Create Tension: 4 Tips Create Riveting Tension Stories

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Create Tension: Create Riveting Tension in your Stories

At DTWT we talk a lot about creating curiosity for your readers.

If you want them to keep turning to the next page you have to continue to create questions for them to want answers to.

Something that goes hand in hand with creating curiosity in your readers is creating tension.

Tension is a way of creating curiosity, but without questions so to speak.

Tension makes your reader desire to know how the tension will resolve and what will be the ultimate end of that tension.

Here are some ways you can create tension and think about it in your stories:

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# 1 Create Tension: Keep the Stakes High

In order for your tension to work at all, the stakes have to be high.

You have to make sure that the character has a lot at risk.

In order to create tension, we have to put things that our character finds important at risk.

And that risk doesn’t always have to come from another character.

In some stories, your main antagonist doesn’t have to be a human.

It could be nature for instance.

Let’s say we are writing a story set in the wild west.

The family we are writing about relies on the land and farm to live, but one winter it gets too cold and the land freezes over and the animals start to starve and get diseases and the family didn’t have a good harvest last year and now they are on the verge of starvation themselves.

What’s is the tension created here?

We create tension by making our readers think: What will the family do to survive? Will they survive?

Life or death scenarios work well but it doesn’t have to always be that high of stakes.

In order to create tension, the stakes have to be high.

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# 2 Create Tension: By making your readers feel like they can’t guess what will happen.

In order for tension to really work, there can’t be an underlying thought in your readers’ minds of “I can see where this is going and they will be fine.”

That happens often in T.V. Series and that’s is partly why they die after season 2.

When you start to see a repeating pattern of how things will resolve and everything will be fine you start to lose interest because there is no curiosity there. There’s no mystery anymore.

It’s easy to lose interest when there is no mystery left anymore.

In order to create tension we have to keep our readers guessing.

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# 3 Create Tension: By making your readers feel something.

We as consumers of stories LOVE stories that make us feel something and feel what the character is feeling or feel so much for the character that we want the worst or the best for that character.

If we can get our readers feeling emotions for our characters we will create tension for those characters when we put them in a bad situation or a sad situation.

In order to make our readers feel for our characters, we have to help our readers resonate with them.

One sure-fire way to make our readers feel for our characters is to make them as real and human and vulnerable as possible without going overboard.

If they are too vulnerable they can appear pathetic and whiny = BAD

If they are too perfect they can appear to be too far beyond us for us to feel for them = BAD

For our readers to resonate with our characters they have to be a little good and a little bad. Very much like regular humans. There are good people out there, but all of us have faults even though we are trying our best.

Find ways to make your characters more human and when you go to create tension, your readers will find themselves being surprisingly emotionally involved.

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