Tension

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.