Creating tension in a story is hard, and killing it is easy.
So let’s go over 4 tension tips to use AND to avoid then write our own tension-inducing story together!
During the last stream, a subscriber requested that we go over how to create tension.
You can watch the video here to or scroll down for notes/highlights.
How to Create/Kill Tension
- Tension is the stress that someone feels when reading a story
- It’s good to have because it bonds the reader emotionally to what’s going on: the characters are stressed, and the reader is stressed for them
- Tension is one of the most important type of fuel of your story it’s part of what keeps the reader going, and if it runs out they might stop reading
4 Ways to Create Tension
#1. Have a clear GOAL
- If the reader doesn’t know what the character wants to do or why, then it will be impossible for them to feel any stress over the situation
- As the author, it can be fun to keep motivations ambiguous, but avoid that for the main character, give them a clear goal based on the story’s main conflict
- Example: In The Name of the Wind, main character Kvothe, a poor orphan wants to go to the university to research the mysterious Chandrian, a group of spirits that killed his family. That makes his entrance exam much more tense than it would be without that goal.
#2. Put a ticking CLOCK on the stakes
- For there to be any tension, the reader needs to know what will happen if the character fails: Will they die? Will the enemy get a weapon? Will they lose their crush?
- To make the stakes more tense, put a clock on it: They will die… if they don’t get the antidote in three days. The enemy will get a weapon… if they don’t stop the blueprint shipment. They will lose their crush… if they don’t win their heart before prom.
- Example: In Harry Potter, the tension at the end of the story is high when the trio goes through the obstacles to get to the Sorcerer’s Stone because there is the ticking clock of them needing to get to it before Voldemort doe
#3. Sprinkle in some SUSPENSE
- Suspense comes from when we don’t know something that a character doesn’t know either, and we’re both curious to see what happens
- If a character is in control of a situation, or if they know things the reader doesn’t, that can take away from the tension
- Example: In the Hunger Games, the tension is high because both the reader and Katniss never know when another person might sneak up on her and try to kill her during the tournament
#4. Amplify the ANTICIPATION
- Anticipation comes when we know something is going to happen, and we dread the consequences will when it arrives
- Sometimes the characters know what’s going to happen too, or sometimes they don’t
- Example: In the movie Titanic, the audience knows the ship is going to sink, but the characters don’t know, heightening the tension. In Stephen King’s 11/22/63, the entire story leads up to the main character going back in time to kill JFK’s assassin, and the anticipation slowly builds to that day.
4 Ways to Kill Tension
#1. Irrelevant conflict
- A good conflict will naturally create tension, but a bad conflict will leave the reader flipping pages, searching for excitement
- The story’s conflict should be tied to the character’s goal, if it’s not then it will suck away the tension
- Example: Your character is going to a roller skating party where their crush will be and they’re conflicted about asking them out. But instead of focusing on that, we get a scene of the roller rink not having their shoe size available, the skates being too small, swapping them out for new ones, arguing with the staff, etc. That’s a conflict, but it has little to do with the character’s goal or the story’s premise, and there is no tension.
- Fix it by tying new conflicts back to the main one. For example, the character is worried that the time they’re wasting getting the right skates is time that other people could be seducing their crush. Suddenly it goes from irrelevant to tense!
#2. Bad pacing/Not staying focused
- The worst time to go on a sidequest or pursue a subplot is when you want the tension to rise
- The reader will likely just skip past those parts to get back to the main issue at hand
- Example: Your main character and their partner are hot on the tail of an escaped criminal… until the partner confesses that their wife went missing that morning. So now they go looking for the wife, while the criminal is still on the run.
- Fix it by cutting/moving the stuff that is not necessary in the moment. For example, perhaps the character and partner catch the criminal, then discover that the partner’s wife is missing… and it has something to do with a plan the criminal set in motion. With new stakes for their interrogation, suddenly it goes from unfocused to tense!
#3. Repetition
- Nothing kills tension faster than the same thing happening twice or more
- Even if it’s varied up with different characters or a different setting, if it’s too similar to something that happened before, then readers will be bored
- Example: Your main character is warned by their police boss that they are “meddling in things they should leave alone,” and then are warned again by a crime lord in the next chapter, and by a rich playboy in the next. Instead of building up tension to their eventual discovery, it just makes the reader groan.
- Fix it by merging scenes together. Instead of the character being warned about “meddling” three times, they can be warned once, then they can be attacked by the crime lord and his cronies, and then they can be kidnapped by the playboy. Suddenly it goes from repetitive to tense!
#4. No consequences
- Tension is created when a character makes difficult decisions, and those decision affect the outcome of the story — and tension is killed when the decisions don’t affect it
- If things are too easy/work out well for the character, then all tension will dribble away, and the reader will be bored
- Example: Your character is running late for a date and when they finally arrive they’re half an hour late and… their date doesn’t care, they have a perfectly normal time afterward.
- Fix it by adding consequences. Their date is pissed at them, this is the third time this month they’ve been late, and they have a fight in the middle of the restaurant. Suddenly it goes from dull to dramatic!
After that, chat voted that we write a tense story using this prompt: Bob Ross starts painting you while you are watching him on Twitch.
Here’s what we came up with:
Todd set up his easel and clicked over to the Bob Ross painting stream on Twitch. He’d been waiting for this moment for months. Finally alone in the mountains in his rented cabin, away from the world of number crunching and spreadsheets for an entire week. And on paid leave, no less!
His only companions were the old totem pole and apple tree outside the cabin, his jeep that had brought him thirty miles from civilization in any direction, and Bob Ross talking on his laptop.
Starting today, he was going to focus on painting, something that he’d never been allowed to do as a child, and that he’d never had time for during his hectic teenage years. But starting today, that was going to change. He could watch his number-one childhood teacher anytime he wanted, brought back to life thanks to the magic of the Internet.
The stream began, and Bob Ross himself was there, smiling at the camera as the late 80s audio crackled through Todd’s laptop speakers.
“Hello I’m Bob Ross and this is the 44th Joy of Painting series.”
His smooth voice soothed any remaining pieces of Todd’s anxiety. He’d always watched Bob Ross as a child and wanted to follow along, but his parents would never buy him paints. Waste of money, they’d say. And yet they had no issue keeping the fridge full of “mommy and daddy drinks.”
But now Todd listened to Bob Ross welcome the newcomers, and he finally felt like one of the crowd. Along the side of the stream, chatters popped in to say hi, some of them pretending Bob Ross could hear them with messages like “Mr. Ross, I love you!” or “Streamer, can you please up your framerate?”
Todd chuckled and ignored them, focusing only on Bob Ross and his own blank canvas before him. There was nothing else except the soothing dark of night pooling in through the cabin windows, and the light sound of crickets chirping outside. The perfect art studio.
“Anyone can paint,” Bob Ross said, addressing the camera. “Whether your name is Henrietta or Gale or Ryker or Todd.”
At hearing his own name, a shock went through Todd, making him smile. It was a sign that this was what he was always meant to do.
Bob Ross started the same way Todd remembered: going over today’s colors. Dark sienna, Van Dyke brown, and a dozen more would all go into the landscape to come. Todd had researched the episode beforehand, and his palette was already sticky with blobs of each of the required paints. The woman at Michael’s had known exactly what he was going to do when he asked for “alizarin crimson.”
“So go ahead and coat the bristle of the two-inch brush,” Bob Ross said. “Then give it some criss-crosses, some x’s, across the sky here.”
Todd’s paintbrush was ready, but his hand shook as he brought it to the canvas. This was the moment, standing on the edge. The first fall was the scariest.
He brushed it across the sky, and the anxiety melted away. It was a bit thick and blocky, a far cry from the subtle shades of beautiful midnight blue that Bob Ross was conjuring, but it wasn’t bad either.
“I like painting the blues first,” Bob said. “Helps get the blues out of the mind, you know? Whether you’ve had a hard day, or a hard year plopping numbers into spreadsheets.”
As Todd finished brushing his sky, he wondered if spreadsheets were a thing when Bob Ross was doing his show. They must’ve been, apparently. Probably programmed with those punch cards and vacuum tubes and whatnot.
Bob turned to the camera and smiled. “Even if you excel at your job, you have to enjoy the creative processes from time to time, right?”
He didn’t turn back to the painting, he just kept staring off Todd’s screen. Odd, he usually didn’t look away from the painting for more than a second or so, unless he was going on a spiel about something. But now he was just smiling, staring, letting his blue canvas sit still behind him.
Todd glanced over at the chat, expecting to see silly comments like “RIP painting” or “someone restart bob.exe plz” But either no one else noticed, or they didn’t really care. It was just the same flow of “Bob, how do you get your hair that poofy?” and “You’ve been wearing the same shirt for 17 hours of streaming!”
Just as Todd thought his stream froze or something, Bob turned back to the painting and kept brushing away.
“Now let’s go ahead and add some mountains to our little scene here.”
Todd followed along, brushing some new “sap green” beneath the sky, then some dark “phthalo green” beneath that for the beginnings of the grassy field. Bob’s looked just like the real thing, a mountain at night nestled under a comforter of stars. Todd’s messy strokes just looked like a first grader had tried really hard.
“How are you doing tonight?” Bob asked as he brushed away at the trees. “I’m feeling a little sad, but I’m glad I get to be here with you.”
Todd couldn’t help but answer back. “I’ve waited a long time for tonight, Bob, and so far it’s been worth it.”
Bob nodded and looked at the camera again. “Glad to hear. You know what, though?This painting reminds me a bit of my good friend Todd.”
That made Todd drop his paintbrush to the wooden floor. He scrambled to pick it up, accidentally smearing the alizarin crimson across the floor in a bloody stroke.
“Todd always wanted to paint places like this,” Bob said. “He loved the mountains, the fresh air. Unfortunately he didn’t know some of the other things mountains had up there.”
His heart pounding away, Todd stood back up, focused entirely on the screen. Bob was just happily adding in the beginnings of a log cabin in the middle of the clearing.
“I miss Todd a lot,” he said. “I tried to warn him, but there are some things that I just don’t like to paint.”
Todd’s shaking hands from earlier were back. The puddles of paint on his palette dripped together, leaving behind their brightly colored selves, congealing to mud. He never remembered Bob Ross mentioning a “Todd” this personally before.
“Are you talking to me?” Todd asked his laptop. Hearing his own voice echo in the empty cabin made him suddenly feel very alone.
Bob didn’t answer. He kept painting away at the little details around the cabin. A yellow flag on the roof. A totem pole by the front door. A lone apple tree off to the side.
Todd could see all of those things from where he was standing, through the windows of his own mountain cabin.
“You’re painting my cabin,” Todd said, nearly out of breath from just speaking. Saying it aloud, he realized how stupid he sounded. “No. No way. It’s just a coincidence.”
Bob Ross lifted his brush from the painting and turned to the camera again.
“There are no mistakes here, Todd. Just happy little accidents.”
Todd slammed his body into the seat in front of his laptop, his painting standing forgotten on the easel. His eyes scanned the chat, hoping for any sign that someone else was seeing what he was seeing. It was just the usual garbage. They were not watching the same thing that Todd was.
“Why are you painting my cabin?” Todd demanded. He gripped the sides of his laptop, as if attempting to squeeze the truth out of the screen. Bob chiseled away at the little details of his cabin with a fine-tipped brush.
“Do you ever feel a little discouraged?” he asked. “Like nothing’s going quite as you planned? Yeah, me too. But that’s okay. That’s a-okay. It just means your canvas has some ideas of its own. It’s trying to tell you something, Todd.”
Sweat dripped down Todd’s eyeballs as he watched Bob step back from the painting. It was a perfect rendition of Todd’s cabin, as if it was the exact photo he’d seen in the catalogue when he’d rented it.
The only difference were two alizarin crimson eyes lurking in the blackness of the cabin door.
“Just keep in mind,” Bob said, smiling at the camera. “It’s not finished, until it’s finished.”
Todd glanced down at the stream’s timer. The show had been going on for twenty-four minutes, only one minute remained. What would happen when it was over?
“Sometimes you gotta beat the devil out of your brush,” Bob said, smacking his washed brush against the bucket. “And sometimes, Todd, you gotta beat the devil with your brush.”
Todd didn’t hesitate. He grabbed his brush, still soaked with sap green, and burst out of the cabin door into the nighttime. The totem pole and apple tree blurred by him as he sprinted to his jeep. He threw the door open and cranked the ignition, the paintbrush dripping green all over his sweaty fingers and steering wheel. His headlights flashed on and he reversed it out of there as fast as possible.
Two crimson eyes watched him from the darkness.
Be sure to check out the video for a dramatic readings, and for an explanation about how we used the tension creation/killing points to write this story!
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you join us on Twitch.
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Featured image: Pakutaso