In the two weeks that followed, Nuria and I spent every free moment with each other. We ate together, slept together, phoned each other when she was at work, and lived for the evenings and the nights.
Gwyn skillfully collapses two whole weeks into quick summary and then quickly returns to the action:
One lunchtime I was already on the bench, having spent some time there reading over proofs in the morning sun with a bottle of cold beer. Nuria arrived, exuberant, flushed.
By condensing small passages of irrelevant events in short windows of time, you ensure that your prose won't be flabby and that you can continue to keep tension alive.
Condensing Information
Your characters will be doctors and architects and tradespeople of all kinds. They will weave intricate designs out of silk, build plans for large skyscrapers, and study the flora and fauna of their worlds. What they do as a vocation, a hobby, or for pure survival may be of great interest to you, and may even play a crucial role in your narrative, so you may want to describe the breathtaking minutia of a heart surgery or the drafting of a blueprint because it captures your imagination. Too much description, however— whether in dialogue or through narrative passages—will read like a technical manual and offer no possibility for tension. You want to first digest it, and then filter it through the point of view of your character, offering a condensed version of the facts that gives the reader a taste, a flash, or an insight your characters.
The same is true of information that comes as a result of crime scene investigations, or any mystery that can be solved—from the ancient origins of a sacred relic, to a murder, to how an entire civilization disappeared. Any line of investigation and inquiry will naturally come with lots of clues and information that your characters will need to offer to readers to drive the plot forward and explain things.
Your job is to condense it in a way that adds to the tension and drama of your narrative. For example, in Joanne Harris's novel Sleep, Pale Sister, Henry Chester is a painter with a fascination for one model in particular— Effie, a young girl upon whom he projects innocence. He becomes obsessed with her and paints her many times, but rather than showing a bunch of dull sittings, Harris gives the reader an overview of all the sittings in quick, expert lines of exposition that, rather than being boring, add up in their condensed description to an eerie feeling of tension and concern:
I must have drawn or painted Effie a hundred times: she was Cinderella, she was Mary, she was the young novice in The Passion Flower; she was Beatrice in Heaven, Juliet in the tomb, draped with Lilies and trailing convolvulus for Ophelia, in rags for "The Little Beggar Girl." My final portrait of her at that time was The Sleeping Beauty, so like My Sister's Sleep in composition, showing Effie all in white again, like a bride or a novice, lying on the same little girl's bed, her hair, much longer than it had been when she was ten — I had always urged her never to cut it—trailing on to the floor, where a century's worth of dust lingers.
When you condense information like this, try to do so in a way that creates a feeling of trouble brewing. Add up elements that give the reader concern for your protagonist, or suggest a behavior that is a little off-center, or obsessive, or potentially volatile. If the devil is in the details, then use these details strategically to build tension when you tell the reader about the vocation and activities your protagonist (or antagonist) engages in.
OTHER TENSION-BUILDING TRICKS
There really is no good reason not to have dramatic tension in your narrative, because there are so many ways to create it. The next set of techniques can be thought of as tension tools that you can keep in your writer's kit and pull out fairly easily to infuse tension into individual scenes.
Including Foreboding
Foreboding is a feeling that something bad or unpleasant is coming for your protagonist. Unlike foreshadowing, which hints at actual plot events to come, foreboding is purely about mood-setting. It heightens the feeling of tension in a scene but doesn't necessarily indicate that something bad really will happen.
Here's an example from Don DeLillo's novel White Noise. In this scene, the young son of Professor Jack Gladney and his wife, Babette, wakes up one day crying and doesn't cease for seven hours straight. Though they can find nothing physically wrong with him, the crying is so abnormal that they take him to the doctor—where they get no answers. His crying instills terror in the family, and it presages a more dramatic situation that is to come later in the book—that of an airborne toxic cloud that descends over their town inexplicably. Notice how something simple like a crying child creates tension and foreboding in the following passage:
As I started the car I realized his crying had changed in pitch and quality. The rhythmic urgency had given way to a sustained inarticulate and mournful sound. He was keening now. These were expressions of Mideast-ern lament, of an anguish so accessible that it rushes to overwhelm what immediately caused it. There was something permanent and soul-struck in this crying. It was a sound of inbred desolation.
Since the child is pre-verbal, one gets the feeling that he feels on some level what is to come, and DeLillo conveys this tense, uneasy feeling without dropping any direct plot information. The scene is eerie, tragic, and unnerving, full of dramatic tension as the reader wonders what on earth is going on.
When you create foreboding, remember to think about atmosphere and mood. Invoke the senses. There's something deeply eerie about the sound of a crying child in the previous. Think about how you can use sound—like the plaintive cawing of seagulls; or smell—think of what kind of effect a foul odor will have on a character. Foreboding happens in the moment. You don't have to make good on it the way you do if you use foreshadowing. You're painting an atmosphere to establish a feeling of uneasiness and worry in the reader.
Thwarting Expectation
When a character has an expectation or desire in a scene (and characters always should!), you have a great opportunity to create tension by making the reader (and the character) worry that the expectation will not be met. This can be a large expectation, like the bride waiting at the altar, or something seemingly small, like in this example from Diane Setterfield's novel The Thirteenth Tale.
Protagonist Margaret Lea is an amateur biographer and book lover who has been asked to write the biography of the enigmatic and famous writer Vida Winter. In preparation, she begins to read Winter's famous work, concluding with a book of stories called Thirteen Tales. Notice how the simple act of expectation—of reading the thirteenth tale—takes on tension as Margaret's expectations are thwarted:
It was while I was reading "The Mermaid's Tale"—the twelfth tale—that I began to feel stirrings of an anxiety that was unconnected to the story itself. I was distracted: my thumb and right index finger were sending me a message: Not many pages left. The knowledge nagged more insistently until I tilted the book to check. It was true. The thirteenth tale must be a very short one.
I continued my reading, finished tale twelve and turned the page.
Blank.
I flicked back, forward again. Nothing.
There was no thirteenth tale.
There was a sudden rush in my head, I felt the sick dizziness of the deep-sea diver come too fast to the surface.
This sets up a mood for the rest of the novel. Things are not as they seem. Pieces of the story are missing. It's a brilliant stroke of dramatic tension.
In order to carry this out, you must put something at stake for your protagonist regarding whatever it is he expects, something meaningful to him emotionally, or that has consequences in his life somehow. A man waiting to find out the results of her mother's will, for instance, has a great deal invested in the results. If the lawyer continues over a long period to read out assets that are granted to cousins and relatives less directly tied to his mother, the scene will take on tension. What, if anything, has his mother left your character?
Thwarting expectations is a technique I recommend you use frequently. For if your protagonist
gets what she wants or expects in too many scenes, there will be little tension left to keep the reader hooked.
Making Changes Without Explanation
People like to know why things happen, especially when it comes to change. Therefore, if you want to create tension in a scene, you can change something in your protagonist's life without giving him an immediate explanation. The change can be life-altering, or it can be something more befuddling, like in this example from a scene in another of Joanne Harris's novels, Gentlemen & Players:
As the door closed I saw a pile of flat-packed cardboard boxes propped up against the wall.
"Busy day today?" I asked him, indicating the boxes. "What is it? Invading Poland?"
Gerry twitched. "No, ah — just moving a few things around. Ah—to the new departmental office."
I regarded him closely. There was an ominous ring to the phrase. "What new departmental office?"
"Ah — sorry. Must get along. Headmaster's briefing. Can't be late." That's a joke. Gerry's late to everything. "What new office? Has someone died?"
"Ah — sorry, Roy. Catch you later."
All that has really transpired in this bit of a scene is that Professor Roy Strait-ley has learned about the creation of a new department at the school where he teaches. Yet it feels tense because Roy is a longtime professor at St. Oswald's School for Boys and it is very atypical for him to be uninformed about a major decision. The reader instantly wants to know why Roy hasn't been informed, and the way that Gerry hems and haws makes it clear that the answer to come will not be pleasing to Roy. Harris could easily have made that a boring scene, or just cut to the chase of Roy finding out, but she creates dramatic tension over the simplest interactions because it sets a tone of intrigue, which she follows through on.
You can do the same thing in your own work by throwing change at your characters that they don't have an explanation for.
It's not useful, however, to throw in change just for the sake of it or out of the blue. Change without explanation must have a basis in your plot. It must motivate your protagonist to learn more, and to take his fate into his hands.
Tension comes from the stakes you set for your characters. If there is little or nothing at stake, there will be little tension.
An important way you keep your protagonist from wandering aimlessly about your narrative is to give him an intention in every scene—a job that he wants to carry out that will give purpose to the scene. The intention doesn't come from nowhere—it stems directly from the significant situation of your plot and from your protagonist's personal history. To clarify, an intention is a character's plan to take an action, to do something, whereas a motivation is a series of reasons, from your protagonist's personal history to his mood, that accounts for why he plans to take an action. In every scene these intentions will drive the action and consequences; they will help you make each scene relevant to your plot and character development. Intentions are an important way to build drama and conflict into your narrative, too, because as your protagonist pursues his intention, you will oppose it, thwart it, intensify his desire for it, and maybe, only at the end of your narrative, grant him the satisfaction of achieving it.
Every time you begin a scene you want to ask yourself: What does my protagonist want, need, and intend to do? To answer this, you'll need to consider the following:
1. What are the most immediate desires of the character? An intention is often a character's desire or plan to do something, whether it's
to rob a bank, propose to a woman, go to the store for cigarettes, or tell off a misbehaving family member.
2. When will your characters achieve their intention or meet with opposition? A scene intention should meet with complications to build drama and suspense. Therefore, try not to allow your characters to achieve their intentions right away, or too easily. Know when and where you will complicate or resolve things. Some intentions will have to be achieved, or else your plot will stop cold.
3. Does the scene intention make sense to your plot? Be careful not to take tangents and side paths that, while fun to write, don't contribute to the drama already unfolding. Every intention should be related to the significant situation and its consequences.
4. Who will help your characters achieve their goal? Who will oppose them? Decide what other characters or conditions will support or thwart your protagonists' intentions, and try to keep some resistance in the scene so that intentions are not achieved too soon, nor delayed beyond what feels realistic.
These basic questions will help direct you when you begin thinking about the actions your characters need to take in a new scene. Now we'll look at the kinds of intentions you'll want to focus on: plot-based, and scene-specific.
PLOT-BASED INTENTIONS
The first imperative any character has in any scene must always be tied back in one way or another to the significant situation of your plot, or else your scenes will feel free-floating, like vignettes. An intention, at its most basic, is a course of action your protagonist plans to take (and sometimes needs to take) in the scene that arises first out of the significant situation, and then from the consequences that ensue.
For example, Tess Gerritsen's thriller Vanish launches its significant situation when medical examiner Maura Isles prepares to do an autopsy on a Jane Doe—an unidentified female corpse—and the dead woman opens
her eyes. No, this isn't a zombie story—the woman is alive, though barely. Maura's overarching plot-based intention, no matter the scene she stars in, is to figure out who this woman is, and what has happened to her—how did she end up in a body bag in the morgue when she wasn't dead! The consequences of the significant situation get underway very quickly, creating new intentions for Maura: For example, the press gets wind of what happened and begins to harass Maura and misquote the medical examiner's office. The nearly dead Jane Doe, once she's in the hospital, turns out to be livid with rage and violent in defending her own life. These are the consequences that spin out from the significant situation, and they drive scene-specific intentions (discussed in the next section).
So, here's an example of Maura Isles engaged in a plot-based intention. Maura is visiting the hospital after Jane Doe has been admitted:
"I'm here to visit a patient," said Maura. "She was admitted last night, through the ER. I understand she was transferred out of ICU this morning."
"The patient's name?"
Maura hesitated. "I believe she's still registered as Jane Doe. Dr. Cutler told me she's in room four-thirty-one."
The ward clerk's gaze narrowed. "I'm sorry. We've had calls from reporters all day. We can't answer any more questions about that patient."
"I'm not a reporter. I'm Dr. Isles, from the medical examiner's office. I told Dr. Cutler I'd be coming by to check on the patient."
"May I see some identification?"
Maura dug into her purse and placed her ID on the countertop. This is what I get for showing up without my lab coat, she thought. She could see the interns cruising down the hall, unimpeded, like a flock of strutting white geese.
So, referring to the points mentioned earlier:
1. What is Maura Isles most immediate, plot-related intention? To
interview Jane Doe and determine her identity, and discover what, if anything, she remembers of how she came to be left for dead.
2. Will she achieve this intention or be thwarted? The reader doesn't know when in the scene (or if) Maura will achieve her intention, but Gerritsen does—and in a moment, I'll show you how she complicates this intention unexpectedly, creating drama and action. Though the exchange with the clerk may seem inconsequential, it's quite crucial to building tension. If Maura walked unobstructed into the hospital, which is thronged by press clamoring to get in, and went straight to her patient's room, the scene would lack any element of dramatic tension. Here, the reader wonders if she's even going to get in to see the woman, and since the reader is as curious as Maura as to the identity of Jane Doe, thwarting Maura's intentio
n keeps the reader on his toes. On a larger scale, in the novel, other law enforcement officials will aid Maura, and members of the press and Jane Doe herself will thwart her.
3. Does the intention make sense to the plot? Yes, absolutely—nat-urally Maura will want to speak to the woman who survived death. For the plot to move forward, something new will have to be revealed about Jane Doe.
4. And finally, who helps Maura achieve her intention? In this scene, after questioning her and scouring her ID, the clerk lets Maura through, helping her achieve one part of her intention—she gets into the hospital. But will she get to interview Jane Doe? Who will help her? In this scene, as it turns out, no one.
Gerritsen ups the ante on the plot in this scene when Jane Doe, who is more than awake—in fact she's volatile and has to be restrained—gets hold of the guard's gun and shoots him, then takes Maura as her hostage. Afraid of the woman, no hospital personnel want to get involved. Maura ends up relying on her own wits and skills to keep from getting shot.
Complicating intentions is a crucial part of building suspense and tension. Remember that if you allow your characters to achieve their intentions too early in the scene or in the narrative, you dissipate any tension or suspense you might have created.
Plot-related intentions can be demonstrated by the protagonist's direct responses to the significant situation through:
• Interior monologue that shows his thoughts and feelings
•Actions he takes to try to change or influence the outcome of the significant situation
• Dialogue in which he expresses his feelings or thoughts about the plot
SCENE-SPECIFIC INTENTIONS
Now, while your protagonist has an umbrella set of intentions related to the plot that will drive him no matter what is happening in the scene, he will also have more immediate scene-based intentions, like to find shelter after his car has been bombed, or to contact a friend he can trust before the cops find him. These immediate intentions still must relate to the plot, but they are more likely to be related to consequences—the many smaller actions and events that stem from the significant situation. Scene-specific intentions keep your characters from being aimless.
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