Have you ever wondered how authors create tension on the page? How they keep their readers turning those pages? How they balance characters with fascinating flaws and desperate objectives with pace and tone? Well, you’ve come to the right place.
Authors use many devices to increase story tension, from challenging objectives obstructed by cunning adversaries to the simple countdown clock, ticking towards the crunch that will change the world forever.
This article explores how a tightly-wound plot becomes all the more exciting with a countdown that forces a protagonist into action.
Ready? Let’s get started.
What is Tension, Exactly?
Dramatic tension is born of the underlying pressure, anxiety, or energy that builds up before something happens. It’s the anticipation of things that could go either way; that knot in your belly that just won’t shift.
When you’re writing a thriller, you want the reader to feel the protagonist’s tension.
Tension is felt
In theater, the tension of a scene often lies in the silence between the lines of dialogue, when the characters want to say or do something, but for some reason feel like they can’t come out and say it.
In this context, we see characters in thought. We watch them strategize their way out of a hole. The audience feels the same tension as the characters, and they want to know what the character is going to do next and how they’re going to get out of the sticky situation they find themselves in.
In novels, we feel the tension through the character’s thoughts and actions. We see the action through the narrator’s eyes, but we’re not always armed with all the information. In dramatic writing, information is the key to building great tension. Read on to discover how.
Is Tension the Same as Conflict?
The two terms are often used interchangeably, but conflict and tension are different dramatic devices.
Conflict occurs where there’s an active clash of objectives: John wants the ring, Claire wants him to go. This places the characters at loggerheads in some way and forms the action of the scene.
Tension is a physical response to conflict
You could say that tension is the body’s response to conflict. It’s that knot in your belly before, during, or after a confrontation. It’s that unpleasant feeling of edginess that makes people behave oddly around each other.
Great thriller writing expresses the tension so readers feel it as well, forming an emotional bond between the character and readers, and keeping them turning the pages to see how the tension pays off.
Conflict falls flat without tension
We feel the tension more when the protagonist initially fails. This forces them to re-strategize, to try again, and think on their feet. Don’t let your character get what they want too soon. It kills the tension before it has a chance to build.
Show us how your character responds to adversity. We don’t need to know why they feel uncomfortable in a certain situation. The fact that they feel threatened or challenged is enough to build the tension.
Ultimately, tension allows us to stay in the moment with our characters. It makes us hope and pray and root for them.
How a Countdown Boosts a Novel’s Urgency
Great protagonists follow clear objectives, which forces them into action—but stick a countdown into the equation, and now there’s urgency.
Countdown Tip #1: Compress the Timeline
If a character’s objective is to get married with an indeterminate timeline, they’ll sit on their sofa swiping left and right on some dating app in between occasional showers to get ready for doomed dates.
But give them a timeline—and a tight one—and you’ve got urgency.
If they need to find someone they can date, fall in love with, and marry in the space of a month, then they’re going to get their groove on and act with determination.
Compression adds an additional challenge
Drama is often described as somebody wanting something and having trouble getting it. And it’s the trouble they have getting it that makes the story satisfying to the reader. If someone wants something and they simply get it, there’s no drama, no conflict, no tension, no interesting story.
So, compressing the timeline and giving your protagonist a short window of opportunity to complete the task adds much-needed tension to the narrative.
One option is to make the physical journey to the deadline challenging; pepper the path with obstacles that threaten the deadline. It will get your readers’ hearts pumping and keep them turning those pages.
Countdown Tip #2: Internalize the Clock
Show us how the deadline affects your character. Rather than continually telling us that time is ticking, show us how the clock affects your character’s physicality.
Do they get sweaty palms in the face of yet another unwelcome challenge? Maybe their heart pounds as obstacles push them further from their destination.
Show us how the countdown affects your protagonist viscerally. Force them to make quick decisions that may or may not guide them towards the point of success.
Countdown Tip #3: Impossible Choices
Characters who make decisions become masters of their destiny. So, if your chapter is meandering, drive your protagonist toward an inescapable choice that will impact the story’s forward momentum.
Characters who umm and ahh stall the story’s progress. If things just happen to the character, they become a passive bystander, merely reacting, instead of active participants.
A character with a clear and driven objective offers storyline focus. Forcing them to make impossible choices places them at the center of the action. Their decisions drive them toward their objective.
And never forget that bad choices complicate the plot, which can add additional spice to the tension.
Countdown Tip #4: The Challenge of the Physical Journey
A great way to increase plot tension is to make the physical journey to character self-actualization treacherous.
Never allow a character to simply achieve their objective without trying, especially if it leads us to a plot-altering revelation. That feels too easy.
Put physical obstacles in the way; make the journey further than from the sofa to the fridge. Set them on a path that is going to challenge them in ways that pushes them beyond what they initially believed was possible.
Countdown Tip #5: The Act 1 Countdown
Tension isn’t something that appears in chapter 5. It should be present from the opening line. Show us how the protagonist has outgrown the status quo at the beginning of the novel, and you show us a character in a crisis that manifests their super-objective.
In the stage play, Plus One…? by British playwright Mike Heath, protagonist Jason wants love, but he’s too picky to settle for any of his one-night stands. He always finds fault in them, and we see him in the opening scene doing his utmost to get his latest conquest out of his home.
So, when a plus-one wedding invite from his least favorite cousin—the horribly smug and competitive Tim—drops onto his doormat, he makes a pact with himself that he’s going to take someone to the wedding who is more than just a friend.
Give the character a countdown
If Jason just sat on the sofa with a dating app, we would have a boring story that doesn’t go anywhere. However, the wedding is a week away (his boozy mum forgot to forward the invite), so he has little time to waste.
So, from the start, Jason is up against the clock. And it forces him to get out into the world to meet someone he might like enough to take to horrible Tim’s wedding where he can present his new love to his family.
But, of course, if he just stepped out the door and bumped into the person he’s going to spend the rest of his life with, any chance at cultivating tension is instantly lost.
Leading us to…
Countdown Tip #6: Setbacks and Complications
As we’ve discussed, objectives get characters on their feet. Tight deadlines force them into immediate action. But be sure you pepper the path with setbacks and complications that test the protagonist’s mettle.
I love setting characters off on journeys that are going to challenge and change them. But I also adore forcing protagonists into conflicts that stop them from immediately getting what they want.
Some potential complications
If you’re writing a thriller, make it impossibly tough for your protagonist to overcome the problems you put in their path.
Force them to get past the security guard so they can get into the vault.
Force them to restrategize by:
- Pushing them into air ducts filled with spiders.
- Making them creep past the security desk in silence wearing squeaky shoes.
- Challenging their intellect and duping the guard by convincing, manipulating, or charming them.
- Setting off a fire alarm to get the guard to move from their desk, only to get trapped in the room by locked security doors.
- Confronting the guard physically, only for them to have a black belt in karate.
Set your characters treacherous challenges and make them work hard to overcome the obstacles that litter their path.
Now, you have a gripping story.
Countdown Tip #7: Consider Pace
For tension to breathe, it needs variety of pace. There’s the slow build of creeping dread: the possibility that something is in the room, and the character is walking into peril.
Alternatively, you might use short sentences to create immediacy on the page.
Consider how sentence length affects the reader’s interaction with the tension you’re aiming to build.
How sentence length affects pace
You might be building a slow dread:
James gawped across the rippling lake, certain that the lights in the sky had been nothing more than a shooting star. His heart thumped, and his skin prickled with electricity. Whatever it had been—an oddly black glow that had swooped across the water’s surface—was gone. A carbon tang hit the back of his throat, burning his nostrils. His skin felt clammy, his ears ached, and his legs became heavy.
Then you might want to pick up the pace with shorter sentences:
He peered down. Everything suddenly slowed. Silent. His feet. Hovering. Rising. He squinted up. A black glow. Ears pulsing, eyes blurring. Static breaking up the lake. Sucking. Up. The lake, a tiny pin prick. Heat skinning him into whiteness.
Black.
Silence.
He breathed. But the air felt…thick. Cold. Loud.
Countdown Tip #8: The Classic Tensions
One of my favorite ways to build tension is to consider what everyone knows: the characters and the audience.
And this leads us into the three classic tensions.
Classic tension #1: Nobody knows what’s happening
Consider this scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.
It’s early in the movie, and Lydia goes to visit Dan. She knocks on the door and lets herself in. She sees broken cups hanging on the dresser. She doesn’t know what that means—neither do we. But something feels wrong.
She peers into the hallway. It’s silent as she walks down the corridor, toward Dan’s bedroom. We can feel the tension because we don’t know what’s coming, and neither does Lydia.
She enters the bedroom. There’s a dead bird stuck in the window. Signs of a struggle. Then Dan. Dead. Eyes pecked out.
Why this works
This is the first of the classic tensions: nobody knows what’s happening—the characters and the audience. We sense the character’s tension because we feel it ourselves.
Classic tension #2: The audience knows, but the characters don’t
This type of tension is great for comedy, but it works equally well in dramatic writing, where the audience knows someone is listening at the door and a secret is revealed.
In this Fawlty Towers clip, Manuel practices his English and disappears from sight. The Major believes the moose’s head is speaking to him. And the illusion continues while Basil hangs the head on the wall.
Why this works
The audience knows something the character doesn’t, and we watch them walk into the trap. In dramatic writing, we want to shout at the characters to warn them of the peril ahead. But all we can do is watch, and hope they’ll survive.
Classic tension #3: The audience knows, some characters know, some don’t
This is an extension of the second, but where one or more of the characters know what the audience knows, but one of the other characters doesn’t. This makes the audience complicit in the deception.
Whether you choose 1, 2, or 3, these classic methods help writers build tension on the page. Knowledge is power. Consider how you might use that knowledge to keep your readers guessing.
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