How to Create Tension in a Story
Eight Guiding Questions for Building Tension
Learning Objective: By the end of this post, you will know how to create tension in a story using eight (8) guiding questions.
Over the years, I’ve attended countless writing workshops, and one of the most common buzzwords in workshop feedback is “tension.” Tension is crucial for effective stories, but its definition often becomes abstract and murky. For our purposes, we’ll use this definition:
Tension: The sense of anxiety that conflict creates for the protagonist, and in turn, the reader. This anxiety is what compels the protagonist to act until they accomplish their goal and the reader to keep reading until they finish the story.
In general, it’s difficult to discuss tension without discussing conflict. For me, it’s most helpful to think of conflict as a story concept with three key ingredients: (1) a concrete goal, (2) a concrete obstacle in front of that goal, and (3) a concrete consequence for failing said goal.
A story’s tension is directly proportional to the size of the obstacle and the severity of the consequence of failure. The bigger the obstacle and the worse the consequence, the tighter the tension. Tension is crucial to stories because it compels the reader to read to the last page. As important as it is, tension is one of the most difficult things to create in a story, especially in a first draft. For this reason, I often recommend that writers just get the story down in their first draft and revise for tension in the next.
For this month’s AMA, we’re creating a roadmap for revision by learning a concrete, step-by-step process for creating tension.
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How to Create Tension in a Story
If a story needs more tension, the feedback it receives often looks something like this:
“The story hooks me on page ten when the force of antagonism is clearly defined. How can we increase the tension in the first ten pages?”
“The tension is taut in the beginning because the stakes are clear, but it becomes slack in the middle because the character’s goal is too abstract. How can we concretely define the character’s goals?”
“The protagonist is alone in this scene, and the tension is lax because the scene prioritizes interiority over conflict. What would the story look like if another character were in this scene? How could this character create conflict that gives the interiority concrete meaning?”
In general, if you receive feedback similar to this, your reader is essentially asking you to consider this question: What would this story look like if the protagonist’s goal, obstacle, or consequences were concretely spelled out for the reader?
As we’ve discussed in previous lessons, goals become more concrete when they can be defined in terms of win, stop, escape, or retrieve. Obstacles work best in western stories if the force of antagonism is person versus person, and consequences become more severe if the protagonist dies a literal or metaphorical death if they fail. When a story consistently maintains concrete goals, person vs. person obstacles, and literal or metaphorical life-or-death stakes, its tension is taut and the reader is hooked until the very end.
Needless to say, maintaining these three things throughout the course of an entire story is easier said than done. Here’s a revision exercise that can simplify the creation of tension in your story. As always, take what’s useful, and leave what’s not behind.
Revising for Tension with Three-act Structure
Over the past year, we’ve done a deep dive into Three-act Structure with the following lessons:
Kristy left this great comment on our most recent Act II lesson:
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