Some tools and techniques
You can’t spin tension out of nothing. You got to have some yarn before you twist it taut.
So how to get some yarn?
A question the audience wants answered gets you a chunk of the way. Will she escape? Will the mystery be solved? Will the murderers be stopped? But if you’re writing genre (I mostly write thrillers), the answer will usually be some form of ‘yes’. And the audience expects that, which contains tension, dampening it down to frisson or interest (or worse – boredom!), rather than a visceral almost unbearable need to find out what happens next.
Writing characters that an audience cares about, with a real prospect of failure can help. Maybe they lack the necessary skill? Maybe they can’t bear to do the thing that needs doing? Maybe they do the right thing – but it still all goes wrong anyway? Maybe the fight’s been knocked out of them? Maybe they want conflicting things that can’t be reconciled.
There’s other ways to get yarn – but that might do to start with. How do you pull it tight?
You know something they don’t know…
Information flow is one of the most important tools in the kit, and it can be wielded many different ways.
Letting the audience see something important ahead of the characters (Hitchcock’s ticking bomb under the table while the oblivious guests eat lunch) gives you tension for the price of surprise. That’s usually a trade I’ll take. It can be as obvious as a close-up on the bomb beneath the table, or as subtle as a flicker of recognition on someone’s face. If it’s subtle, the audience gets to feel clever when it pays off – and people like feeling smart.
People with something to hide
People’s secrets matter to them, even if they’re irrelevant to anyone else. And what people choose to keep secret gives a handle on what they fear, what they’re ashamed of, and who they think they are – which is powerful fuel that can lead to…
Good(ish) people who can’t trust each other
Because everyone knows it’s safer to go it alone than to trust the wrong person… And if you don’t have a way to tell who is the right person, maybe it’s safer to trust no-one at all. But you can’t do it alone.
Dig a hole you don’t know how to get out of
Sometimes, especially if things are trucking along in the expected direction (whether that’s from an outline, or just your sense of ‘how it should go’), you can do worse than to think ‘What’s the absolute worst thing that could happen right now?’
Then do that thing.
Put your characters in a situation you don’t know how to get them out of – because if you already know how you’re getting them out of it, the audience can probably guess too. If it takes you a bunch of gnawing walls to figure out their escape, you’ve got a better chance of your audience really feeling vicariously trapped.
Slow it all down
Focusing on a detail – letting key moments really unfold in real time, through slow painstaking work – sitting with the characters as the surrounding peril gets closer and closer.
When you’re building tension (as opposed to excitement), fast-paced action and spectacle aren’t necessarily what you’re going for.
And last but not least, you can opt to…
Leave the tension unresolved
THE CHINA SYNDROME does this brilliantly: the nuclear meltdown near miss, caused by the short-sighted antics of corporate bosses concerned only with profit – and engineers lacking the courage to refuse them – is averted by luck not skill and it teaches no lessons. The calls for an inquiry sound forlorn even as they are made – the watching cameras slide away to a microwave ad. A good man lies dead, but nothing has changed: the horror remains. (I wrote about it here).