Whether you’re writing mysteries, thrillers or even romances, a key part of any story is tension. Will the pretty young housewife evade the crazed killer hiding in her bathroom closet? Will the cop ferret out the mad poisoner, or will he strike again? Will the beautiful maiden find her Prince Charming and ride away into the sunset? If your story doesn’t have any tension, any element of unanswered question, your readers won’t have any reason to care about how it ends. And if they don’t care, they won’t keep reading.
There are myriad ways to create and build tension, but one of the most powerful tools in the writer’s arsenal is also one of the simplest: raise the stakes.
Thriller writers are especially adept at wielding this tool. Take a look at a good thriller, and you’ll see a steady progression: things get bad, then they get worse. Triumphs are followed by defeats and those by more defeats. The ultimate victory, when it comes, is always hard-won - which is part of what makes it satisfying. It’s hard to savor a victory that’s won too easily, or one that comes without challenge.
Let’s look at an example. Here’s the germ of a story, a beginning onto which we can build:
A woman is cashing a check at the bank when robbers storm into the place, guns drawn. In the ensuing confrontation, a guard is shot and killed and the woman is taken hostage. As stories go, this isn’t a bad place to start. We already have a few points of tension: will the robbers be captured? Will the hostages escape alive?
But let’s look at some places we could introduce yet more tension into this framework:
- What if the robbers are themselves escaped prison inmates, who stole their guns from a nearby farmhouse? What if the leader of the gang is a convicted murderer who’s facing a needle if he goes back to prison? He’s dead anyway, so he has nothing to lose and everything to gain by being ruthless and cold-blooded.
- What if one of the hostages is a fugitive on the run from justice? Or what if the mousy-looking guy in the corner just happens to be the man whose testimony put one of them away in the first place? Hey, stranger things have happened.
- What if our female hostage is a single mom with a small child at home? That’s not bad, but it’s a tad clicheed, so let’s raise the stakes a bit more. What if her son is seriously ill? Let’s say he’s got a chronic and ultimately fatal lung disease, and he needs a breathing treatment every eight hours. He’s at home sleeping right now, because mom was only counting on being gone for a few minutes, but pretty soon he’s going to wake up and need that treatment. And he can’t administer it himself.
Do you see how you can turn a relatively ordinary story into something unusual by amping up the tension? In the novel A Maiden’s Grave, Jeffrey Deaver did something similar to amp the tension up right from the beginning: He made the hostages a group of students and teachers from a Deaf school. The tension ramped up from there, of course, but in that one decision he made the power differential between good guys and bad guys a little sharper, he made us care just a little bit more about the hostages and what happened to them, and he made his take start with a bit more tension out of the gate.
If you’re a writer, what have you done in your stories to create tension? What are your favorite ways to raise the stakes? And if you’re a reader, how do your favorite writers keep your pulse racing?
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