On Tension

Your current project may not be a Hitchcockian thriller, but creating tension can ensure your reader stays with you to the final scene. I realize “craft a narrative that readers want to stick with” feels like impossible and vague guidance (about as helpful as Elmore Leonard’s advice to “leave out the parts that people skip”), so let’s bring in Sol Stein.

Stein suggests* some concrete ways of achieving tension: “Short sentences step up pace…frequent paragraphing accelerates the pace. Short sentences plus frequent paragraphing steps up pace even more.”

Crafting shorter sentences means leaving some of your darlings behind. But pruning your language lets you focus on the strongest branches of your narrative. Or, as Stein puts it, “[f]lab cutting is one of the best means for improving the pace of both fiction and nonfiction.”

Take a scene from your project. First, trim the fat. Start by removing “all adjectives and adverbs adn then read it the necessary few after careful testing.” The list of banned adverbs includes very, quite, really, always, almost….

Once your chapter is as svelte as Grace Kelly, turn to the structural pacing. Begin at the sentence level. Look for semicolons, em-dashes, and comma clusters. Break everything into shorter, brisker sentences.

Then turn to the paragraph. Start by splitting each paragraph into two paragraphs, then see if three works.

You may not keep all of these changes. In fact, you may really hate them. But this exercise will force you to examine the pacing of your narrative and ask yourself if it works for the story you want to tell. It will also help you see the flab in your story. Who knows, maybe you will keep some of those shorter sentences and paragraphs.

*See Sol Stein, Stein on Writing in our Recommended Books section below