19.39: A Close Reading on Tension: Tying It All Together
This episode, we’re talking about how important tension is in creating a world where your readers feel fully immersed. We talk about the importance of using tropes and techniques while also using variation in order to make your story less predictable. We dive into the difference between tension and conflict, and talk about how you can use the former to help the ladder. Tension can be found in movement, but also in inaction. We touch on tension’s effect on try-fail cycles, inverted pyramids, and worldbuilding.
Thing of the Week: The Night Guest by Hildur Knutsdottir (a novella translated by Mary Robinette Kowal)
Homework: Take a look at your outline and move one of the major conflict points to a different act forward, and then try and move it to a later act. Consider how this changes the pacing and tension.
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, and Howard Tayler. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
Join Our Writing Community!
Powered by RedCircle
Transcript
Key points: anticipation, subversion, movement, resolution, narrative, context. How do you decide what to use when? Think about one thing and do that the best you can. Then go back and fix the others. Do little bits of lots of things. Ask yourself questions at the end of a try-fail cycle. Use an inverted pyramid, to do the least rewriting. A mille-feuille of elements! Multiple threads of tension. Bake your structure as you go! Add tension in rewriting. Tension is not just conflict. Don’t just add more explosions. Tension comes from caring, stakes too. That needs relationships. Relatable moments. Focus! Variation and change.
[Season 19, Episode 39]
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
[Season 19, Episode 39]
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: Tying It All Together.
[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you’re in a hurry.
[Howard] And we’re not that smart.
[DongWon] I’m DongWon.
[Erin] I’m Erin.
[Howard] And I’m Howard.
[Erin] I’m excited that… Well, I’m sad that we’re winding up our whole piece on Ring Shout. But I’m excited to talk about all the things that we’ve been talking about over the last few weeks and figuring out how do you put it all together. We’ve been talking about anticipation, subversion, movement, resolution, narrative, context. If you’re writing, trying to write something as tense as Ring Shout, how do you decide which tools you’re going to be using at which moment to make it work?
[choking sound]
[Howard] I’m laughing because there are so many disciplines… That as a web cartoonist I had to learn so many different disciplines and in every last one of them, I found that I knew more things than I could track at once when I was trying to do a thing. So, for me, the answer is think about one thing. Do it as best you can. Then come back and figure out where you made the mistakes in all of the other things and now try to do them.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, this is been such a fun module because we were able to cover some many different techniques, so many different types of things. I think P. Djèlí Clark is really virtuoso-ly demonstrating a lot of these techniques at once. So one of the things to kind of take away from it is what you want to be doing is doing little bits of lots of different things. Right? I think this kind of goes back to what we were talking about last episode in terms of how to keep something from feeling super trope-y is having that variation. You want to subvert a little bit here, you want to like deny someone a resolution here, and then you want to complete the pattern here so that we’re in the rhythm of the story and your drawing us forward. Right? This really ties to a lot of the stuff we’ve said before, we’re just framing it slightly differently in terms of try-fail cycles, yes-but/no-and, like all of these kind of things that help move someone through the story which we usually talk about in terms of plot, really are tension techniques. Because tension is the thing that makes a reader excited to continue reading. That’s when you get that page turning effect. That’s how you get the more like quote unquote transparent prose effect where it makes something more quote unquote commercial. Right? I’m going to just keep saying quote unquote around…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] All these publishing terms. But tension is so much of what like drives the story, because you can get to the emotional core of the characters, you can get to the core of the relationships, and you can set stakes in really efficient ways.
[Erin] I love what you said about try-fail cycles, because one thing I’ve been thinking about for myself is, like, how to incorporate all of this. Because it’s one thing to read it in somebody else’s work, like you were saying, Howard. It’s another thing to try to put it all in yours. I was thinking if I broke my work down… A work I was still doing, into a try-fail cycle, maybe these are all questions I could be asking myself at the end of that cycle. So it’s like, okay, I’m trying, like… What am I… What are the characters anticipating in this try-fail cycle? What have I resolved at the last try-fail cycle? Where am I moving towards? Instead of look for some of these moments of tension, because, sort of as you were saying, though the try and fail is a lot about the… Like, the action. But not necessarily the tension. So, thinking about what’s the tension that moves that action forward, or that makes that action important, might be a cool thing for me to think about, like, when I’m trying to figure out an outline or if I’ve written something and I’m like, “That doesn’t seem very tense. How can I add more to it?”
[Howard] I love the try-fail cycle aspect of it, because try-fail cycles are one of those things structurally that you kind of want to know early on. Because if you get them wrong, you have to do a whole lot of rewriting. I think about… Tying it all together, all of the techniques, I think about which do I need to do first in order to do the least amount of rewriting. It’s kind of an inverted pyramid. Worldbuilding. For me, is the very first, especially with a historical alt history piece like this. You get something wrong, oh my goodness, the amount of rewriting that has to go on. But the amount of history that your readers are actually seeing on the page is very small compared to things like dialect, dialogue, all of those other tension techniques we’ve been talking about. So, for me, tying it all together is an inverted pyramid. Start with the structural things that will make the biggest mass if I get them wrong, and finish with the structural things that are like the fine grit sandpaper.
[DongWon] Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. One way to think about how to apply what you’re talking about and sort of what we were talking about earlier in terms of all these techniques is I often think of a novel as a layer cake is the metaphor I use a lot. Right? Not like a three layer birthday cake, but like of mille-feuille with all these different elements. One thing I want people to think about in terms of how to keep tension rolling forward, how to keep that momentum up, is if you’re resolving one thread of tension, if you’re coming to the end of a pattern, make sure you have another one set up that’s going to carry them forward. Right? So as you’re resolving one, so… Say it’s resolving her arc of understanding what happened in the barn, then underneath that you have the second arc of the broken sword. So that’s going to carry you forward. As one ends, there’s already rolling forward tension and momentum on another plot line. Ideally, like two or three others. Right? This is partially why what we were talking about in one of our earlier episodes about contextual tension can be so useful. Because the contextual tension is this ambient tension that pulls us through the whole book as were trying to understand how does this tie into the real world history, how does this tie into the actual plan, into the history of quote unquote the nation and all of those things.
[Erin] I also think I will say, like, as a very messy writer, I am not a great structural like planner. So I think it’s also maybe, maybe not, a way to like bake your structure as you go. So I’m thinking about that opening scene where they’re fighting… Let’s say I was just like I want to write a scene where the clan are monsters and somebody is fighting them, and I’m going to figure out the rest once I get there. So it’s like the scene has ended. Okay. They fought them. Then it’s like what is left unresolved on the stage. Like, what is left? What’s actually left is the next thing they do, which is the pieces. So I’m thinking, like, okay, now they’ve killed these things, they’ve got to, I assume, get out of wherever they are. Okay. That needs to be resolved. They need to, like, take the bits of monster somewhere and do something with them.
[Howard] Oh, and they gotta steal some whiskey.
[Erin] And they gotta steal some… There’s always time to steal some whiskey. One of my life mottos. Not really. But then, like, by thinking about that, then it’s like, okay, maybe that gets me to the next scene. Then I can figure out, okay, now I’ve figured out where they take the pieces. Oh, I thought up a new character, maybe that character provide some new tension. Will it be a lot jankier, and you’re going to have to go… It’s like a cake… You ever make those cakes where it didn’t quite work out?
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I mean, not frosting the heck out of it?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] You’re like, no, no.
[DongWon] [garbled] Flat and round. Right?
[Erin] Exactly. That’s all you need. So you may have to fix it in post. But I think sometimes, for me, like, I will often get stuck when I’m writing at transitions. I think a lot of times it’s because I haven’t figured out where the tension is going.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] So it feels like you just ended a sentence with a really, like, heavy period. That sounds very odd. You just ended a sentence with a very definite ending.
[DongWon] You want to keep the flow going.
[Howard] You know what, let’s keep that. And speaking of flow, should we take a break for things of the week?
[Erin] Sure, while I get myself together.
[DongWon] This episode of Writing Excuses is sponsored in part by Acorn. Money can be a difficult topic for writers and creative professionals. It’s not like earning a regular paycheck that comes in at reliable intervals. It requires more careful planning to make sure that that advance covers you not just this year, but set you up for the future as well. Learning to invest and be smart with your money takes time and research, and it’s easy to put that off in favor of short-term goals. I encourage all the writers I work with to read up on the options out there and do their homework to figure out what makes sense for them. Acorn makes it easy to start automatically saving and investing in your future. You don’t need a lot of money or expertise to invest with Acorn. In fact, you can get started with just your spare change. Acorn recommends an expert-built portfolio that fits you and your money goals. Then automatically invests your money for you. What to acorn.com/wx or download the Acorn app to start saving and investing in your future today. [Lots garbled]
[Mary Robinette] I want to tell you about a novella that I translated from Icelandic. Yeah, I know. Icelandic. It’s a whole other story. The thing I want to talk to you about is this novella. The author, Hildur Knutsdottir, is an award-winning writer in her home country, and we met at Ice Con in 2021. I fell in love with her writing, but it wasn’t available in English. The Night Guest is a creepy horror novella which starts out with a totally relatable situation. The main character goes to the doctor because she keeps waking up tired and with mystery bruises. That’s not the relatable part. The relatable part is that her concerns are dismissed because she’s being quote hysterical. But each night, the injuries get worse. Hildur has this beautiful spare language that manages to create dread in the seemingly most innocuous moment. I loved this book enough to translate it. Check out The Night Guest by Hildur Knutsdottir.
[DongWon] Howard, I love what you’re saying about thinking about how to write efficiently. How to figure out how to do the least rewriting. The one thing I do want to say on that, though, is I think tension is the thing that needs rewriting the most often. You know what, as an editor, the thing that I see the most, the feedback I give the most is, characters are great, worldbuilding is great, the plot is great, it just doesn’t have enough momentum. It needs somebody to… The line I always say is it didn’t pull me through the story in the way I need it to. Right? So that’s always a tension critique when I give that. So what you’re saying, Erin, makes a lot of sense to me too, in terms of like when you do it, you have these individual scenes, is getting the momentum and sliding from one scene to the next. Tension is how you create that elision, moving from one beat to the next beat. So figuring out how to layer that in sometimes will not be too obvious for you in the planning stages, and maybe something you find as you go. So if you’re struggling with that, I don’t want you to, like, worry too much about things in the outlining and planning stages. Obviously, have an eye on it, think about it. I think it can be really helpful. But it’s okay if you feel like this needs a lot of rewriting to get the kind of tension in there that you want.
[Howard] You know what, I want to be clear here. When I say the least amount of work, I’m not talking about no work.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] There is so much rewriting that needs to be done. But I don’t want to have to take this magnificent set of layers and instead of doing some trimming, I turn a dobos torte into a dobos tortilla. There’s… Okay, I only have one layer I can use. Now I gotta rebuild the whole thing.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] For a tension rewrite, what I prefer is to be able to say, “Oh, this chapter isn’t working the way it needs to work. I will rewrite this chapter.” Rather than, “Oh, this chapter doesn’t even fit in this book. I have to restructure it and everything that comes after it.” That’s the work that I want to avoid.
[Erin] I think that one of the reasons… I agree with everything. But I think that one of the reasons that tension often happens in the rewriting is because tension is different than conflict. I think sometimes when we get stuck in writing, or maybe it’s just me, like, the instinct might be to, like, Michael Bay it and…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Just be like more explosions! More things! More enemies! Like, and just like build it out bigger and bigger and bigger. But that doesn’t necessarily make it any more tense.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Because it’s like if you’re up against 50 people trying to kill you or 60 people trying to kill you, it’s pretty bad either way. It’s not more tense, you’re pretty dead. So you have to think about a lot of times, it’s small things…
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] That create tension. It’s emotional things, it’s personal things. I think that’s what I love about Ring Shout is that things that we talked about in tension, the girl, the sword, they’re important, but they’re not the big set pieces.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] They’re not the huge battles in a lot of ways. They’re the smaller moments that pull you from one big set piece to the next. I think they can be harder to find until the rewrite, because you don’t know what small details you put in chapter 3 until you write it out. Then you go, oh, I mentioned a cloak. Maybe that’s a source of tension that I can bring through…
[DongWon] I think the lesser version of the opening of this book is one that starts with the trap blowing up. Right? But he doesn’t do that. He starts with a conversation. Starts with a long conversation between the key characters of the story. I think that leads to the kind of tension that’s interesting. Because now we have a sense of who these people are, we’re starting to care about them. Then, for me, the fight scene in the warehouse is fine until she draws the sword. Then it’s like, oh, damn. This is interesting now. Right? Because that, for me… I… We talk about this a lot, but death isn’t very interesting stakes. Right? Like, if the character dies, I’m sort of like, okay, characters dead, let’s move on. It’s how the other characters feel about the character’s death that makes it hit hard. It’s the sense of, like, oh, they had something to accomplish that they didn’t accomplish. Because we, as people, care about other people. Right? We don’t necessarily care about one thing in isolation, we care about communities and relationships. So when I say that this needs stakes, I almost always mean that this needs a relationship of some sort. To another person, to a group, even to like themselves in a certain way. An aspiration for themselves. That’s the thing we’re going to feel emotions about. So, that’s why starting in an action scene is something that, like, I always recommend against. When you think about action scenes in general, as Erin was saying, it’s not about the explosions, it’s not about the cool fight scenes, it’s about the intensity of emotion, it’s about caring about the relationship, it’s about what’s the consequence of losing this fight. That consequence is in the regard of their community and their family, whatever it is.
[Howard] The community and family. There’s a scene about… I want to say a third of the way into the book, where the community is coming together for shared meals, and we talk about the food and we talk about the music and what’s happening. When a scene like that is done well, I want to eat. I am now connected. If you do something that like removes their ability to get crayfish anymore, I’m tense. Because I… Food. That’s important.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] So these sorts of celebratory moments a third of the way into the book… Granted, my meta-reader is saying, “Oh, Howard, don’t learn to love this food or these people or whatever else. P. Djèlí Clark is just setting you up to care about things that could be taken away.” Yeah, set my meta-reader aside and just enjoy it. Because it’s a lovely scene that connects me and allows the author to create stakes that matter.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] Rather than, oh, no, somebody’s gonna die. Oh, no, this community might fracture.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] It’s so grounding. Like… You said food, it made me think, many of us may have been in life or death situations against multiples of people, but many have not. But we’ve all eaten. I would assume. Oh, boy…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] So I think that a lot of times in… It makes me think about one of the challenges of fantasy and science fiction, which is that sometimes you’re talking about things that we have no frame of reference for. Like, I have never been tense about a ship exploding, because I’m not on a spaceship. But I am tense about letting the people on my crew down. Or, like, disappointment is something that we understand. So I think a lot of times where I can sometimes get lost in fiction is when so much of the tension is focused on the thing that I can’t ground myself into, and not enough, like you’re talking about, in the relationships.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] But I think when people hear “add more stakes,” sometimes they think…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Add bigger things blowing up.
[DongWon] One other thing I want to add to my layer cake metaphor here…
[Erin] Yes.
[DongWon] And sort of what we’re talking about in general is I think one of the problems with adding more explosions is you lose focus. Right? So I’m saying have lots of layers, but have one of those tensions be the focus of your scene. Right? Then as you resolve that, you shift the focus to something else. When you’re just adding more noise, you lose sight of the tension, so the tension drops, actually. Right? So thing to remember is that, like, if you think about the juke joint fight scene, right, she’s running around looking for her lover through all that, and the tension is coming from that, primarily. There’s other elements there. Right? There’s the relationship with Sadie, there’s whatever’s going on outside with the butcher, there’s… Again, the stuff with the sword, her memories, those are all present in the scene, but the dominant note, going back to our music metaphor, the dominant theme in that is her relationship with this guy as she’s coming to terms with how much she cares about him.
[Howard] You mentioned don’t raise stakes like Michael Bay by blowing more things up. Funny story. I think it’s the third Transformers film where they were shooting in 3D, and it was the most enjoyable and comprehensible for me. It turns out it’s because the 3D tech people went to Michael Bay and said, “That thing you keep doing with the cameras? Stop it. We can’t do 3D if you jiggle around a lot.” So they, for technical reasons, they forced him to, as you were saying, focus our attention on something.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] Which let me care about it. Which made things comprehensible.
[DongWon] Yeah. I saw an interview with George Miller the other day where he was talking about the most important thing that he learned to do, and he learned it from making Happy Feet 2…
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Which he made immediately before Mad Max Fury Road, which is very funny to me. But once you spot it, you can see why it makes Mad Max so good, is he learned that you communicate who the protagonist is by what the camera is looking at. Right? So all throughout Fury Road, you will notice these scenes… You talk about, like, Michael Bay level action, a million things are happening at once, but you’re always focused on a character, what that character’s experiencing, thinking, and you can tell what that character feels about the other characters in the scene. Right? You can see the growing trust and affection between Max and Furiosa simply by watching how they move, how they respond to each other. Then when they start fighting in tandem, it’s this beautiful moment of two people coming together for survival. So, I know we’ve wandered off of Ring Shout…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] But think about that focus when you’re thinking about how to create and maintain tension.
[Erin] Yeah. I also want to, just before we wrap up this episode, you were talking about music earlier also made me think about something that I’ve seen that happens a lot at karaoke. Which is that if you have somebody who has the most beautiful voice in the world and they start singing at the same volume and, no matter how beautiful it is, after about 30 seconds, people will stop. The thing they do where they start listening, they’re like, “Wow, you can really sing,” and then go back to their conversations. Because it is the change that actually makes…
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] People pay attention. Our human brains are really good at taking things that there use to and screening them out. It’s actually… Whole nother podcast on why that actually is unfortunate, because if you’re happy, sometimes you could get really accustomed to it and start thinking you’re not happy anymore, because that’s what the human brain does. But it does the same thing when you’re reading. So when you were talking about the one scene in her looking for her lover, that’s the note of that scene. But it’s not the note of the entire book.
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Erin] Because if you hit the same note over and over and over again, nothing wrong with explosions, I think the reason Michael Bay gets a lot of heat is because when you go to the same well over and over, it’s like that singer holding the same note, same pitch, same timber, for 10 minutes. Eventually, you’re just like, oh, got that. Now I need something new.
[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.
[Erin] Speaking of something new, we have new homework for you.
[DongWon] Yeah. I’ve got your homework for you this week. What I want you to do to tie this all together is to take a look at your own outline. Move one of the major conflict points in that outline into a different act. Move it forward. So, say you have the resolution of Act I. See if you can stretch that into what happens if you move that to the end of Act II. If you have something in Act IV, what happens if you move that to Act III? See how that changes the pacing, see how it changes the tension, see if moving things forward or back increases or decreases the speed of reading the book and the momentum of your story.
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.
[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There’s an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon’s expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.