Maintaining Tension

Tension is what keeps your audience reading, what makes them enjoy their time with your story. Therefore, maintaining the tension in your stories is very important. Tension is created through stakes and conflict, so those, too, are part of this post.

 

First of all, as mentioned, conflict creates tension. What many authors balk at is the expression ‘Conflict,’ but that is not necessary. ‘Conflict’ doesn’t only stand for violence, explosions, and fights. Those can create tension, but they’re not the only way to create it. In general, everything that stands between your main character and their ‘want,’ their goal, is considered conflict. In a comedy, that might be all the shenanigans which happen, in a romance, it could be a second suitor, in a crime story, it is the mystery itself. All of those things are also sources of tension, making the audience wonder whether or not there will be a happy ending - whether the main character will get what they want.

Of course, depending on genre, ‘conflict’ can also stand for bombs, guns, and collateral damage. Yet, if you’re writing in a genre where that is part of the conflict, you shouldn’t complain about it - you chose the genre you work in.

Conflict creates tension by throwing roadblock in the way. Will the main character manage to get through all those shenanigans and be home in time for dinner? Will the main character surpass the suitor in the love interest’s eyes? Will the main character solve the mystery and deliver the culprit to justice? That is where tension comes from, that is what the audience wants to know. By putting something in the main character’s way, by letting them fail here and there, by having them take a detour, you create more tension. You make it less likely that they’ll succeed in the end, and you make the audience wonder how the main character might succeed, since some of the obvious ways are now out.

 

Tension needs to rise throughout the story to keep the audience engaged. You can’t start a story with the highest possible tension - such as the main character on the verge of dying - and then simply let it drop afterwards. A moment of high tension can be used for the hook (see below), but in general you want for the tension to start on a lower level. The full extent of the conflict is usually not obvious at the beginning and the roadblocks are not yet visible. The tasks might seem doable or even easy - after all, your main character just has to get back home from work, how hard can that be?`

Yet, tension also can’t rise constantly. Just as a human can’t tense their muscles the whole time, but needs to relax them every now and then, tension needs to go up in a more jagged, stair-like motion, otherwise the audience will grow tired and stop reading - which is what you want to avoid. The right way to raise the tension, therefore, is by pushing it up with a few scenes throughout which the conflict grows stronger and the main character is under pressure, then release that pressure after the highest point and give both the character and the audience a moment of rest with a low-tension, low-stakes scene. After the detective stalks a suspect and is almost killed by a falling flowerpot, they’re talking to the love interest for a while and they’re not in danger of another flowerpot hitting them.

From that point of recovery, the tension can then rise again. Having those points is especially important in high-tension, high-stakes stories. When everything is a life-and-death decision, there has to be the occasional scene where the main character or characters can take a breather, take care of their injuries, and repair their equipment. That’s what is often called ‘downtime’ and it’s important to have, but not to overuse. Too much downtime might bring the tension back to the baseline and that shouldn’t happen once the story has fully begun. To keep the audience engaged, there must always be some tension and the tension must almost always be on the upward path.

 

Many stories start with a plot hook - an initial conflict or suggestion of a conflict meant to pull the audience in (hence it’s called a ‘hook’).

The plot hook can be a scene from later in the story which is set in the first chapter to tell the audience that something dangerous, something high-stake will be happening. The next scenes then lead up to the plot hook and the story continues after it has been reached. This can work, but it means that tension will fall well below the original hook for a while and that can also turn audiences off.

The plot hook can also be a suggestion of the main conflict in the first scene. Perhaps, the main character is worrying about a decision they have to make (such as a political marriage in an appropriate setting or whether they’ll join the monster hunters or something else that promises tension). In a crime story, the first scene is often the murder or the discovery of the body, which is high in tension by itself and also presents the mystery and thus the main conflict of the story.

Usually, the tension goes down a little after the initial hook - the conflict from the first scene is either postponed or it’s resolved to a degree, even if there’s a suggestion that it’s not over. The body has been found, but nobody else is in danger of dying right now, nobody has been accused yet, and it might not even be certain that it was murder (those pesky suicidal flowerpots…). The marriage might be postponed because something has come up that the future spouse has to deal with first or there might be a shift in power and the marriage might no longer be that pressing. Yet, the threat, the conflict, still hovers on the horizon. That is a good setup for a story: the audience is invested in the original conflict, yet the tension is relatively low and can be raised.

 

Tension is integral to storytelling and necessary for a story to work. It must be raised carefully and maintained while no raise is happening. While it might drop a little after a high-tension scene, giving both the characters and the audience time to rest, it is not allowed to drop to the baseline created in the first chapter again - or even below it. Maintain your tension, keep it rising, and the audience will stay invested.