Tension is an essential element of most stories. Tension is an unanswered question, and the reader wants the answer to that question, wants to see not only the answer but how the answer comes about. The story, “Lily went to the kitchen. Lily made a sandwich. Lily went to bed,” is supremely boring. Nobody cares. The story, “Lily went to the kitchen hoping for a sandwich. She couldn’t find ham. She went to her neighbor and got some ham. She made a sandwich and went to bed,” is better, if not by much. There’s something there to be interested in. Why? Because the second story has tension, a question yet unanswered. The importance of tension means we need to understand what it is and where it comes from.

Tension is the reader’s emotional response to an unanswered question the he cares about. Will Frodo get the Ring to Mount Doom? Will John put himself in danger he can’t get out of in his quest to translate the book?¹ Will Harriet Vane prove innocent?² These, of course, are the essential plot-concept questions of the books. Tension is found in a million other questions, though, questions the writer asks of himself, questions the reader hears, asks in echo, and waits for an answer to. Will Boromir succumb to the temptation of the Ring? Will John and E.M. heal the cracks in their relationship or grow apart? Will Peter Wimsey crack under the pressure of his self-appointed quest? These questions are still large questions, though, questions which span whole swathes of narrative. Scenes have their own questions. Will Pippin and Merry survive the battle? What counsel will John get from Gilbert? Will Urquhart catch the surveillance? These questions provide tension for the scenes, are answered in the scenes; they also play into the larger questions of the story.

Creating tension is a matter of identifying the question, giving the reader a reason to care, and holding the answer in suspension, not denied but delayed by the narrative (not, from the reader’s perspective, the author³). For the central plot of the story, a consideration of the ‘desire-confliction-revelation’ structure outlined here will prove helpful. The question inherent to this structure has many angles and forms. It can be ‘Will his desire be fulfilled?’, ‘How will his desire be fulfilled?’, ‘Must his desire change to be filled?’, or another permutation. Essentially it is the question of what will happen when reality and desire meet: what will the revelation be?

Frodo desires to drop the Ring into Mount Doom (now), but when he faces the reality, will his desire overcome the temptation of the Ring, the danger of the journey, his own frailties, the vice of those around him, and the turmoil of the world? The revelation here will have, of course, many different facets. The larger the question, generally, the more facets it has, as it interacts with more parts of the world, changes more elements of the setting and characters in its answer. One facet is Frodo’s character (and even that has its own hundred parts and shifts, its own facets, like how a fly’s eye is made out of eyes). Another facet of the question is Sam’s character. Another is their respective bodily state. Another is Gondor, another Aragorn, another Gandalf, another Pippin, another Minas Tirith, another the happy obliviousness of the Shire.

These facets are in truth their own questions. Very often they have their own desire-conflict-revelation arc. Of course, the desire may be replaced by something else here, so long as it has some incongruity with the world and the question at large to generate an uncertainty of what will happen. Thus, the question of whether Minas Tirith will fall can be phrased in terms of the city’s desire to remain as it was, its inertia, conflicting with the reality of the world trying to bring it to its knees. Minas Tirith, of course, isn’t a character; all this ‘desire’ talk is anthropomorphizing. The structure of its question, though, is that of ‘desire’ versus reality (conflict) leading to revelation: can Minas Tirith stand? The answer, as it turns out (spoilers, but go read Lord of the Rings if you haven’t, I recommend everybody at least try it) is that Minas Tirth can stand, but not forever, perhaps just this once. This, of course, raises a new question, “Is this once enough?”

Small questions flow out of big questions, and they flow back into them too. The survival of Minas Tirith is a question that flows out of the narrative- the larger war that Sauron has kicked off-, but it doesn’t exist separately. It’s still a part of that larger plotline. Small questions are what give depth and breadth to larger ones. If the story is a human body, the central question is the trunk and head, the really big secondary questions are the limbs, and the smaller questions are the bones, muscles, the ligaments, the cells. They compose the other questions and connect them together.

These questions can come in all sorts and shapes. They can ask physical, mental, moral, and relational questions. The question can be whether the protagonist weds his lady-love, whether he reaches the mountain’s summit, whether he understand his place in the world. It can be about death, about sickness, about relationship, about money. It can be about anything a human can care about (and therein lies the rub).

In all this complexity, we must remember one important fact: the reader must care or it doesn’t matter what the questions are. This was the problem with the example vis a vis Lily in the first paragraph. We don’t care at all about whether Lily gets a sandwich.⁴ It’s like when you read a children’s picture book, one advanced enough to have a story but obviously intended for teaching grammar and reading, not for excellence in narrative. Those books can be impressively uninteresting. Why? Because the book doesn’t put in the work to get an adult to care about its questions, can’t build up tension because the reader’s response simply isn’t there.

How, though, are we to make our readers care about the questions we present? We have three paths.

First, we can connect the question to another question the reader already cares about. This is a panspermia-style solution; all I’ve done it shove the problem down the line for another day. Still, it’s the practical answer for many smaller questions. Leaving aside the attraction of spectacle, the reader cares about who wins the swordfight between Inigo and Westley because of the wider context of the scene, its connection to other questions.⁵ Because the answer to this question matters to that question, because the reader cares about the answer to that question, he cares about the answer to this question. Of course, I still have to get the reader to care about the larger question. Thankfully, the last two solutions aren’t just passing the problem on down the line.

Second, we can connect the questions to another part the narrative the reader cares about: the characters. We humans are wired to sympathize (and empathize) with other people, and fictional characters take advantage of that. Samwise Gamgee and John and Peter Death Bredon Wimsey all become living, breathing people in our minds, realities in thought if not in body, and we learn to care about them. I’m assuming we’ve already done the work of making the reader care about the character. What, precisely, makes the reader care about a character is up for debate (and different, honestly, for different readers and different characters and different times in the readers’ lives). It’s a topic too big for today, except to say that one element of a reader’s care for a character can indeed be the reader’s sympathy with the questions the character faces. The takeaway here is that by welding the question to a person (real to the heart and mind, even if known to be fictional, real within the story and the world the story projects into the reader) we can produce attachment in the reader, get him to care about the answer to the question because of how it connects to the characters.

This connection to the characters will vary. Sometimes, the answer matters to the character because it’s a question of how they’re going to change; even if they don’t perceive the question, the reader perceives the question inherent in their narrative and wonders how they will change, how they will respond. Sometimes, the answer matters to the character because, well, the character thinks it matters. The answer to ‘Will Harriet Vane turn out to be innocent?’ is important to the reader, in part, because of how clearly important it is to Peter Wimsey.

Third, we can bring the read to care about the question by connecting it to a beauty. We have an innate longing for the beautiful, and thus a question which concerns the survival or creation of something the reader has been convinced of the beauty of is of concern to the reader. Do not think, though, that simple assertions of something’s beauty will suffice. Readers will not care about a question just because you have described something connected to it as ‘beautiful’. Beauty here must be beauty perceived and experienced by the reader.

Nor should the beauty be presumed to be the limited beauty of an object or sound described. The beauty of the most effective examples is the beauty of a beautiful character or deed or relationship. It is the beauty of 1 Peter 3:4, which says “Let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit.” This beauty is found in the father who stands to defend his child, the wife who is loyal to her husband, the crusader who seeks to protect the innocent. It is Frodo, undertaking a mission of unutterable agony, only partly understood as it is, for the sake of his home, him continuing this mission even as its true terror and suffering impresses itself upon him, as the physical aspect becomes pale before the spiritual burden of the Ring. It is E.M., seeking to preserve her family as a family, to recapture the beauty of her marriage’s mutual surety, its strength. It is Peter Wimsey, working himself to the bone for the sake of one he hardly knows but has been already enraptured by. This is the beauty, honestly, that many of the greatest stories of the world stand upon, the beauty that I seek to declare to those who read my writing.

If you want real life examples, consider the bravery of the martyrs. Consider the deeds of those who counted their lives as naught for Christ (Acts 20:24). Look to history too. There’s real beauty in the loyalty of man to his fellow man, at the great cost of his own life.⁶ Beauty lives in the devotion of man to his loved ones, in his pursuit of God. If story has one beauty which it is peculiarly adapted to impressing upon mankind, it is the beauty of the relationship, of a person loving another in deed and in heart, even the beauty which could have been but which sin denies.

When we seek to create tension, we must take care to create questions in our narrative, questions that the reader cares about. Whether the reader cares about those questions because of other, more interested questions, because of character connections, or because of the beauty which they deal with, or for another reason (a question may be of interest to a certain reader because he has himself asked that question- theological and character arc are the most susceptible to this), he will want to stick around till the end to find out what the answer is. What’s more, while he’s waiting for that answer, he’ll be hooked into the story, given a reason and path to care about it, will feel the (hopefully pleasant) fear of which tension is a species.

Next week, we’ll consider what happens when the answers comes too quick.

God bless

Footnotes

1 – Towards the Gleam by T.M. Doran; in my top ten books of all time.

2 – Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers; one of its sequels is in my top ten books of all time (which, to be clear, I haven’t actually counted, so it might be closer to top fifteen).

3 – Check out this article for why the author’s hand needs to be hidden.

4 – I really don’t, because I can’t even empathize with wanting a ham sandwich, given my distaste for lunch meat.

5 – The Princess Bride. The book is quite good, as is the film.

6 – I have an example: Flight 93 by Leslie Fish. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to this song without tearing up.