#05 The Shape of a Story: Building and Varying Tension in Your Creative Writing

Another insightful and unexpected discussion about inspiration, followed by a ZANY round or two of Exquisite Corpse. 

This time, part 1 is all about how to vary the tension in your creative writing, drawing on some unusual tips and principles... drawn from the world of acting.

art 2 is as bizarre as ever: Anna Tizard brainstorms story ideas mixing up YOUR words and phrases.  Tune in, be inspired - and laugh your head off! And don't forget to keep those words coming in. The Socks of Destiny need you at: annatizard.com/play!

SHOW TRANSCRIPTION (does not include Exquisite Corpse game play at the end):

Now, this fifth episode is all about building tension in a story. I don’t know about you, but when I think about tension and pacing in a story or a movie, it can all seem a little bit general at first. On the face of it, what do you have, essentially, besides parts where there’s lots of action and parts where there’s a build-up to the action? Surely it’s as simple as that? But – in my experience, there’s nothing quite so powerful as thinking about tension from the inside out, that is, from the internal changes that occur within the characters, especially the protagonist, in response to what’s going on around him or her. Use a bit of psychology. In fact, this is one of those aspects of writing that, for me, really crosses over with principles of acting. I was quite heavily into acting in my late teens, until I realised, I’m too much of an introvert to cope with this stuff. But still, I’ve held on to the things I learned back then, and what I couldn’t apply to myself very well on stage, I’ve used as inspiration for my writing – and so can you. So can anyone. 

A golden rule in acting – which I never quite managed to grasp in my acting skillset – is that your character must almost always be seeming to hold something back. They don’t express everything. If they did, it would be too much. It would be like me running down the street screaming my head off whenever I got an annoying email at work – and the streets of Brighton would never be the same again. But people don’t do that, people don’t act out all the time, unless they’ve really hit a threshold with the amount of stress they’re under, and that would have involved a long build-up. And if anyone did it in a film – if characters just said everything on their minds and lashed out at every single irritation – it wouldn’t be believable. This “holding something back” is about realism too. I believe it’s also known as the “tip of the iceberg” rule. In a film when you get the sense that the main character isn’t saying or showing everything they feel, it creates the sense in which they have an internal life, they’re a believable, rounded character – that there’s stuff going on inside that’s more than just a reaction to what’s going on around them right then. It’s a little bit the mystery aspect I was talking about in the last show, on Writing Around the Secret.

A while ago, I watched a documentary about film making. There was mention of a horror movie – now, I don’t watch horror movies, I’m too much of a wimp, but the programme wasn’t going in to details of the story itself. We’ll just skip the part where I can’t remember which horror movie they were talking about, something famous that involved a female actress running around screaming. An actress who found that, very soon after having been given the script in the first place, that the scenes would have to be filmed in a totally jumbled up order. Some technical issues meant that later scenes needed to be filmed first, and they were all going to be done so quickly, that it would be pretty difficult to keep track of where they were at in the story in a chronological sense. Now, if you’re not a horror movie fan, you might think, if she was mostly wandering around looking frightened, or screaming, whether this really posed much of a problem! But of course it did. She knew, like all good actors know, variance in pacing and tension is really fundamental, no matter what the genre. We can’t run at fever pitch constantly – we feel exhausted just watching it. And if the tension is fairly low and doesn’t rise or fall, that’s boring. We lose interest.

For some reason it makes me think of a situation where you’re given a big workload and you’re told that everything in that pile is really, really urgent. Well, great, thanks – that really doesn’t help me prioritise, does it? I mean, can you please tell me if there are some that are at least a bit more urgent than the others, so I can get on with them first, rather than just feeling completely overwhelmed?

It's a totally different situation but it’s somehow the same principle. In life, we need variance.

I’m going to give an example of a film which might be controversial for some scifi fans. The recent Dune movies. (I’m not a big scifi fan but I’m happy to try most things that don’t involve gore.) I saw the first of these films a few months ago. It began with an intriguing atmosphere of tension, sort of low-medium tension, of something brewing under the surface, of things not fully expressed, angers and anxieties bubbling under, just out of reach. Perfect for a beginning. It really hooked me in. But no matter what happened in the story, what changes occurred, the same atmosphere persisted at that level of tension. By the time the film was halfway through, I was like, for goodness’ sake, come on! It felt as if nothing had happened, even though plenty had. It was frustrating – and it wasn’t just me, being a storyteller and very aware of these aspects. My hubby too, who is an avid scifi fan with no acting or creative writing experience, and he totally agreed with me on this. You cannot sustain the feeling of … something’s going to happen, any minute now, it's going to break out, the tension’s mounting up, what is it going be, it’s going to be big… er, some time soon, please?

I didn’t finish watching it. My hubby did, but said there still wasn’t much change to the atmosphere, even by the ending. Apparently the story is meant to continue on in the next one – but sorry, that’s no excuse! Even in a trilogy or series, a film or a book is a self-contained unit. No matter if there’s an overarching plotline that carries through to other episodes – each one must have its own promises fulfilled, otherwise – why did I just watch that?

Set up your expectations, but then – deliver. Build the tension, and then bring the story to a crescendo. It’s not just about tying up loose ends, answering questions that are posed in the plot, or revealing mysteries that intrigued us in the beginning. There must be variance in tension. But how?

Back to that actress in the horror movie, that I shamefully cannot remember. She’d just found out that the part she’d been learning was going to be filmed in a completely jumbled up order. She’d have to act out these scenes, these beats, without any chronological sense of what her character had just been doing seconds ago, and where the story was about to go to.

But do you know what? It didn’t matter. Because as a part of her preparation for the role, she’d already made the genius decision to mark up her script as she read it, and label different scenes with a tension scoring, from 1 to 10. (I think she must have looked at it and thought, I need to do more than just run around and scream.)
10 was the highest pitch scream of pure white terror. One was the subtlest hint that something worrying was going on, then there were all the steps and flavours of anxiety, trepidation and fear in between. She’s scored the lot in advance according to her own interpretation. It didn’t matter which scene the director asked her to act “off the cuff”: she’d check her notes and recreate the exact level of tension she’d already envisaged in her first or second read of it. And so, no matter that the filming was jumbled up. The final cut was seamless.

What would it be like to try that with one of your own stories or a novel? For me, unless it was a really short piece, that’s too pedantic for me, I couldn’t cope with that. Whenever I’ve tried to use something like scene cards for a novel, anything too organised, the story very quickly loses its lustre – it feels worn out and overanalysed. But that’s just me. For whatever reason, my creativity doesn’t hold up very well under heavy-going structural manipulation – I’ve always had to step aside a little bit, to learn something, and then gradually integrate it into my writing techniques, so it becomes a sort of awareness I have as I write. So if that sounds like you, maybe don’t try this at home, unless it’s a short story; or you’re working on something and you’re very stuck. But if you like these sorts of things and you’re super-organised… Is your writing desk neat? Then I think this could be for you! (You should see mine… Well, no, actually, you really shouldn’t.)

But – as with a lot things, we can take a piece of this principle and apply it however we want. If it feels like too much to score something you’re working on, as it does for me, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. Next time I watch a film I’m going to jot down on a piece of paper a tension scoring between 1 and 10, for each scene. Tension changes within a scene, so maybe I’ll draw a line to show each scene change, and then put a number just before the line and just after it, but also write numbers in the midway point between the lines, if the tension changes in the middle of a scene, and then just see what I observe. The fluctuations in tension, the rising and cresting of tension. I think I it might be best to try it with something I already know. I might think I know why I enjoy that movie so much, but maybe I’ll learn something new about pacing by doing this. It could give me clues as to what fluctuations in tension make a story work for me.

I suggest doing this exercise with a film, just because it’s so much easier and quicker to do. In any case, so much writing nowadays is influenced by films and the expectations we have about the way a story should unfold the way it does in films – nowadays, it’s not possible to extricate fiction completely from what goes on in the movies. You could try it with a book; that will of course be a longer, more complex task, and there may be more to learn. But either way, just by trying out this exercise, or just by becoming more aware, more observant, of changes in what you watch and read, will in turn enrich your own sense of pacing and tension when you write and plot stories. You don’t have to adopt any pedantic habits; the point is to just enhance your awareness and consider how these principles, of what you observe and enjoy in other stories, might be applied in your own writing style.

Stories move. In both senses of the word.
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And sometimes, words can move. Words that are scribbled on slips of paper, folded up, may move from the SOCKS OF DESTINY…

… and onto my desk where they form bizarre sentences and story ideas. That’s right, it’s time to play Exquisite Corpse!

Exquisite Corpse game play is not transposable... Please listen the last section of the show to enter a realm of deep silliness and inspiration!