We've all been told to build tension in your story, right? It's a pretty common piece of writing advice, but for good reason. Without tension in your story, your reader just isn't going to care about too much. There are no stakes. But building tension is more than just putting your character into sticky situations and hoping that they make it out alive. Not only are there different types of tension that you need to do to lie in your story, but we need to lay some groundwork first. And I think that's the part that's less talked about, so I'm going to explain it and break it down here for you. Hi, I'm Michelle. I'm a short story writer who holds a bachelor's degree in creative writing, and I teach the foundations of creative fiction writing to writers either just starting out or looking to get published or somewhere in between. I'm bringing my teaching practice online to reach more writers who are ready to take their writing career to the next level. And also so you don't have to sit through four years of school and go into student debt just to be able to write a decent story. Okay, let's get into it. Building tension into story means giving your readers something to be worried about. Will your main character fall in love or will they find that thing that they're on a big quest form? But the real question is how do we get readers to care about all of that stuff? How do we get them to ask themselves, will this all work out? That part comes before you put your characters into the sticky situations. The things that we might noticeably know as tension. If you have a big fight scene, but we really don't know much about either person or team on either side of that fight, it's not going to mean much to your readers. It's like watching the Super Bowl when you've never watched a game of football in your life. It's supposed to be this big event where you're seeing there abiding your nails, waiting to see who wins. But if you've never watched football, if you don't know the two teams in their history of the season or at the rivalry that they have, you're just not going to care. And I am speaking from experience here. There's just no tension, there's no stakes. Nothing really matters because we just don't understand the story behind what's happening. It's just another Sunday football game. Before we get into what tension is, we should look at what tension is not. We're not necessarily talking about those moments where people say, oh, you could cut the tension with a knife. This is usually said after like an argument or two people who have a history coming together by accident. There's usually some kind of an incident that's occurred that leads someone to saying, oh, you could cut the tension with a knife. Now this kind of a situation can certainly be tension in your story, but it's not the only way to build tension in a story. It's probably not even the best or most exciting way to build tension in your story anyway. I want you to think much broader than this specific way to build tension when you're looking to add to your story. We're going to talk about the four types of dramatic tension, which includes the tension in relationships, the tension of the task, tension of surprises, and the tension in mysteries. So the tension of relationships is when there's some kind of tension between characters. This might be one of those moments where you say, oh, you could cut the tension with a knife. This is the main source of tension in romance novels, typically. It's when the antagonist gets in the way of the protagonist. This type of tension is important to include in your stories because it makes your characters feel real. Every single day, we get frustrated with another person for some reason, bigger, small. So your characters also need to be frustrated with other people because it's a pretty human experience to get mad at somebody. Your characters need to go through that to also feel real to us. And when we say tension of the relationship, it's not only romantic relationships. This can be fights between friends, conflicts at work, awkward family dynamics. Anytime two or more people are interacting, there's a relationship there that can have tension. The tension of the task is all about obstacle showing up when a character is trying to accomplish something. And this can be for goals of any size. Maybe in a section of your story, your character is trying to get their car out of an icy parking spot so they can make it to this meeting across town. Otherwise, they lose their job if they don't show up. So there's a few instances of tension all happening here on top of each other. There's the tension of the car being stuck. There's the tension of the timing of that meeting being across town in just a few minutes. And then there's that tension of the person maybe losing their job. Including multiple tasks like that all on top of each other can double or triple your attention in any given moment. We want the character to figure it all out and we're going to watch and see if that happens. We're always asking what's going to happen next. So the next one is the tension of surprise and nobody actually likes surprises. Anybody who says that they like surprises is only talking about gifts and vacations. And here we have two different types of surprises. The reader can be surprised by the turn of events or your protagonist can be surprised by something happening to them or around them in your story. And here's a little secret I'll share with you. Anything can be a plot twist. Of course some will carry more weight than others, but tension doesn't have to be a big dramatic point in your story. Your tension can range from mom not being home when she said she would be to an asteroid heading straight for Earth that turns out to be an alien spaceship. If you think about it, not a day goes by that we aren't surprised by something. Today I was surprised when my partner came home early for lunch and some days I'm surprised by a car wreck on the side of the road. Surprises happen in many different ways, many different intensities, but they do happen every day. And much like these other tensions, you need to include them in your story just to give it that realistic feeling of a person living a life that anybody off the street could be living. A story that plays out exactly as a reader expects it to is just not an interesting story and not one that your reader is likely to finish. We just don't want to be able to predict everything because that's no fun. The last type of tension that we'll talk about is the tension of mystery. This tension is going to propel your reader through the story. The mystery is going to be so enticing that they can't not find out what happens. This can be achieved by building up with other tensions to some kind of a cliffhanger that then gets resolved later. You can have one overarching mystery that's at play until the climax of your story. And you can have smaller mysteries that just keep popping up throughout the story. All of these versions of mystery will bring your reader in. And this mystery doesn't need to be some big murder mystery type of mystery. It can be tied to another type of tension as well. It could be the will they won't they trope and romance or the mystery of will they make it across town to that meeting in time. So now we know the types of tension that you can include, but how do you lay that groundwork so that your characters actually buy into that tension and feel it with your characters? I think the easiest way to do this is to really work on your characters. Now working on characters is not necessarily easy itself, but it's something that you should be doing as a writer anyway. So it's just going to enforce that tension even more. You really do need to create substantial characters for your reader to enjoy, and then you need to give them reactions to the tension as well. And these reactions seem to be consistent and make sense with what's going on in the story. And it can also be a way for you to guide your reader emotionally through the story. If you want them to feel a certain way about something, you can have your characters react that way, and then your reader will reflect into that. If you're interested in building characters, I do have a few videos on that I'll link them in the bio below. And I also have a free training on effectively using character profiles that walks you through not only how to fill out a character profile, but what to do with it once you're done and how it actually incorporates into the story that's on the page. If you're not sure where to even start adding tension into your story, you might look at using a story structure, maybe something like the Freitag's pyramid. This is a story structure often taught in the high school English classes, so you might be familiar with it. You have your exposition, your rising actions, your climax, solving actions, and then a resolution. And I do have a video on story structure coming out in a few weeks, so I'll dive deeper into a few of them at that point. But let's take a quick look at how this story structure works. The exposition of your story can be pretty mild. You might start with some idea of a mystery that starts kind of building up there. And then you'll get to your inciting incident, which is where the action really starts to happen in your story. And that might set off your mystery to your characters and start to propel us through your story. And again, it doesn't have to just be mystery. It could be any of your tensions here that could start building up and then really hit the ground at that inciting incident. And then you're going to build tension up until the climax of your story, which is where things will get revealed or another big incident will happen. And then the following actions will start to kind of tidy that up. And then your resolution will be the little bow at the end of your story. There are infinite ways that you can take these four types of tension and build that groundwork to really get your readers to dive into your story. But just remember to lay that groundwork, that is the most important part. Because otherwise those sticky situations that you put your characters into just aren't going to hit the way that you want them to. And again, do that by creating those realistic characters. And if you're stuck, take a look at some story structures. They often have that tension built into them where things should be rising and falling. And again, don't forget to sign up for my training on how to effectively use character profiles also in the description below. And be sure to hit that like and subscribe button so that I can reach more writers in the same position as you and we can all level up our writing together. But I'll see you next time and until then, happy writing.