Tension is
what happens when we feel the risk that something bad is going to happen. The
threat doesn’t have to be violent, or even clear in its details, but it can
hang over a story like a dark cloud. In The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, for instance, we know
that the house is probably haunted and that there is something wrong with the
heroine: the details of how these factors will collide aren’t apparent in the
end. The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons uses tension as a sort of
guessing-game: what method will the haunted house use to attack its next
occupants? It’s rare to see a novel that lacks tension and succeeds, which is
not to say that every story has to be a rollercoaster of terror, but that there
needs to be something at stake and a threat to it for the reader to read on.
Characters at Risk
A lot of
science fiction and fantasy films open with a massive battle, in which
thousands of indistinguishable people are fighting. This isn’t tension: it’s
grandeur. The aim – at least not in the sweeping overhead shots of a billion
CGI knights charging into one another – isn’t to create tension as to who will
win, because we don’t know anything about the sides yet and have no reason to
care about them. It’s to overwhelm the viewer with the sheer scale of what’s
going on. Personally, I wouldn’t suggest that writers attempt this, as it’s
much more suited to a visual medium. Focusing on the struggles of one person,
and his internal thoughts (which a film can’t do as well) will be much more
powerful.
Some guys fighting some other guys |
There’s no
tension where there’s no risk. Take the not-very-good thriller Hannibal, sequel
to the vastly superior Silence of the Lambs. Very quickly it becomes clear that
Hannibal Lecter is an author’s darling (one of the biggest Mary Sues in
literature, if you ask me) and will never be lost for words, let alone put in real
danger. The other characters are the ones we wonder about. We see the same
thing in the recent film Blade Runner 2049. There is an extended fight sequence
between the two blade runners in an abandoned hotel. The trouble with this is
that there’s absolutely no question that they will survive: in fact, everything
about the characters, and every piece of marketing, suggests that they won’t
just live, they’ll make friends. So get on with it! Stop smacking each other
around and move the story on!
Fancy a drink? |
Creating Tension
So how do
we create tension? Firstly, something has to be genuinely at stake. That means,
to my mind, that there has to be an objective, a struggle to get it that has
the risk of genuine harm to the parties, and a side (or just a person) that
we’d choose over the other. In other words, something to fight over, a fight, a
person we’d prefer to win and a credible chance that they won’t. The fight
doesn’t have to be literal, of course: it could be a fight for self-expression,
or a difficult choice between two suitors, although having the problem
personalised in a single villain does help to focus the reader. And of course, the more righteous the cause they're fighting for, then the more we'll want them to succeed.
One
technique is to show the different parties converging on the prize, step by step.
The reader will contrast their progress, raising the sense of urgency. Another
trick – The Terminator springs to mind – is to show how they are progressively
weakened and damaged by the contest. If every step forward by the heroes is
accompanied by loss, who will get there first, and what will be left of them
when they do?
But perhaps the best trick, for me, is to make the reader want them to win. We need to want the characters to succeed, and that means making them likable. They need to be fighting - really or metaphorically - for something we want them to have. They need to deserve what they're trying to get, and if there's a strong chance they may not get it, and get hurt in the process, the tension will appear.