Let's Make Things Tense

More thoughts on openings... (part 2)

A few weeks ago I posted some thoughts about openings in fiction, focusing on where and when we start. But regardless of where the story starts, tension is (usually) what draws us in. And tension is an art. A devious, sadistic art.

And a heads up here that this is a serious deep dive today. If you only subscribe for the Zillow content, don’t worry, more of that soon.

Tension (physicists, please forgive me) is basically when two things are pulling in opposite directions, in a way that can’t be sustained forever.

So, George really needs to put the hot lasagna dish down, but his daughter is using the table for her science fair project and if she moves it right now, it’ll upset the algae. They can’t stay in this limbo forever (or even for very long). Something has to give, and someone is going to be unhappy, and something is going to change.

Or, look at classic sustained romantic tension. These two people want to jump each other’s bones, and either they’ll finally sweep everything off the desk and go for it or one of them will break the other’s heart, but it’s probably not going to keep on going exactly like this till they’re both 95.

This photo is apparently from National Tug-Of-War Day, which the internet tells me occurs every February, and I’m guessing the people who thought pulling on a rope in February was a good idea are not from Chicago.

Another way to identify tension is to look for the “but” statements that you could make when talking about the story. George needs to put the lasagna down but Gracie’s terrarium is half-built on the table. Jason and Macy are wild about each other but they both fear rejection so they haven’t acted on it yet. Gatsby wants Daisy back but she’s married to another man. And so on.

In most circumstances, most writers will want tension throughout most of the piece. And we usually want tension to ratchet up, not taper off, as we build to the end of a story. But since we’re talking about beginnings, we can focus for now on the fact that tension in an opening scene or paragraph is a lot of what gets us into the story. We don’t know or care about these characters yet, we don’t owe the author a read, perhaps we’re standing in the bookstore still, uncertain what we’re going to buy—but if we’re presented with compelling tension, a scene we simply must read to the end of, it can carry us through until we do feel oriented, and invested, and committed.

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We can break tension into categories, focusing especially on what happens in an opening.

Atmospheric Tension:

I’m not starting with the most dramatic one here, and that’s okay. These are the big background tensions that might not even happen “on the page” in the timeline of your story, but that create a generally tense or unstable atmosphere. Consider the musical Cabaret, in which all the love affairs and business dealings are the main action but behind it all it’s, you know, 1930 Germany. Or (lower stakes here) imagine a story set at a terrible workplace where everyone’s miserable and the AC doesn’t work.

In some cases atmospheric tension is chronic (meaning it’s there the whole time and it doesn’t really change) and in some cases it’s acute (meaning that while it’s still not the main focus, it arises suddenly or evolves; think of a lightning storm midway through a scary movie). One of my kids is extremely tuned in to background music on film, in a way that’s made me much more aware of it, and she’ll veto certain movies if the soundtrack is too tense throughout (chronic atmospheric tension) or be unhappy if it’s too intense in a certain scene (acute atmospheric tension).

Those elements do not need to change throughout the story, and they’re not the point of the story, but they destabilize everyone. It’s important to note, though, that this is not enough. A storm outside or a war in the background or tense music throughout a show is not enough to carry the narrative.

Here’s an example of atmospheric tension starting a novel. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is going to be about the house itself, of course, but the house never really changes—the characters are the main story—and yet we start with the house:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill house, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for 80 years and might for 80 more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Here’s another where nothing is particularly unusual, we’re just reminded that the world itself is a conflicted and fraught place (Ida Hattemer-Higgins’ tragically underread The History of History):

The oceans rose and the clouds washed over the sky; the tide of humanity came revolving in love and betrayal, in skyscrapers and ruins, through walls breached and children conjured, and soon it was the year 2002.

Chronic Character Tension:

This is very similar to atmospheric tension, but it’s about the tensions that exist, chronically, within a certain character. Hopefully all of our characters contain contradictions and tensions (because that’s what real people are like) but importantly, we can start out a whole novel on this note.

George Eliot does so in Middlemarch:

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

Jay McInerney does it in Bright Lights, Big City:

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy.

Dramatic (Diegetic) Tension:

We’ll get to that second word in a minute, but first the easy part. Dramatic tension is the most obvious kind, the tension felt by characters themselves (and therefore also by the reader, we’d hope). The lasagna pan and the brewing sexual storm above are both dramatic tension. In the most classic setup, two or more characters each want something, and not everyone can get what they want (as with George and his daughter). Or perhaps one or more person wants something but some other thing or force stands in the way (as with our would-be lovebirds and their shyness).

Between this guy and what he wants, there is a lot of mud.

Dramatic tension can be about what’s going to happen next, but it can also be about what already happened in the past. Whatever book you’re in the middle of right now ask yourself: What would the main character really love to know right now, if they could have any answers in the world? Their questions might all be about the future (Will Jason ever make a move? Will my daughter move her damn terrarium?) or they might be about the past (Who killed the mayor? What happened to my grandmother back in Russia that she doesn’t want to talk about?) or they could be philosophical (Can free will exist if there’s an omnipotent God?) but that latter category might not be your greatest source of dramatic tension.

And as with atmospheric tension, we can have both chronic and acute cases. The chronic dramatic tension of Hamlet is that throughout the whole play, he’s trying to avenge his father’s death but can’t bring himself to do so. The acute tension in the bedroom scene is that he thinks Claudius is behind the curtain but it’s really Polonius.

Colson Whitehead begins The Intuitionist with acute dramatic tension:

It’s a new elevator, freshly pressed to the rails, and it’s not built to fall this fast.

Here’s Anne Tyler with much less dramatic opening from Breathing Lessons, but one that still holds dramatic tension:

Maggie and Ira Moran had to go to a funeral in Deer Lick, Pennsylvania.

(The implication here in the word “had” is that they are going to a funeral but of course they probably don’t want to be.)

And here’s Ha Jin’s Waiting, where we start with chronic dramatic tension:

Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.

A relevant sidebar:

[Now featuring a correction to make things MORE complicated, wooo!]

Okay, a word on the word diegetic. Let’s go back for a minute to the movie soundtracks. You know how sometimes in a movie, the characters are either making or listening to the music, fully aware of it (whether logically or not) and it’s part of the story? Think of “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music, or Angela Chase dancing in her room to “Blister in the Sun” on My So-Called Life, or “Auld Lang Syne” playing at the party at the end of When Harry Met Sally. Those are examples of diegetic music. It’s experienced by both the audience and the characters.

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Meanwhile, sometimes there’s music in a movie (the screeching strings as someone’s hand nears the handle of the basement door) that the characters absolutely cannot hear. It’s music that’s external to the world of the story, music that’s just between the film and the audience. We could call that non-diegetic music.

[A complication: In the first version of this post, I contrasted diegesis (which Aristotle used to talk about narrated stories, told stories) and mimesis (which is what we experience directly, just watching the action unfold). This is a clearer distinction onstage than in prose, but we could loosely think of it as “telling” vs. “showing.” What would make WAY more sense to me is to use “mimetic” to mean the stuff both we and the characters experience and “diegetic” to mean the breaking-the-fourth-wall stuff, but nope, film theory had to go and complicate Aristotle, so now we have three terms, and I kind of hate it. Aristotle was here first! But since there are probably more film theorists than Aristotle scholars in the world now, we’ll go with what they’ve decided.]

So if we take this out of the soundtrack world and into the world of tension, diegetic tension is tension that exists for the characters within the world of the story. And most of the time, narrative tension is diegetic.

What on earth would non-diegetic tension look like? I’m SO GLAD YOU ASKED!

Narrative (Non-Diegetic) Tension:

There are times when tension is about us putting ourselves in the place of the characters and wondering what will happen next; and then there’s tension that’s external to those characters, something they wouldn’t be aware of.

Here are some of those circumstances:

• The narrator (presumably either not a character, or else a character telling this from a later vantage point) promises something, some future event that the characters don’t know about. Think about the opening of the film American Beauty, in which the character Lester Burnham, narrating presumably from beyond the grave, says “In less than a year, I will be dead.” We are now watching in order to see that promise fulfilled.

That promise might be much more subtle. Consider the opening of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay:

In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.

We’re going to spend a lot of time now with the childhood version of Sam Clay, but we’ve already been promised, by this narrator, that this strange little boy will one day be famous on the comic book convention scene; part of why we’re reading now is to figure out how he gets from point A to point B.

• The same thing might be accomplished because we have a prologue or an early chapter in which we see what the future holds. At the beginning of Breaking Bad, we see Walter White in front of a trailer full of meth in his underwear. Then we flash back and he’s a mild-mannered chemistry teacher. Again, we’re watching partly to get from A to B.

• We already know some or all of the story, from sources other than the narrator—for reasons ranging from the story being familiar to most readers/viewers already (Titanic, Oedipus Rex) to the title (How I Met Your Mother) to the paratext (meaning the cover and description of a book; imagine a book called HELLWORM with a cover feature a bloody rope and a blurb about this being “the most disturbing novel of the decade”; if the opening scene is of a mother taking her kids to the swimming pool on a lovely sunny day, you’re still going to feel a lot of tension.)

• There’s tension between the text and another text it’s riffing on (Demon Copperhead in relation to David Copperfield, James in relation to Huckleberry Finn). We keep reading because of the dramatic tension but also to see how it’s going to follow or subvert the original text.

• There’s an inherent structure to the text that a reader wants to see through to the end. This could range from a list structure (Imagine a story called “My First Five Husbands” that starts off with a summation of marriage #1, then #2, and so on) to a structure announced by the text itself (Marley tells Scrooge he’ll be visited by three more ghosts) to the expectations of a traditional, established story structure (If you’re reading an Agatha Christie novel, you’re waiting for Hercule Poirot to inevitably solve the case, despite this not being announced in the book itself).

  

  Marley is here partly to announce the narrative structure.

• We, the reader, have unanswered questions that the characters do not have. Think of that Ha Jin example above. Most readers are going to have the same reaction to “Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife,” which is something along the lines of “How in the hell does that work?” This can be a very useful kind of tension at the beginning of something, but if you do too much it can interfere with orientation, and it can feel annoying and even desperate.

So Exactly How Many Tensions Do I Need and Where Do I Put Them, Precisely?

There is, of course, no formula (sorry). But start by reading for these tensions. Stop on page five of a new book and ask yourself how many “but” statements you could construct. How many of them are atmospheric? How many are related to character? How many are dramatic (diegetic) tensions? How many are narrative (non-diegetic) tensions? What unanswered questions do the characters have? What unanswered questions (in a good way) do you, the reader have?

We know that some books start off with a ton of tension right upfront (holy falling elevator!), and some get there much more slowly and/or subtly.

There’s no wrong formula to any of this, but here are two key things:

1. It’s really really hard to make a story work without at least some dramatic tension, things the characters are worrying and wondering about. Titanic can’t just be about us, the audience, waiting for the iceberg. So we have a love story and some nude modeling and Billy Zane being an idiot until that happens.

2. A lot of writers rely way too heavily on the very last kind of tension discussed above (questions the reader has that the character doesn’t), ignoring all these other boundless sources of intrigue and momentum. Why are you doing that? WHY? WHY?!?!?!?!?

But What if Putting in Tension Feels Artificial and Corny?

It's perhaps ironic that the more intrinsic tension a piece runs on, the LESS authorially driven it feels. When we're writing about moments of static, relying on ambiance and detail and description and memory, we notice the hand of the author much more. (Because who's telling us these things? And why?) When the engines of tension and momentum are up and running, the story has an excuse for existing. It just IS, rather than being told. 

*A Footnote:

Here's my footnote about diegetic and non-diegetic music, a thing I haven’t found a word for. Okay, so in The Sound of Music, Fraulein Maria is strumming her guitar and the kids are singing. So far, so good. But then a full orchestra comes in to accompany them. On the one hand, they’re totally aware of the music going on (diegesis!) but on the other hand, they’d be really freaked out if they were in the middle of this field and suddenly there’s a horn section playing, so they obviously aren’t aware of the other accompaniments (non-diegesis!)… So it’s, like, half and half? Someone make it make sense!

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Last time I got some great questions about openings, ones I’ll answer next time. If you’re a paid subscriber, add your questions below!

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