This weekend
I’m attending When Words Collide, a wonderful writer and reader’s convention in
Calgary. I can’t wait! I go every year and always learn a lot.
In addition I’m going to be on a panel called Creating Tension. Here’s a
preview of what I’m going to say:
1. Hooks and cliffhangers. Everyone knows that your
novel should start with a hook, but it’s
even better if every chapter and every scene begins with a mini-hook and ends
with a mini-cliffhanger. I grew up reading Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. The
chapters always ended with Nancy in trouble of some kind.
2. Conflict. I
know this seems obvious, but, yes, there should be conflict in every scene.
Even a quiet scene between two friends can have conflict, provided they both want something different. I once wrote a book
where I deliberately gave the heroine a conflict with every other character she
encountered.
3. High stakes, both public and personal stakes.
What’s the difference? The public stakes in a thriller might be a madman
threatening to blow up a building. The private stakes may be that the heroine’s
grandmother is trapped in that very building. Your novel should have both
kinds. When revising, try to raise the stakes.
4. Use the Scene Question (sometimes also called
Dramatic question) and Scene Answer to add punch to your scenes. During
revision, I hunt for what the scene question is and move it up in the text so
that the reader naturally poses this question to themselves. Sometimes the scene question is quite simple.
In a fight scene, it’s Will the protagonist successfully repel this attack? In
a different scene it might be something more subtle like: Will the princess
persuade her handmaid to spy for her?
The scene
answer should either be No, AND or Yes, BUT therefore complicating matters for
the hero even more. For example, in the aforementioned fight scene, the
protagonist could lose the fight and wake to find themselves a prisoner. Or the
protagonist could win the fight but kill their opponent therefore losing the
opportunity to question them about the villain’s plans. Either way, their
situation is worse off than at the start of the scene.
If you have any tips, post them in the comments!
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