Accidentally Undercutting Tension (and How to Stop)
Tension and conflict are two different things. And before I get into this writing problem I encounter from time to time, I need to make sure we are all on the same page.
Conflict: This is when problems are happening.
Tension: This is the potential for problems to happen.
In a lot of ways, tension is actually more powerful than conflict, because the anticipation draws the audience inâthe worry or fear that something might happen. Jumpy, scary movies are great at dishing out the tension. A character moves slowly through a dark area and the music and camera angles ramp up tension to the point that we are clawing into our seats or pulling our blankets up to our eyes.
Itâs entirely possible to have tension without conflict, and conflict without tension. For more on tension vs. conflict, check out my post on it.
Every once in a while, I run into a manuscript that is undercutting tension, accidentally. And sometimes that manuscript is even my own.
I sometimes feel like tension is one of the lifebloods of a powerful story. Without it, itâs harder for the audience to get invested, itâs harder for readers to turn the pages, itâs harder for the story to be powerful. All good stories need some tension.
But sometimes as writers, we undercut the tension in our own story and zap it out of existence, on accident.
For example, we might have one character afraid that something bad is going to happen to them tomorrow, and this creates tension. What if something bad does happen tomorrow? But just after we build up the tension on the page, we have another character come in and explain why that bad thing wonât ever happen tomorrow, and the first character believes it. The tension is suddenly gone.
In a passage, it might read something like this. (And this is just a quick, rough example to illustrate the point.)
Timmy rocked back and forth on his seat at the dinner table. Tomorrow was the first day of school, and he felt sure that Jacob, the schoolyard bully, would want to knock the living daylights out of him; Timmy had put a spider in Jacobâs desk at the end of last year, and Jacob had found it just before the final bell. With the whole summer break, Jacob had to have figured out it was Timmy.
Jacob had fists like bricks, and Timmy could already imagine the mean, boar-like look Jacob got in his eyes whenever he was about to wallop someone. Timmy had hoped to register for the science fair this year, but after tomorrow, heâd be lucky if he could register for the next grade. He was doomed.
âYou havenât touched any of your food.â His mom had walked back into the kitchen to check on him. âAre you feeling alright?â
âMom ⊠what if Jacob beats me up tomorrow?â Timmy managed to ask.
âThat wonât happen,â Mom said.
âBecause Jacob moved at the beginning of summer, remember? You never have to worry about him again.â
Timmy immediately relaxed. Thatâs right. Jacob had moved. How could he have forgotten? Timmy felt silly for having gotten all worked up over nothing.
He ate a spoonful of mashed potatoes.
This passage seems rather harmless, right? And certainly it would be fine in some stories. But imagine it was the only tension related to the first day of schoolâwhich is still pages and pages away. There is nothing else in the text that Timmy hopes or fears for, for the first day of school. So we donât really feel any tension, from now until then, so we donât really feel invested in reading about his first day. We cut off the tension too early. Even if Jacob did move, it may have been better for Timmy to not realize that until he was in recessâas long as there was something else to hope or fear about soon after that. We undercut the storyâs tension.
Another way this is a problem, is if the writer does this sort of thing over and over again. Builds up tension, and then cuts it down to nothing, or nearly nothing, soon after. Eventually, whenever tension arises, the audience will subconsciously assume nothing significant will actually come of it ⊠which will eventually result in them not even feeling the tension the writer is trying to put on the page.Â
Tension doesnât have to lead to conflict all the time, but it should lead to something significant much of the time. Otherwise it feels like âfalse tensionââjust a trick the writer is using to try to make the audience afraid over nothing. And if it never leads to any conflict, then itâs going to lose its impact.
Some people in the writing world believe that tension should always lead to conflict, but if you have that perspective, you really miss out on great tension opportunities, and juicy hooks.
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