On the importance of tension in stories
Mar. 8th, 2024 02:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rainwatersparkI've seen it said that all books need conflict. I would disagree with that and say instead: all books need tension.
2023 had a lot of action movie duds. Those movies were definitely full of conflict, yet for the ones that I watched and wasn't in love with, they lacked tension.
What is tension? I define it as the reader's guess/expectation that something will happen. Or, in the words of Dan Brown (probably paraphrased), it's posing a question and then promising that if the reader keeps reading, they'll get the answer. Romance novels are often criticized by people who don't read the genre for being formulaic, but the tension in romance comes from knowing the main couple will get together, but not exactly how they will. It's why they're so compulsively readable for fans of the genre. Crucially, tension involves uncertainty. If a story is completely predictable, there is no tension.
Recently, I read A Tempest of Tea by Hafsah Faizal, and ended up feeling bored out of my skull after roughly the 20% mark. It's a heist book—it was definitely full of conflict. But I didn't feel any sense of tension. Like, sure, the main characters have to pull off this heist or else they'll lose their beloved teahouse. But we know that failure isn't really an option because otherwise why are we reading this book, so...?
I find that action-packed books with tension often achieve that tension by introducing a conflict underlying the main action plot. Either a character-based conflict, or multiple conflicts in a single action setpiece. For example, in Voyage of the Damned by Frances White, protagonist Dee isn't just investigating the murders to get justice for his loved one and because he and his friends might become the next targets—he's also trying to hide the fact that he's the only powerless person on the cruise ship. Or, in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, when Ethan Hunt and co. attempt to steal the nuclear codes at the Burj Khalifa, they're not just stealing the codes because they can't let them fall into the wrong hands; they're also gambling on not having their identities uncovered, which would ruin their whole mission.
It's taken me a while to be able to articulate my problems with A Tempest of Tea, and I think it boils down to a few things: (1) The characters never fail in their goals, so even when they encounter obstacles, there isn't much tension that something bad could happen to them. (In Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, by contrast, we see the main characters lose the nuclear codes multiple times, which really heightens the stakes.) And (2) none of the twists were foreshadowed ahead of time, so while they should have been sources of tension throughout most of the book, they weren't.
And that's why I ended up bored out of my skull while reading the book.
2023 had a lot of action movie duds. Those movies were definitely full of conflict, yet for the ones that I watched and wasn't in love with, they lacked tension.
What is tension? I define it as the reader's guess/expectation that something will happen. Or, in the words of Dan Brown (probably paraphrased), it's posing a question and then promising that if the reader keeps reading, they'll get the answer. Romance novels are often criticized by people who don't read the genre for being formulaic, but the tension in romance comes from knowing the main couple will get together, but not exactly how they will. It's why they're so compulsively readable for fans of the genre. Crucially, tension involves uncertainty. If a story is completely predictable, there is no tension.
Recently, I read A Tempest of Tea by Hafsah Faizal, and ended up feeling bored out of my skull after roughly the 20% mark. It's a heist book—it was definitely full of conflict. But I didn't feel any sense of tension. Like, sure, the main characters have to pull off this heist or else they'll lose their beloved teahouse. But we know that failure isn't really an option because otherwise why are we reading this book, so...?
I find that action-packed books with tension often achieve that tension by introducing a conflict underlying the main action plot. Either a character-based conflict, or multiple conflicts in a single action setpiece. For example, in Voyage of the Damned by Frances White, protagonist Dee isn't just investigating the murders to get justice for his loved one and because he and his friends might become the next targets—he's also trying to hide the fact that he's the only powerless person on the cruise ship. Or, in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, when Ethan Hunt and co. attempt to steal the nuclear codes at the Burj Khalifa, they're not just stealing the codes because they can't let them fall into the wrong hands; they're also gambling on not having their identities uncovered, which would ruin their whole mission.
It's taken me a while to be able to articulate my problems with A Tempest of Tea, and I think it boils down to a few things: (1) The characters never fail in their goals, so even when they encounter obstacles, there isn't much tension that something bad could happen to them. (In Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, by contrast, we see the main characters lose the nuclear codes multiple times, which really heightens the stakes.) And (2) none of the twists were foreshadowed ahead of time, so while they should have been sources of tension throughout most of the book, they weren't.
And that's why I ended up bored out of my skull while reading the book.
