Inside the Wonder World, Lesson 35

Tension and Stakes

Welcome to my Friday edition of Substack, which features my paid posts: Inside the Wonder World.

Those paid subscribers who stick with me for a year will get a free copy of the book as soon as it’s out.

Inside the Wonder World is the working title of my developing craft book on writing and publishing for young readers. I’m bringing it to you in pieces, both to help you learn something more deeply (lessons and exercises included) and to push me to finish this lofty goal.

Here’s the next lesson!

Tension and Stakes

This is a 2-part post on creating more tension in your work.

Have you ever submitted something to a reader only to have them say something like, “there’s not enough tension here”? Or, “your pacing is off”?

I struggled with pacing and tension for years before I finally read Donald Maass’s The Fire in Fiction. When, later, I went to one of his workshops with his books in my hands, he signed them “Tension on every page” which is what I want to tell you right now:

There must be tension on every single page of your story.

Now, I’m not talking about exploding starships or brawls in barrooms or multiple murders. Tension is something that comes from setting up a problem and then magnifying that problem through language, character, scene, world, and so on. I’ll address the big things first and then focus in on the actual techniques.

For more on this see my recent post on micro-tension.

Building Stakes

Let’s start with stakes.

You have a story idea, you have a character, you have the bare bones of a plot. Now ask yourself, what are the stakes? What happens if your main character doesn’t get what she desires, or doesn’t defeat the antagonistic force, or doesn’t achieve her goal? You must be able to answer these questions – and not only for the whole story, but in every scene of the story.

James Scott Bell in Conflict and Suspense says that the stakes in every story must be death.