How to Up the Tension in your Story

Tension. Without a little bit of tension in your writing, there is no excitement when obstacles are overcome by the characters. By increasing tension in a story you’ve added suspense, intrigue, and you’ve captivated your audience as they excitedly ask “What comes next?!” Today we will go over a few simple and easy ways to increase your story’s tension.

Photo by Orimi Protograph on Unsplash

Increasing Tension — Up the Stakes in your Writing

What I Want:

Your characters all have wants and needs. They fight to win, and in most cases if you’re on the side of the protagonist you will win. By allowing your characters to always win, to always get what they want: The lover, good reputation, the ‘insert rare item here’, and anything else that should be hard to get. Don’t give it to them. Reality is, you don’t always win, so your character’s can’t always win either. By doing this not only does it increase tension later knowing they can win or lose, but it also makes the characters more relatable and realistic.

Can This Get Any Worse?

If you’re feeling stuck at a point, the characters are on their way and doing well but it doesn’t feel right… Ask yourself what can go wrong? Then let that happen. The characters are travelling. What if they got lost? Now let them get lost. What if they stumble upon one of the antagonist’s goons? Let is happen!

Obviously, try not to overuse this — but if you find your story lacking during certain portions this is a good fast way to correct that.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Multiple Conflicts:

Conflict between the protagonist and antagonist is expected, but other types of conflict can be surprising. Try to allow conflict between characters, antagonists, even the world around them. Everyone has a different personality, flaws, and viewpoints. Try to consider ways they could clash. For example: A pacifist might disagree with a warmonger, or someone who goes with the flow would tend to be pushed around by a bossier personality. Allow morals to clash, and highlight the differing personalities.

No Feather-Fall:

Finally, don’t allow your hero a cushy fall. Allow for huge consequences if the hero fails, show that there are no empty threats.

Like how if you show a rare knife at the beginning of a story, you have to use it eventually, the same goes for most threats.

There must be consequences. This makes it all the sweeter if your hero manages to come back from their fall, and gives a rewarding finish to the story.

Now that you have the groundwork for a fulfilling story that will captivate your readers, try to practice working this into your stories or writing short stories to improve your tension writing abilities.