By John Gilstrap

When I teach at conferences and workshops, sooner or later, someone asks about tension. What is the secret for continually raising the stakes to keep the reader engaged?

The short answer is that tension isn’t magic. It’s engineering. It’s not something your characters generate while you sit back and admire their spontaneity. (If yours do that, please send them to my house. Mine mostly demand coffee and complain about the weather.) Tension is built one writerly decision at a time. Here are some things to think about:

1. Hurt Someone (Strategically)

If a scene feels flat, it’s often because no one is in jeopardy. Particularly in thrillers, happy people doing happy things happily is boring. Readers lean forward when they sense consequence and lean back when they sense safety.

I once fixed a third-act problem by shooting a character—not because I enjoy random mayhem, but because the story needed destabilizing. The moment the gun went off, the emotional geometry of the scene changed. Loyalties shifted. People had to react. That’s tension.

You don’t always have to fire a bullet; sometimes you fire a truth, a betrayal, a revelation that rearranges the emotional furniture. But if nothing in the scene forces a reaction—if no one bleeds, physically or emotionally—you’re not building tension; you’re decorating prose.

2. Put a Clock on It

Human beings are remarkably calm about catastrophe—right up until there’s a deadline. A bomb that will explode “someday” is background noise; a bomb that will explode at 6:42 p.m. sharp is a crisis. Time pressure forces decisions and eliminates the luxury of perfect plans. It makes smart characters make stupid decisions, and stupid decisions create complications, which is where tension thrives. When you compress time, you compress options. Suddenly every delay matters, every detour carries risk, and every conversation feels like it’s stealing seconds from survival. Nothing sharpens a scene like a ticking clock, and nothing sharpens a character like urgency.

3. Close the Exits

Sensible choices and logical escape routes poison thrillers. If your protagonist can call for backup, the sensible choice is to wait for help to arrive. If they can break contact without consequence, they probably should. If they can confess and clear everything up, why wouldn’t they?

To build tension, take those options away. Maybe calling for backup exposes a secret that destroys a career. Maybe walking away means abandoning someone who will then suffer. Maybe confessing will land the wrong person in prison. Tension lives where every available choice carries a cost, and the protagonist has to choose anyway. When I feel a scene sagging, I ask myself, “Where’s the easiest pathway to safety?” Then I remove it. Leave your character with only hard paths forward.

4. Let the Reader See the Trap

One of the most delicious forms of tension happens when the reader knows something the hero doesn’t. You show the antagonist making preparations. You let the reader glimpse the ambush before the protagonist walks into it. Suddenly, every line of of the story can vibrate with subtext. The hero reaches for a doorknob, and the reader is already whispering, “Don’t.” You’ve got to be careful here because the balance is delicate. Reveal too much and you drain suspense; reveal too little and you muddle the plot.

5. Escalate Consequences, Not Just Action

More gunfire does not automatically equal more tension. I’ve read scenes with explosions that felt sleepy and conversations in parked cars that vibrated with tension. The difference is stakes. Tension isn’t about volume; it’s about consequence. Start small—a lie that might be discovered, a trust that might be broken—then widen the blast radius to a career, a marriage, a life. Maybe more. But escalate in layers and earn each step.

This is where my retired engineer’s mind kicks in. A story is built in layers. The world of someone we like turns sideways, and somehow he has to cope with the crisis. But that crisis is only the beginning because his strategy to solve the problem triggers an even worse problem. Tension truly is engineered into a story.

What about you, TKZ family? Any strategy or tactics you’d like to share for engineering tension?

By PJ Parrish

Well, gee, thanks a lot, Sue.

Yesterday, my cohort Sue Coletta here at TKZ posted a blog about overcoming procrastination.Click here to read. I am fighting with this lately because I have a short story due for an anthology and it’s not going well. Sue suggested that I am not just lazy or unmotivated. (Which, in truth, I often am). Sue blinded me with SCIENCE!

She wrote that there is a conflict raging in my brain, a tug of war between my prefrontal cortex and my limbic system. The cortex is sending a signal to my limbic system that says, “C’mon, it’s time to work.” And here I must quote from her.

Because your limbic system is like an unruly teen who seeks only pleasure and avoids pain or discomfort, it often returns a signal that says, “Let’s do something else that feels good right now.”

I feel much better knowing there is something to blame for sitting on my butt watching Project Runway reruns while my garden goes primal and my short story is on a time-out. But to cut me some slack, I’ve got a lot of life things goes on right now and am battling a lingering bout with that flu bug that’s going around. So when the going gets tough around my house, the tough…

Fold laundry. (I’m very good at this)
Do the Spelling Bee in the Times. (must get Queen Bee status!)
Lament the retirement of Tim Gunn
Kill fire ants. Which have created a Saharan lanscape in my sad garden
Go to Home Depot for Amdro but wander around the hardware aisle 14/15, where arcane fasteners and screws are on display like trinkets in a Casablancan bazaar. (Pictured below: a Hex Washer Head Self-Drilling Sheet Metal Screw. I can waste a half hour trying to imagine what this is for.)

What I am trying to say here is that I think there is such a thing as good procrastination. Some days, the mind just cannot focus on the real task at hand — writing.

Here is a truth about writing that I believe intensely:

To write well and steadily, you have to give yourself over to a fantasy world. You are the godhead of that world. You are creating the landscape (let there be English moors!). You are moving your population through time and space (the plot is dragging. Let’s have Moses part the Red Sea!). And most importantly, you are making your make-believe people breath and live on the page with such heart and agility that they feel real.  Do you guys realize how hard that is? Do you know how rare is it when it all comes together in a great story? To write well, you have to enter a rem state. You have to give in to vivid dreams, an increased heart rate, with your brain engaged and limbs a tingle. And you have to do this while being completely awake, aware, and preferably sober.

(I often watch my dog Archie when he’s asleep. He barks, twitches, yips and lollops his legs. I watch him with envy, wondering what great stories he is creating in his mind.)

I know many of you are disciplined and dogged in your writing schedules. You write every day, no matter what. Some of you keep diaries of your output. You embed yourself in your fantasy world and stay there for hours. I can’t do that. I have tried, so very very hard. But it just isn’t how I roll as a writer.

When I was writing novels full-time, I had to force myself to write every day because I was on a contract to produce a book every 8-10 months. But I confess that for me, staying in that rem state every day was exhausting. At times, I even resented it.

So I learned to take breaks. I learned how to procrastinate productively. Mainly through physical activities like running or biking. Or sometimes just watching old movies. Or I just fold laundry. My mind clears and I go back to writing with an open heart. Sometimes I take a break for a day or two. Sometimes it runs a whole week. But here’s the weird thing…

Whenever I leave my story, I can always feel this thread keeping me bound to it. Even when I am away from writing, I feel a subconscious connection to it.

The idea of a string connecting worlds and people is common in myth, literature, and most religions. The astral cord, or “silver cord,” is a metaphysical concept describing a luminous and indestructible tether connecting the physical body to the astral body (soul/consciousness) during out-of-body experiences, sleep, or astral projection.

Allow me one final digression.

Cinema Paradiso is one of my favorite movies. It is about a boy in a tiny Italian village whose beloved father figure Alfredo tells him to leave the village to find his way in the world. Never come back here, Toto, he says. At the movie’s end, the grown Toto returns to his village for the first time for Alfredo’s funeral. We don’t see Toto greeting his elderly mother. To track the reunion, the camera focuses on her knitting needles and yarn. As the mother heads downstairs to meet her son, we see the yarn unraveling and then it stops. The camera pans left to the window as they embrace. The thread between Toto’s two worlds is fragile but unbroken.

So it is with me. Yes, I procrastinate. But I am always pulled back. Sometimes it feels heavy like a good rope, pulling me back up from the depths. Sometimes it feels flimsy, like a kite string, ready to snap when some hard life wind blows through. Sometimes it feels like a cord through which some electric current pulsates.

But it is always there. I am away from my fantasy world but I am always tethered to it.

So let’s beat on this dead horse some more.

Many faithful readers here on Killzone Blog know my opinion of passive sentences, and just as nauseating, adverbs, but there are thousands of would-be writers out there who haven’t read anything we’ve discussed on this site.

To them, and others, please read Stephen King’s excellent book, On Writing, and David Morrell’s Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing. Full disclosure, I get nothing from the sales of these books, but it was these two volumes that taught me more than I ever imagined about the art of writing fiction.

Finding passive sentences in a novel, yours or someone else’s work, is nothing new. I have thousands of volumes in my home, in hardback, trade paperback, and the now stupidly abandoned defunct format, mass market paperback. Many of the books on my shelves are first editions by authors I enjoyed and admired through the years, but that has no bearing on the sins these mainstream writers committed through the years.

For example, at one period in my life, I loved science fiction, fantasy, and sword and sorcery. At an antique store not too long ago, I picked up a 1999 first edition volume of a familiar old sci-fi series and looked forward to settling into my chair for a frosty winter afternoon of reading.

The first page furrowed my brow. Was this the same guy? I checked his photo and byline. Yep. It was him, so I read on (to page 2) until coming to his passage where the protagonist and his girlfriend escape from a high-security area with stolen crypto-currency.

“The engine roared forcefully, the air rushed by swiftly, and we held hands compassionately as our transport of delight soared skyward.”

This ly-ing, tail-wagging pack of adverbs made my stomach roll.

If I’d been reading this as a judge, this backsliding famous and influential author would have been on the naughty list in a flash.

But the dialogue is even worse.

“Robot policemen!” I chortled. “Therefore, we don’t have to hold back and spare their lives. Because they have no lives! To the junkyard with the lot!”

Please take a moment to absorb that short paragraph.

I wept.

Let’s continue.

(The narrator continues)

We were vastly outnumbered and outgunned.

“And running out of ammo,” Angelina said, echoing my own thoughts.”

In this case, the protagonist hadn’t offered his internal thoughts. This was a statement of fact, and the unnatural, clunky dialogue in both examples is stilted and unrealistic.

My literary senses are tuned to a high level these days, because I’m judging a nation-wide contest. Some of the entries are brilliant, and my list of winners will reflect the authors’ writing skills.

However, more than half are weasel-filled, adverb-laden passive sentences that were probably inspired by watching too much HGTV.

“The outdated kitchen was completely gutted, and an open-concept layout was created to maximize space. At the same time, the walls were painted a bright white to add light, and the old carpet was ripped up to reveal original hardwood floors.”

I’m wondering if some of those who submitted novels learned their writing skills from those scripted “reality shows.”

In one novel I threw against the wall, “Jack introduced them and greetings were exchanged.”

I wonder why the editor didn’t suggest a re-write of that sentence. Sparkling dialogue provides necessary information about characters and the two (as yet) unidentified walk-ons might provide much needed tension at some point, or maybe that they became immediate friends.

Of course, we don’t need, “Hello,” he said.

She replied, “Good morning.”

But “greetings were exchanged,” is lazy writing.

Five pages later in this same submission, “Ellen watched Davy stride determinedly to the hen house with the basket in hand. When he entered the hen house, she went into the kitchen and began the ingredients for chocolate cake.”

She began the ingredients.

Let’s pause here so you can absorb this scene and write it a different way.

To wrap this discussion, here’s a brief list from the first fifty pages that put this novel into the junk pile.

“James amazingly didn’t object.” (I hate the word amazing, and even more so if it becomes an adverb)

“The headlights bounced erratically as it (not they) slowly traversed the rough course. I expected it (them?) to keep coming our present location, but it stopped at the old site. The headlights were dimmed and the engine killed.”

By whom?

And the kicker for me was the following sentence in a novel set around 1910 in rural Idaho. “The sheriff read him his rights.”

This lack of research did it for me. Back then, no one was Mirandized. “You’re under arrest,” was probably the closest the western or rural accused would come to hearing their rights.

I admit, I’m not without fault when it comes to adverbs and passive sentences. They crop up in my works all the time, and it’s shocking when I find these nauseating weasels in something I’ve written and edited half a dozen times.

We can all do better. I know, because I’ve been the victim of memory lapse before when it came to researching certain rifle calibers. We’ve all experienced that problem, and readers always point them out, along with a reference to our intelligence or maternal history.

Now, another book I had to chunk was full of head-hopping scenes without any kind of transition, but that’s a subject for another time.

The truth is, mistakes were made. Try not to let that happen to you.