can you talk about building emotional tension and using temporal jumping to facilitate that? Whenever, if you don’t want to spoil anything, feel free to table this or be really general
hi ok so this has been sat in my inbox for a MONTH a sweet sweet long month but i feel like now i can finally attempt(?) to answer it with my inane ramblings as ive done pretty much all the temporal fuckery that i can do in bwmh which i guess is what ur referring to:D sooooo cue some wank here!
ok i guess ill take this in two parts, firstly building emotional tension + secondly facilitating emotional tension using time/temporal jumps. so emotional tension…i mean this can be kind of dime a dozen in a sense, even the worst books ive read tend to have a vague idea of how to implement emotional tension, because the tropes around it are v much like embedded into our psyche/the way we consume media. so bwmh is not special in that respect, neither is like any sort of writing that revolves around conflict which is….all writing lol.
having said that, theres some stuff here and there that i felt would tip things in the right way, particularly because bwmh deals with emotional conflict in the past and the present and also with its continuity throughout. so, the “present” emotional tension (or what is the “cover” for it essentially) is obviously sam, which i feel was not built up particularly subtly — i thought that throughout the show, in s2, it was quite obvious to the viewer fairly early on that sue was having an affair with sam, the tension came from when emily would find out that this is the case, so i wanted to emulate that in bwmh. which is why you get very cut and dry lines like in ch2 ('If there was one thing worse than sitting and playing ‘fortunately, unfortunately’ in the town hall after a long day of work, it was sitting and playing ‘fortunately, unfortunately’ in the town hall after a long day of work with your ex-friend-with-benefits who, in reality, had neither been your friend nor offered you much in the way of benefits.')
like, in all honesty, the emotional tension never comes from sue sleeping with sam, it comes from, as i said, the waiting for emily to find out, which again i displayed fairly early on (perhaps artlessly but sue is too self aware for this not to be the kind of thing she thinks):
so you’ve got emotional tension 1: when is emily going to find out? (because the conventions of narrative/conflict dictate that it is a matter of when and not if), and then emotional tension 2: why did sue do this, which honestly again she elucidates fairly clearly, but still in an obscure enough way that the reader has questions, all of which boil down to: what is she running away from?
the scene that this extract is from (which is ch3, the first scene where emily and sue are having breakfast and discussing sam) actually does a lot of heavy lifting in terms of setting the groundwork for emotional tension: we get a development in the conflict on emily’s part (she likes sam), but also, and of course ultimately this is more important, there is the hint of tension between emily and sue:
so, emotional tension level up, essentially because, if we speak in terms of writing tropes, the reader is starting to realise that they are seeing through the eyes of an unreliable narrator!!!!!!!(sue). obviously it’s not as dramatic as, say, the gone girl unreliable narrator reveal (one of my fav examples of that from like. modern/recent writing), but the crux of it is: for the first few chapters, we were under the impression that sue was in love with emily (which is still true obviously lol), that this love was not requited/at least hasn’t been discussed, and that emily was most likely ignorant of it. however, in my view this always seemed to be an unlikely turn of events mostly because emily is very observant by nature and also because…? i cant figure out a world in which emily loves sue the way she does and stays schtum about it. so actually through this dialogue we establish:
unreliable narrator (sue), if admittedly only by implication
emily’s awareness of sue’s feelings
emily’s possible rejection of sue’s feelings (for whatever reason: ‘don’t do that’ is obviously purposefully vague).
an understanding between them, whatever that is, which continues into the next line:
so, here, two fun ways of building emotional tension, this time between the narrative and the reader — one very typical, one also typical but more interesting (hopefully).
establish that, contrary to both our previous assumptions and our own knowledge, sue DOES have a handle on her relationship with emily — however dysfunctional (obviously miserable pleasure is not exactly healthy!). WE don’t, however, meaning there is tension created.
very cliche/simple — character about to say something and then external circumstances (in this case emily realising she’s running late) preventing them from doing so
the last thing i would say i PERSONALLY am fond of with regards to emotional tension is building it to a certain point then taking it down again. if you imagine a scene of conflict/tension as following the 5 part story arc (which you probably shouldnt lol but its the easiest way of illustrating my extremely insane thinking):
part of emily and sue’s problem in bwmh (or rather pretty much their MAIN problem) is they are stuck in ‘act 4’ - falling action - and rarely resolve appropriately into act 5 (the denouement) with the way they communicate. so if we take that first scene from ch3, we get:
1: exposition
2: rising action
then 3: climax which on its surface is the argument about sam but in reality is actually that little section of dialogue where we reveal sue’s unreliability which ive already discussed. but actually, the falling action never neatly resolves into a denouement because they each dont have the wherewithal to actually have it out:
instead of actually resolving the discussion appropriately, they apologise, move on/change the subject, nothing actually gets sorted, so we get a hangover of tension. then we see the same formula over and over again (probably too many times lol but lets not get into self flagellation now!). in a scene later in the same chapter, for example, we get a very similar, if slightly more tense formula, where this falling action doesn’t feel at all resolved:
between the characters: absolutely NO resolution!
between the narrative and the reader: even LESS resolution, because of what happens next!!!
so, now, what the reader has been beginning to suspect from the beginning of the chapter, since reading the knowing/not knowing part of the cereal scene (what i call it in my head lol sorry), is starting to crystallise a little more — obviously being the physical relationship. This is actually the real tension. i mentioned earlier that the climax of the relationship seems to be about sam, but of course it’s not actually about sam at all, which is why we care more about 1) this implication of more to their relationship than we initially suspected and 2) when emily will find out about sam and how that will affect her relationship with sue as well as our relationship with sue.
so, actually, when emily finds out about sam at the end of the chapter, it’s not so much the ‘climax’ as the fake climax, because the emotional tension is perpetuated and complicated due to a) the confirmation in the next chapter (the interval chapter) that sue and emily have had sex and b) as you so astutely pointed out, the fact that the action has been physically postponed by the movement into an interval chapter.
which leads me onto part 2 of your question: how temporal jumping facilitates emotional tension, and this part of my answer is a lot more cut and dry, don’t worry. the short answer being, it postpones it!
each place in which an interval chapter falls comes at the development of an ‘emotionally tense’ section of the present narrative: interval 1 comes after emily finds out about sam and sue’s relationship, interval 2 comes after sue and emily sleep together for the first time that WE have seen in the present tense, i.e. we confirm that their physical relationship still exists, interval 3 comes after the frankest conversation about their relationship between the two of them that we’ve seen thus far in the narrative, as well as off the back of an emotionally laden sex scene (lol). essentially, it’s dragging the whole thing out!
but of course, or at least my intention was, each interval chapter offered a revelatory element of their relationship that they wouldn’t talk about in the present tense as easily/unprompted. if you consider the physical nature of their relationship being confirmed in interval 1 as the ‘revelation’ of the chapter, we then consider the emotional nature of their relationship as the revelation of interval 2 (which also serves to establish the timeline of their relationship more clearly) and then finally interval 3 ‘reveals’ emily’s own missteps in the relationship (i.e. catherine — if sam is sue’s present tense error, emily’s past tense error is catherine, and both are turning points for each of them in how they view the interiority/exteriority of their relationship).
so what in reality happens is that the interval chapter doesn’t just drag out the tension, it develops it further, and knots up what we know has happened in our present narrative with what we’re learning has happened in the past. essentially, emily and sue’s relationship really lends itself to this, because even on the show we get the sense of two individuals who are essentially inextricably linked. they try to separate and they can’t; they also (crucially!) don’t really want to — they share history. the very astute and easy way in which the show did this was by having them snog in the pilot (power move!), and have them say that they loved each other in literaallllyyy their first scene together. so actually we skipped out the conventional love interest relationship building and went straight to the ‘established’ relationship which meant that the tension was coming from — well, take your pick, austin, sue, emily, society, and so on and so forth. and it meant that the deeper we get into their relationship — particularly season 2 — the knottier, thicker, more complex it felt, and frankly, it was delightful. the last time i did one of these wanky little things i said that part of the reason i had emily and sue have a previous sexual relationship was that i couldn’t really imagine them making it into their mid/late twenties without having at least experimentally shagged lol and i stand by that, not just bc of…How you say…Horny reasons but also because like truly i dont think its in their wheelhouse like. soulmates baby! It might be a bit fucked up and take a while to get there but like…theyre IT ….
honestly lol in a way fanfiction is extremely interesting to me on this topic because you tend to read it knowing what resolution you’ll reach (i.e. that they will get together) — so you become v focused on the how — which is the fun of the emotional tension. if you think back to the 5 act model, pretty much all the good stuff is in the middle three sections (rising/climax/falling action) and i think in a way emily and sue to me feel so well placed for this because they are very similar. we’re constantly focusing on the HOW and so are they. it’s not a surprise to them that they love each other (i.e. the ‘denouement’/conclusion), it’s not a secret — the how is the problem. how do we move in the right direction? how do we exist with each other? what is stopping us? essentially, to finish with a wanky flourish, i felt what i was trying to do build with the interval chapter/present tense chapter dynamic was establish the question that they’d been asking of each other, which, amongst other things, i mentioned briefly in this part of chapter 7:
what are we looking for!! (emotional tension) what have we found!! (Temporal jump), and so on!!!
anywho! with sincere apologies for this absolute monster of an answer, thank u so very much for the question and hope a slight amount of this was interesting!!!:)
