Tension has a mortal enemy: the answer. Tension abhors the answer. Unfortunately for us, readers sometimes learn the answer too early. There are all sorts of ways to learn. Genre savvy, for instance, could inform them that the story almost certainly has a happy ending; this story, therefore, probably answer the big questions so-and-so. They may be familiar with you as an author too; perhaps you have a favorite way of arranging stories, and they have come to recognize that particular arrangement, can guess almost by feel what story beat you’re working up towards. They could also be guessing- right or wrong, if they think they know the answer, it still kills the tension, at least until they figure out they’re wrong.

Even if you’ve set your book up as supremely unpredictable- a dangerous, dangerous task¹– you can’t avoid readers figuring out the answers sometimes. They can guess, of course, though you can limit that. They can pay really, really close attention to your foreshadowing, and if you’re doing a thorough job there (as some stories may demand and others may not), they might be able to see the ending coming a mile off. They can be informed of the upcoming answer by somebody else. Best of all, most answer-filled of all, they could be paying your story the high compliment of a second read-through (or a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, like me with Tolkien).

How are you, as the author, supposed to maintain tension, if the reader already knows the answers?

The solution lies in this old chestnut: it’s the journey, not the destination. Here I can speak from experience. When I was a kid, I had a habit of reading just about anything I could get my hands on (that wasn’t parentally barred). I read cookbooks, books on science, any work of fiction my parents would let me. Twice I went to the point of reading an entire shelf of my younger (by 10ish years, I’m not doing the math right now) siblings’ kids books. Included in those binges were some history-literature textbooks; included in those textbooks was a section on each of the books of The Lord of the Rings. Now, I didn’t really get it. I was intrigued, and I could have told you an odd amount about Tom Bombadil for somebody who didn’t actually know Tolkien’s name (I think I read it before I read The Hobbit), but I didn’t understand the story. I did, however, pick up enough to know two things about the story: what happens to Gandalf in the middle of it (I was impressed by the rendition of the Balrog in the book, an I remember correctly) and that the whole thing ended in a victory for the forces of good.

I still felt like I was on tenterhooks reading Return of the King. Now, I felt very little tension from Gandalf’s fall. I knew what was coming there. The rest of the story, though, even knowing it would have a happy ending? I was glued to that book, particularly when the alternative was the schoolwork I should have been doing. I knew (I reassured myself regularly) that the ending wouldn’t be darkness, that the story had to end well, but I didn’t know how it could possibly get there.

Why?

It’s the journey that matters as much as the destination. Of course, you can’t neglect the destination. In a story, the destination gives the journey meaning; the answer to the problem justifies all the pain undergone to find that answer. The answer must match the question in weight, in how it is approached, otherwise you have a let-down. The same, though, is true in reverse. An amazing answer to the question only works if the question has been asked and the answer has been reached in an appropriate way.

In a story with a great journey to a great destination, the reader can know the destination and still wish to undergo the journey again; he can know that the main character overcomes his crippling fear of pecans-with-butter-on-them and still want to see how his overcame that fear, the moments of triumph and despair which make up his character arc. As authors, we all should have re-read a book or two or twenty; think about those times. Those stories you re-read, you knew the ending. You probably remembered a lot of the big story beats, the rough outline of the book. As you read, you probably even remembered parts of individual scenes, could anticipate their events. Did that strip all the tension out? For a well-written book, how the question is answered is important as what the answer is.

Sometimes, too, the answer isn’t entirely in the what of the answer. For some questions, the answer is a how. For instance, consider this question: ‘Can a man persist in goodness of his own volition?’ The answer is simple, and it’s ‘no’. Man without God is pervasively depraved.² He cannot persist in virtue of his own might. That’s the answer, but in a novel, it’s only the synopsis. In a novel, this answer could take the form of watching a man, a good man to all appearances, watching him struggle to do good, striving with initially apparent success towards altruism. Then we watch him, on our pages, slowly come to a greater understanding of himself. He pays attention to his own actions, bringing our attention with him, and, with great horror, he recognizes in each good deed he does an admixture of sin- petty sin, perhaps, the type society doesn’t care about. He sees this, and he tries to get rid of it; he struggles. He makes enemies of evil men. He does great good, and those around him perhaps even love him, for he is good in the world’s way. For these deeds his fellows praise him, but it is bitterness to him, because he knows the truth, and when they see that he cannot accept their praise, they hurry away from him, disquieted, even angered. This is the story’s answer to the initial question, and it is all how. Yes, we can summarize this as, “Question: Can this man persist in good of himself? Answer: No, due to recognition of his flawed motives.” That’s a summary though, not the answer itself, and in this type of story, knowing the answer is no substitute for experiencing the answer.

That’s the difference, see, between what and how. It’s the difference between a list of dates for the First World War and Dulce Et Decorum³ by Wilfred Owen. The reader can remember the what of the answer, the technical destination, but unless he’s memorized the book, he doesn’t remember the full how of the answer, the experience of it. Even if he has memorized, he’s simply returning to the story in his mind rather than on the page, experiencing the how again. The tension of the story can come from the answer to the question being as much how and what, from the reader desiring the experience of the answer and not merely its skeleton. Some readers, of course, will be less susceptible, and some questions will be less amenable to this. Questions with purely factual answers, for instances, lose much of their tension when their answer is known; thankfully for us writers, questions with purely factual answers are generally subsidiaries and components of larger, more significant, less concrete questions, the questions of humanity and truth and relationship to God, questions that narrative reaches for greatness in asking, achieves greatness by answering through life instead of dogma.

In all this time, in both installments of this article, I’ve left out one vital (but, I hope, obvious) caution: the reader must recognize the question for it to produce tension. If the reader does not ask the question, it has not been asked (and he cannot care). This is much like what Brandon Sanderson calls “promises”; the story’s questions are promises of answers, promises which you must fulfil once you’ve made them, and which therefore you should be intentional about making.⁴ This does not mean explicitly stating the question though, even by some clever author-in-the-mouth-of-the-character or otherwise. That’s quite often a bad idea (unless it’s a question the characters will naturally take note of: generally speaking, don’t have a general ask the question of his sub-altern’s character development, but do have him ask the question of what the enemy will do in the upcoming battle⁵). What it means is setting up the story so the reader asks the questions, prompted by incongruity, by his understanding of how story works, of how the reality the story emulates works, by the recognition that you have in the story presented an implicit uncertainty.

Keep the tension up. Ratchet it higher and higher. Ask the question, make the reader care, and guide the tension to a climax, every sub-question answered feeding into the tension of the remaining questions, creating new ones. Then, answer the question. Release the tension. This is the climax, the denouement, the conclusion of the story, answering the big questions, wrapping up the little ones. If you can do this, you’ve got a banger of a story. Unfortunately, it’s a bit harder to do than say, but that’s what hard work is for (don’t I know it). Thankfully for us, however hard we work, we will never suffer half so much as Christ suffered for the great Answer of His story: the Cross. Rejoice in this: however high our thoughts soar, forever above us remains the beauty and magnificence and skill which we will see in the final conclusion of that story, the final manifestation of His Answer, the coming of Christ which is to come, the final judgement and glorification.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – Check out these articles for related topics: How to Lie to Your Readers & Rising from the Active Sovereignty of God.

2 – Most theologians call it ‘total depravity’; R.C. Sproul, I think it was, liked the term ‘radical depravity’. It refers to man’s total unwillingness to do true good; all he does is tainted in some way by sin. Even what good he does do is contaminated, mixed with, evil, because he has lost the will to do good.

3 – This is an excellent poem (which in part inspired my own Murder of Crows) and can be found here.

4 – Check out this article for a discussion of what ‘promises’ mean and why they’re important.

5 – This is the type of instruction there’s always a situational exception for, of course, so use your judgement and learn from practical examples.