Cut with a knife

This month, we’ve been talking about the basic tenants of creating your story, the things you need to do to make sure your story is the best it possibly can be, before you get too far in. So far, we’ve created our world and zeroed in on our setting, we’ve met our characters, and we’ve gotten at least a basic idea of what we want our story to achieve—so what’s next?

Defining Your Tension

Yeah, that sounds weird. I had a hard time coming up with a better title than that. Oh well.

What I mean here is that you need to know where your tension is coming from, and you probably ought to know it before the first chapter is through. A lot of the time, you actually need to know it by the time you’ve written your first sentence.

See, if you don’t know where the tension is coming from, if you don’t at least have an idea of what’s going on, then how is your reader supposed to be able to feel that tension? How are you going to know how deep to make that tension in your characters, how richly to convey the taught strings within the story? You don’t, unless you know where it’s coming from.

Basically, I want you to know what the negative elements are.

Writers tend to focus on the happy parts of things a little longer than we should, so I really want you to take some time and figure this out. Sit down and determine what’s really going on in your story.

Is the tension building because your main character is about to be kicked out of their apartment? Is someone chasing them? Or is there a war on, and they’re afraid for their friends and family fighting? Is there an alien parasite inside one of their bodies?

Whatever it is, you need to know. The reader needs to know within the first few paragraphs, so they’re not lost in the throes of exposition with no explanation of what’s really going on.

Remember, our ultimate goal is to plunge our readers deep into our stories. Tension is one of the better ways of doing that.

It’s the stress of it all that makes us want to know what’s really going on. Happy stories are only designed for children. Adults like to see things the way they really are, with stress and tension and anxiety.

Why? I couldn’t really tell you. 

[love]

{Rani D.}