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?
The short answer is that tension isn’t magic. It’s engineering.
Well said, Brother G. Excellent tips here. I’ll add: Stretch the tension. When you have it, make it last a little or a lot longer. I always think of the Dean Koontz scene in Whispers, his first big NY Time bestseller. He has an early scene with his protag, a woman, being stalked through her house (your #3, exits closed) by a would-be rapist. It lasts 17 pages! A master class in how to stretch tension.
Of course, not every tense moment calls for 17 pages, but even smaller moments may go further. I encourage writers to “overwrite” these moments, because they can always be cut back later if need be. But you can’t cut what isn’t there to begin with.
Thanks, John. Such rich content here! I looked through it for something to quote and found so many things I had trouble settling on one: “Tension isn’t about volume; it’s about consequence.” I need to get a coffee cup with that written on it.
As a mystery writer, I can use all of your tips except #4. In a mystery, the reader can’t know more than the main character.
The trick is to give clues to this that the viewpoint character totally misses, but most readers will not.
If you’re writing, like I almost always am, in a deep/close 3rd POV, then everything is filtered through that character, so it’s almost impossible to hide something from them that the reader can see. If they can’t see/hear/smell/feel something, then it can’t be on the page.
Difficulties for the sake of difficulties is bad writing. If the main character needs to get somewhere and his car won’t start, that’s bad writing. If he’d been in a car chase earlier with shots fired and discovers lots of fluids under his car, courtesy of those bullets hitting his engine, that’s a realistic difficulty and good writing. The same with too many difficulties. I finished a book last night where one of the characters explained why they were elsewhere because of a series of annoying difficulties like a flat tire and a package delivered to the wrong place all in a short period of time. Yeah, they were the killer.
I dunno, Marilynn. If the getaway car was a GM product from the 1980s, I totally buy that it won’t start.
A current Ford sedan will lose its battery charge after sitting two days, but only those of us unlucky enough to own one knows this. Which reminds me, I need to cut on my car and drive around the block.