How to Write Great Tension in Your Book

​Want to put your reader on the absolute edge of their seat, trembling to read more? Let’s talk about building tension in your book.
 
(If you’d like to view this post in video format, click here. It’s part of our “Advice from an Editor” series on YouTube.)

Building tension is an important part of almost any book. You want to get the reader in the moment and really engaged with and invested in what’s going on. So how do you achieve it, and how do you achieve the most extreme form of it, which is true scariness?
 
This is a topic that I did quite a bit of research on a few years ago for my own books, and so I have a couple of thoughts. I do mean “a couple” because building tension boils down to two things: controlling the flow of information and keeping your reader in the present.
 
Throughout this post, I’m going to be talking especially about two pieces of media that do this wonderfully—the Korean horror film A Tale of Two Sisters and Jonathan Stroud’s The Screaming Staircase. (I also would like to put in a good word for Alexey Pehov’s Shadow Prowler, which has an extremely tense, haunted sequence near the beginning of it.)
 
Let’s start with keeping your reader in the present. Here I’m going to do something a little unusual: I’m going to use a positive example as a negative example, which is to say, A Tale of Two Sisters. You see, this movie does everything right. It has a slow-boil tension build, and the viewer should be on the edge of their seat and should genuinely be scared. I picked the movie specifically because I was only looking at movies rated PG-13 and below. I didn’t want to be scared because I was in the expectation of seeing something that would scar me for life—I wanted to be scared through genuine tension. An acquaintance of mine said, “You have to see A Tale of Two Sisters. It’s rated R, but it really only has PG-13 content. The R rating is for scariness.” And so I said, “Okay, I’ll give it a go.” Now, she’d seen it ten times and was scared out of her wits each time, so I was prepared for this to be a really scary film.
 
Even though I was studying scariness and tension at the time, I don’t like being afraid. So I sat with my dog on my lap, and whenever things started to get really tense, I would look down at her and there she would be, snoozing peacefully and not scared at all. And because I saw that she wasn’t scared—and she’s the sort of dog that, if someone comes through the door, she’ll bark often—and if she’s not barking, if she’s not alarmed but just snoozing, then I know it’s not real and it’s not actually scary. In other words, I cheated as a viewer. I used an external force to keep myself grounded, keep myself from being too pulled into the story. And that kept me from being, well, more than a little afraid anyway.
 
Being pulled out of a story, being distracted, being taken out of the moment, is precisely what you want to avoid as a writer. Of course, you can’t avoid it 100% because for all you know, people may be sitting with their lapdogs on their laps keeping themselves from being afraid. But there are a couple of tricks that you can use to keep people in the present. One of them is: Keep the scene going.
 
I once read a book by an author who used to be very good. An entire book went like this: We build up a scene to the tense point, and then we switch to the other characters. And we build up that scene to the tense point, and we switch back to the tense point of the first characters. But by this point, I was really invested in the other characters and I no longer cared about the first ones, and it effectively killed the tension again and again and again. Instead, what you want to do is you want to stick with what’s going on. Don’t move to other characters, don’t move into a flashback, don’t start discussing something that is completely irrelevant to the scene.
 
Now, you can have humor. The Screaming Staircase is a very funny book in addition to being an extremely tense book. And at the tensest moment of the entire book (just about) the characters think maybe they can relax a little bit and they start bantering, and this gives it a sort of nightmarish feel because the reader knows it’s not over, it’s getting worse, and now you’re distracted—something horrible is going to happen. And in this way, Stroud uses humor to actually increase the effectiveness. But it’s humor in the moment, to do with the characters and what’s going on; it’s not “let’s discuss an unrelated thing” and so it doesn’t take the reader out of the moment.
 
So that’s the first thing: Stay focused. The second element is controlling the flow of information. Oddly enough, this can take two completely opposite routes and still be very effective. Which is to say, you can tell the reader very nearly everything, or you can tell the reader practically nothing. They’re equally effective—you just have to do it properly.
 
I should mention here that, generally speaking, if you have multiple extremely tense sequences within your book, you’ll put the “tell the reader practically nothing” in the beginning and the “tell the reader everything” near the end.
 
A Tale of Two Sisters is a great example of telling the reader practically nothing—or the watcher, in this case. The watcher doesn’t know exactly what’s real; the watcher doesn’t know what’s going on. They don’t know who the bad guy is or why these haunting-type events are happening. The watcher has no real conception . . . even at the end of the movie, it’s not entirely clear what was going on, although you do find out a whole lot more. What makes it effective is the watcher’s base knowledge. We know that when a scary dead thing underneath the sink tries to grab your ankle, that’s not good. We know that when people are acting in ways that people don’t normally act, that’s not good. In Shadow Prowler we know that, in a place where everything is dead, the child crying in the second floor of the building is not good. We don’t know what that child is; we don’t know what the ghost in A Tale of Two Sisters is. We don’t know what’s going on but instinctively, from experience and from seeing other forms of media, we know it’s not good. And this “not good but not understanding” keeps us on the edge of our seats.
 
On the opposite end of the spectrum is the epic, incredibly tense, scary sequence that takes up the last quarter or so of The Screaming Staircase. In this case, we know very nearly everything of what’s going on. Not only have we been with these ghost hunters throughout the entire book and we’ve gotten lots of information about ghosts and about haunting and how you defeat them, what the different types are, and what their different abilities are, but we’ve also been given specific information about the house that our characters are about to enter. In fact, the book does something I love: It tells the reader everything that’s going to happen in such a way that they don’t believe it, don’t understand it, and it doesn’t help them.
 
Right before we enter this haunted house, the clearly-not-reliable caretaker takes our characters around and points out all the different windows and says, “Yeah, a group of nuns died there, and monks died there, and there was a bloodbath in that room,” and it’s clear that this guy is crazy. Our characters don’t believe him. You, the reader, don’t believe him. But you’re told all these different things, and then you go into the house and you start suspecting that they’re all true—to some extent. But there are some things you don’t know. You don’t know exactly where the hauntings are going to appear. You don’t know specifically what type of ghost will be where. You are given a lot of clues to this; we have things like temperature dropping and the emotional atmosphere changing, which signal that something is coming, but from which direction? How is it going to manifest? And in this way, Stroud controls information in such a way that you know all the stakes in detail and that awful things are going to happen, but not the exact details of when or where they’re going to happen. And that makes it just as effective as knowing practically nothing.
 
Before I end this post, there is one last thing I want to say (and here’s a link to a blog post on this topic), which is: In the case of Stroud, and other effective stories in which the reader knows almost everything, they still don’t know quite everything, and what they do know and what they will learn fit with what has gone before. There’s one book especially that I’m thinking of that had an immensely tense build for the first half, which followed the “you know practically nothing” side of the equation, and then right smack in the middle, it had a big reveal . . . and the big reveal was really stupid. As a reader, I was completely taken out of the present and was thinking, “Really? You’re kidding. It’s aliens’ Noah’s Ark? Are you joking?” And so for the entire rest of the book, I knew what was going on and I was too busy thinking about how stupid it was to be scared anymore.
 
So, read that blog post on big reveals and whether you should or should not do them, and how you should or should not do them. Control your flow of information, and keep your reader focused. Good luck, everyone.
 
Do you have any other advice, comments, or questions about how to build up tension in a book? Leave them in the comments!
 
For more writing tips, check out our Advice from an Editor YouTube series, or this set of blog posts.

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Deborah J. Natelson

Deborah lives with a fluffy member of fauna named Flora and two pretty black kitties. She is the author of Bargaining Power, a smart, twisty fantasy thriller; and various other books. Her author website is www.deborahjnatelson.com.