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Chapter 21: Tightening the Tension to Enthral Readers
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Raising the stakes
Fiction always involves what’s known as rising action, which means that the
stakes get higher and higher for your main characters as they go through the
story. For example, the longer the lovers have known one another, the more
deeply they’re in love, and the more terrible the thought of them being separated;
the closer the detective gets to uncovering the identity of the serial
killer, the more determined the killer becomes to corner and murder the
detective.
A common reason for stories not getting going is that the stakes aren’t high
enough. I’m certainly not saying that all fiction has to be about saving the
world – your story can simply involve saving one character who means the
world to your protagonist. But whatever your character wants or fears, it
must be all-important and all-encompassing to her.
Think of ways to make your character more desperate as the story proceeds.
Perhaps she wants something more and more strongly, or the pressures on
her grow greater and greater. In this way you get your readers biting their nails
to the quick!
Using time pressure
The most common device for increasing narrative tension is to put your character
under some kind of time pressure. She has 24 hours to find and defuse
a bomb. Kidnappers give a couple seven days to raise the ransom money
before they kill the couple’s child. A married couple have a fortnight’s holiday
in which to decide whether they’re going to divorce. A character has a
month before the wedding to convince the man she loves that he’s marrying
the wrong woman.
Stories feature two general kinds of deadline:
✓ External: Deadlines imposed by outside forces. Examples include work
deadlines, academic deadlines (such as exams or the end of a term or
academic year), a wedding date, birthdays and anniversaries, major
festivals, trial dates or dates for an execution, a bomb set to go off at a
certain time or a kidnapping deadline, the time a journey takes, seasons,
tides, an asteroid that will shortly hit the earth and so on.
✓ Internal: Deadlines that characters set themselves, such as making a
resolution to return to their home town in six months, to lose half a
stone in weight by six weeks, to find the right man by the end of the year
and so on.