Storytelling is All About Tension

Tension resides at the heart of every story. Alongside it stands unmet desire. Every story is about a protagonist who wants something but cannot get it. As soon as he or she gets it, the story ends. And each time you resolve a problem, you escalate your plot.

Many beginning writers start out their story with a hook that grabs the reader. But then the writer must explain the hook before continuing on with the story. That’s the opposite of escalation—and the end of the forward movement of the story.

Tension drives a story forward. When you resolve tension, you lose the momentum of your story. Many books on writing short stories differentiate between “character-driven” and “plot-driven” stories. In fact, neither character nor plot drives a story forward—only unmet desire does.

You might include page after page of interesting information about your character, but that won’t move the story along, either. It just causes it to stall. Until readers know what your protagonist wants, they won’t know what your story is about and won’t be able to worry or care about whether or not the character’s desires are eventually met.

Plot is a series of related events that the protagonist experiences as he or she moves through a crisis or into a life-changing situation. You might include chase scene after chase scene, but readers won’t care that one car is following another down the street, until they know what the stakes are. If you don’t spell out what the result will be, they simply won’t care. A story isn’t driven forward by events but by tension. Therefore, all stories are “tension-driven” stories.

In order to deepen the tension in your story, you’ll need to create two struggles that play off each other. The protagonist’s external struggle is a problem that you need to resolve. His or her internal struggle is a question that you need to answer. The interplay of these two struggles complement each other until, at the climax, the resolution of one gives the protagonist the skills, insights or wherewithal to resolve the other.

The genre in which you write will force you to use certain conventions that will dictate the precedence of the internal or external struggle in your story. To write successful, marketable stories, you’ll need to include both an internal struggle that helps readers empathize with the protagonist, and an external struggle that helps drive the movement of the story toward its exciting climax.

Your story needs to progress toward more and more conflict, with more intimate struggles and deeper tension to hold a reader’s interest.

The plot must always thicken. Because of that, repetition is the enemy of escalation. Every explosion, sex scene, or conversion means less and less to the reader, simply because repetition serves to work against the escalation of tension in your story.

Instead, continually make things worse for your protagonist. In doing so, you’ll make him or her better for the reader. Start out in the middle of an action and build the tension in your story until its logical conclusion.

The Power of Cause and Effect

Cause and effect is the most powerful tool you can use as both a writer of creative non-fiction or fiction. While in the former fact dictates what happens next because it actually happened, in the latter it’s up to you, the writer, to figure out what happens next.

One of the best places to see the bad side of cause and effect is on T.V. Here, writers face a number of challenges—time restrictions, actor availability, and budget. One of the classic snafues of cause and effect was in the primetime drama “Dallas.” Patrick Duffy gets killed off when a problem arises with his contract and then miraculously comes back to life after it’s settled by saying he dreamed it all. T.V. writers are notorious for killing off characters who have contract disputes.

You can see one of the worst uses of cause and effect in the sci-fi drama “Stargate Universe.” Unlike it’s parent series, “Stargate SG-1,” which told its story in a smooth flowing way, this series jumps around so much that it becomes hard to follow as the episodes unfold. Add to that the lack of plausibility of some of the events, and you end up with a mishmash of comings and goings that even a diehard novel reader would find hard to endure.

Everything in a story must be caused by the action or event that precedes it. That’s a fact. If you start playing with flashbacks and flash forwards, you better make damn sure that what you write is clear to the reader. And while that seems like an obvious statement, you’d be surprised how paying closer attention to cause and effect can improve your writing.

Whether you pursue creative non-fiction or fiction, your main goal should be to ensure that your reader is always emotionally present in the story—that is, you want them to empathize with your main character throughout. But when you force readers to guess why something happened or didn’t happen, even for just a split second, it causes them to intellectually disengage and distances them from the story. Rather than remaining present alongside the characters, they’ll begin to analyze or question the progression of the plot. In the process, they lose their place in the progression of things. This is exactly what happens in all episodes of Stargate Universe. .

When a reader tells you that he or she couldn’t put a book down, usually it’s because everything in the story followed logically. Stories that move forward naturally, cause to effect, keep the reader engrossed and flipping pages. If you fail to do this, it can confuse readers, kill the pace and show your weaknesses as a writer.

Let’s say you’re writing a short story in which the bad guy is chasing your lead character.

    Fumbling with the latch, he managed to lock the door because he knew the killer  would soon be on the other side.

Writing is that way, you’d break the reader’s emotional engagement with the story.

Instead, you should reverse the sentence so it reads like this:

    He knew the killer would soon be on the other side of the door, so he fumbled with the latch and finally locked it.

If you find that one sentence is serving to explain what happened in the sentence that preceded it, you can usually improve the writing by reversing the order so that you render rather than explain the action.

If you’ve written a scene in which you could connect the events with the word “because,” then you can typically improve the scene by structuring it so that you could instead connect the events with the word “so.” The stimulus leads naturally to the response.

In more complex scenes, realizations and discoveries usually happen after actions, not before them. Always build on what has been said or done, rather than laying the foundation after you’ve built the idea. Continually move the story forward, rather than forcing yourself to flip backward to give the reason something occurred.

One way of making sure things don’t go awry in complex scenes is to list each event in the order that it’s supposed to happen. By creating this visual guide, you’re more likely to stay on track. This is especially useful in flashbacks and flash forwards.

Your writing will be more effective if you show the reader what’s happening as it happens rather than explain to the reader what just happened.

However, there are three exceptions to this rule—three times when you can move from effect to cause without shattering the spell of your story.

The first occurs in scene or chapter breaks. Here, you can begin with a vague reference in dialogue that you can follow up as the scene unfolds. The reader will immediately be curious as to what’s happening and will want to continue reading to find out what happens.

The second exception occurs when one action causes two or more simultaneous reactions. Your character might sigh and look out the window, the order of which could go either way.

The final exception happens when your character deduces something the reader hasn’t yet concluded. Imagine Sherlock Holmes staring at the back of an envelope, cleaning out a drainpipe, and brushing off a nearby stick of wood, after which he announces that he’s solved the case. The reader asks, “How did he do that?” This peaks the reader’s  curiosity, and later when the character explains his deductive reasoning, the reader sees that everything followed logically from the preceding events.

If the writers took the time to make any of the above happen in the episodes of "Stargate Universe," the story wouldn’t have been so confusing. This is especially important when writing science fiction, which, in itself, can be confusing enough, particularly when the writer creates whole new worlds.

Some Truths About Book Publishing

Any writer who has attempted to write a book knows how much work goes into it. You work long and hard, then one day you’re holding it in your hands. And even though it came from your deepest core, it’s really got a life all its own.
   
One of the biggest misconceptions you can have when writing a book is that if it’s accepted by a publisher, then it must be good—it must be perfect. Nothing could be farther from the truth. While you conceive the idea, then flesh it out, and finally give it form, a book isn’t complete until it runs through the gauntlet of copy and content editors.

When a publisher accepts a book, it’s just the first step. To market a book, it must be molded so that it fits into the marketplace. Most writers become myopic when writing their books. They don’t see beyond its content while publishers have a much broader view.

Realize that your editor is a professional at making at helping authors put their books into the best possible shape. So you must learn to be open and nondefensive.

Most changes editors request are minor. You think about it and get to it, You’ve been so close to your book that you perhaps didn’t realize that a bit of dialogue sounded flat and unrealistic or that there was a small hole in the plot. If you’re writing a non-fiction book, you may have inadvertently switched the facts or left one out that made the subsequent text not make sense. You shouldn’t feel bad since these things happen to the best of writers. A book is a large project, so it’s only natural that a few things will slip by.

But what happens when your editor asks you to make a major change? Eliminating a major character, putting in a new one, drastically revamping the ending with the resultant alterations to the rest of your story to accommodate it—these are big. If your editor asks for a major change and after thinking it over you agree, you’ve got some work ahead of you. No matter how you feel about it, it’ll make you a better writer.

Just the way a book is a series of chapters, any major change is simply a bunch of minor ones. Approach it that way. Make a list of what you have to do, then do it. If you feel stymied or have serious reservations about the suggested changes, talk it over with your editor. The more open you are with your editor, the better..

But remember that in the end, it’s your book. Give your editor a concrete reason for refusing to make a specific changes. Offer alternatives. Stand your ground but also listen to what your editor has to say. He or she knows the marketplace.

Besides the editor assigned to work with you on your book by the publisher, you’ll also have to deal with copy editors. The great thing about copy editing is seeing your book through the eyes of someone fresh to it. Your copy editor will challenge any grammar and mechanics you’ve missed and suggest small improvements that never would have occurred to you. Copy editors also catch all those embarrassing mistakes.Since you’ve been working on this big project for so long, you’re bound to make a few.

Today, all book editing is done electronically. You send your manuscript into the publisher, and the copy editor sends it back to you digitally marked. All publishers use Microsoft Word to edit, so no matter what word processing program you use to write the book, you must save the text as a Word document before sending it to the publisher. Word features a complete editing subroutine that enables the copy editor to not only mark mistakes and other items but recommend ways to fix them.

Nearly all first-time authors get bogged down thinking that they control their book. For some reason, many think that they’ll have a role in choosing the cover of their book. As stated above, the publisher’s job is to get a book ready for the marketplace and he or she knows what type of cover will work best. Your publisher trusts this job to experts in graphic design. This doesn’t mean every cover will be perfect for every book, but it does mean you should relax and concentrate on what’s inside.

Another mistake beginning authors make is putting the chicken before the proverbial egg. They worry more about whether their book will be reviewed by the New York Times than they do about its content.

In fact, it’s rare for a first-timer to be reviewed in The New York Times—or any other major publication for that matter—so don’t get your hopes up. The only way a top reviewer will even consider your book is if it concerns a controversial topic. A few good low-profile reviews will help your book in the long run. But one really bad top review could kill it.

What's the Rush?

Everyone today seems to be in a rush to do everything. And that includes writers. The trend over the last several years seems to be to write a book, namely a novel, in just 30 days. While that may not be impossible, is it good for the book or the writer? The answer is probably not.

Books like Write Your Novel in a Month and 90 Days to Your Novel from Writer’s Digest Books say something about the world we live in.

Many beginning writers look at a book as their ticket to fame. Sure, a few fine writers have achieved fame from their books but only because they were really good writers in the first place who thought out their books carefully.

This all began in 1999 with National Novel Writing Month, abbreviated to NaNoWriMo, an annual Internet-based creative writing project that takes place during November of each year. It challenges participants to write 50,000 words of a new novel from November 1st until the deadline at 11:59 P.M. on November 30th. Supposedly, the goal of NaNoWriMo is to get people writing, who might not otherwise do so, and keep them motivated throughout the process.

To ensure this, the project tries to make writing seem like a fun, community activity.  And while it can be fun, writing, itself is a solitary activity. The Web site does provides participants with tips for combating writer's block, lists of local places where writers participating in the project meet, and an online support through forums.

NaNoWriMo focuses on completion instead of perfection. It emphasizes the length of a book rather than the quality, encouraging writers to finish their first draft so that it can later be edited by the author.  Encouraging creativity worldwide, the project began with  21 participants and now boasts a participation of over 200,000 – writing a total of over 2.8 billion words. That’s a lot of words, but do they mean anything.  Of the thousands of participants completing thousands of novels or parts of novels, only 100 have been published by traditional book publishers. Even taking into consideration others which have been self-published, that’s still not a great percentage for the number of would-be writers involved.

While finishing a novel in 30 days may seem like an achievement, it’s no more one than running in one of those 10K races for some charity. NaNoWriMo is essentially a race against time. And while it’s intentions are admirable, too many wannabee writers have begun to think that they should rush to get their novel done in a certain amount of time.  This is probably because they lack the long-term motivation to see a book to its completion. And in many cases, their writing skills aren’t up to writing a project of a book’s magnitude.

What many beginning writers fail to see is that what they write is a very rough draft that will need hours and hours of work to get it to the polished, published stage. The best novels and non-fiction books out there takes months, sometimes years, to write. They take careful planning and, in the case of novels, plotting. “Off and running” just won’t do.

Plotting Along

In a video interview on YouTube, Stephen King recently told a group of students, “Forget plotting. That takes all the fun out of writing.” That may be easy for him to say. As a famous writer of over 35 books and numerous short stories, plotting is second nature. But to most beginning writers, plotting fiction and blocking non-fiction is a fact of life. A necessary evil that they need to master.

The more you write, the easier it becomes. Just as any other professional, writers develop skills that become part of the routine. While Stephen King may think he’s just winging it, he’s actually plotting out his stories in his mind. He doesn’t need to plan them on paper, but you do.

Whether you’re writing articles or short stories, non-fiction books or novels, you need to know where you’re going—you need to know how it will generally will end—so that you can finally get there. Too many beginning writers start a book and only get a third to half way through before they call it quits. The article, short story, book, or novel won’t guide you. Only you can do that.

The reason most beginning writers shy away from blocking or plotting is that they associate these with outlining—that dreaded chore they had to do in school for their term papers and such. Neither is outlining.

Let’s take blocking, for instance. Blocking out an article is easy. You start by putting the word “beginning” at the top of the page and the word “ending” at the bottom of the page. In between you list what comes in the middle in whatever order you choose. This is simplifying this a bit, but, nevertheless, it’s as simple as that. You don’t have to write each step out in sentences, just make notes to yourself as to what it will contain. You may also may want to make a note as to how you plan to start your piece and how you’ll end it since endings usually wrap up where you began. You can do all of this on a napkin if you want. This isn’t a formal outline, but a flexible plan that may change as you write. But it’s a plan all the same.

Plotting a short story is similar. There are some basic plots for all short stories. So after you choose which basic plot you’ll be following, you need to write a synopsis of your story. Pretend a friend asked you what your story is going to be about, then just tell him or her, but do it on paper and limit it to one page. This will help you plot out your story. Again it’s a flexible plan. It can change as you go, but by doing this, you’ll have an idea how the story will end. So you write forwards towards that ending.

Writing isn’t easy. Anyone who tells you that or gives you that impression is only telling you what you want to hear. Writing is work—hard work. But the more you do it, the easier it becomes. Once you start blocking or plotting, you’ll wonder why you didn’t do it sooner. Yes, writing can be fun, but if you’re stressed out trying to write something, there’s no way it can be.