Teeth by Zadie Smith and Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. If you make sure to keep your characters under pressure and out of balance, then a bit of humor can slightly relieve your readers’ nerves without letting them off the hook.

3. Hope

At the midpoint of a novel, the plot arc typically crests when the main character’s experiences to that point begin to succeed in moving him or her toward change. The challenges of the external plot lead to an internal moment of enlightenment at the midpoint, which opens the way in the external plot from the fear of change to the courage to fight. Assuming your protagonist has been in resistance to the thematic truth driving your novel – as further discussed in my post on The Truth Behind Fiction – then this is where that resistance begins to break. The moment of enlightenment also makes possible a special kind of scene, often referred to as a period of grace. We get a glimpse of what might be possible for the character if only he or she would be willing to change and grow. You might be concerned that this would reduce the tension, and it can if the character has nothing further to accomplish, but if instead the biggest change has only happened inside the character and he or she still has to take action to fulfill the goals of the plot, then a grace period will actually increase the stakes and magnify the tension.

All these techniques depend on crafting your happy, humorous, and hopeful moments to be integral to the main character and reflective of the deepest thematic truth of your story. They shouldn’t read like a side show or commercial break. Your protagonist may start in resistance to your truth, but the possibility of happiness can create stakes, humor can reveal character, and hope can propel us toward real change.



Belief in Your Artistic Vision

I have never in my life been as all-in and sure of myself as the crazy dancing man at the Crosby, Stills & Nash concert in Chicago last week. I realize his experience may have been, let’s just say, chemically enhanced, or possibly enlivened by the manic phase of a mental illness. But he didn’t seem drunk or high or ill: he simply seemed passionate and unself-conscious in a way that astonished a more restrained person like me. I found myself thinking about that in the context of writing. In her blog, Carly Watters talks about the importance of risk taking for writers. Why don’t we more often hear of literary agents urging writers to take risks? Well, we do if they work out, but that’s the thing about risks: you don’t know that when you take them. What risks to take are up to each artist, as part of her or his artistic vision. Sometimes I worry that the way we writers critique each other may hamper that.

We’ve all heard of how J.K. Rowling was riding in a train when she was struck by the idea of a boy who didn’t know he was a wizard. Talk about being all-in: she structured a seven-book series out of that idea before she had the contract for a single book. Veronica Roth was so obsessed with her concept of a dystopian society divided by virtues that she wrote her first book when most of us would have had our hands full with college. Genre writers aren’t alone in this: literary writers can get obsessed too. Jonathan Franzen wrote The Corrections in a blindfold and earplugs – I’d call that pretty crazy. But when an idea lights up your brain, I think you should go for it, even if it seems foolish or risky to others.

Technique can be a place to take risks as well as story concept. Magic realism came out of literary risk taking. So did story cycles with their roving points of view. The genre-blending mentioned in Watters’ blog is another example. Why can some writers get away with this, but not others? The old adage about learning to walk before you run is worth keeping in mind. Choosing to depart from the norm isn’t the same as being lazy. If you’ve found a great voice that doesn’t follow the rules of grammar, that’s different from not taking the trouble to check. You want to understand and be capable of following the rules you’re rejecting. You want to have reasons for your departures, even if they’re only in your own head.

Of course, no one can tell you in advance whether your risks will pan out in the marketplace. That’s what makes them risks. Sometimes when traditional publishing fails, writers believe so strongly in their work that they decide to self-publish. Other times they decide to move on to new work – to take on new risks and visions.

My wariness about critiques has to do with the possible chilling effect of peer judgment on risk taking and artistic vision. I still believe in the critique process at the heart of MFA programs and writer’s workshops across the country, often called the Iowa model. This is when fellow writers read each other’s work and provide detailed comments as they sit around a table, first about what’s working and then about what’s not, often with an instructor who weighs in at the end, only after which the author may respond. But you need to find a balance between being open enough to learn and self-protective enough to keep your voice and vision intact.

An excellent writer and good friend of mine, J. Scott Smith, writes dialogue without quotation marks, similar to Cormac McCarthy. One of her short stories, “Lynlee Floats,” is posted at Solace in a Book. As part of a recent critique of one of Smith’s novel chapters, the instructor asked a room full of writers for a show of hands about whether the lack of quotation marks made the piece harder to read. Most hands went up – that’s information for the writer – but Smith has her own good reasons for this stylistic choice. I applaud her commitment to her vision.

Sometimes you need to ignore the rest of the room and dance.



A Still Center

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You’re fretting in traffic, stuck at a light, late for something that matters. Then the sun glints off the car next to you, catching you hard in the eye, and you think of another woman, not necessarily you, but someone you once saw in traffic – or could imagine seeing – her face pinched in worry until the sun hits her eyes. At that moment, her muscles contract, revealing an unexpected, exhausted beauty. You begin to search for the words to capture that, the way it makes you feel sad and hopeful at once. The light changes and you drive on, but you’re not trapped in the car anymore. The traffic doesn’t matter – nothing does, not for now. You’ve sunk deep inside. To the still center where you go to write.

Writers have a still center, a place that can only be accessed internally, where words link with insight, where stillness gives way to transcendence, where we dare to touch on something divine. All artists do. Writing and other arts involve a translation of experience, whether actual or imagined. To accomplish that – for writers, as soon as we attempt to put words to it – we create artistic distance. For example, let’s say you’re awake in the night because you’re hurting, and you feel as if no one cares. Then you think of putting that in a story or poem. Suddenly the hurt is there in your hands like a rough jewel that you want to lift up to the light to see how it reflects. You’ve shifted from yourself as a victim to yourself as a creator of something new.

William Wordsworth spoke of poetry as originating from “emotion recollected in tranquility.” When I first read that, I pictured him sitting on a bench in a peaceful garden (one that someone else must have supplied). Now I think of that as I race through my life, multitasking all over the place: scanning the news as I choke down my breakfast, catching up on emails as I rush down the street, scrolling through Twitter as I pretend to have conversations. Does tranquility even exist anymore?

My answer is that the place to look for it is inside. The world may be going insane, and what we now ask of ourselves in terms of staying current and connected may be a daily threat to our creative lives, but you carry the possibility of reflection inside you at all times. Try to remember that as you speed through your day. Maybe spend half of that rushed breakfast on the news, but the other half on processing it. Maybe walk sometimes without a device and simply think. Maybe set aside a little time every evening to try to capture a few moments that struck you.

As soon as you begin to connect words with experience, I believe a kind of tranquility will find you.