Intermission

Welcome back. We're building tension for a bigger impact

Photo by Kyle Head on Unsplash

My family went to see RENT at the Baltimore School for the Arts a couple of weeks ago. The theater was what they call a black box—an essentially formless space, a simple set, and performers right there within arm’s reach of the audience.

One thing struck me during the show and it wasn’t just how stunningly talented those high schoolers were. (No kidding. Back home later, we put on the broadway cast recording and it hit home how lucky we are to be able to see a bunch of teenagers put on a performance that lived up to it.) What I latched onto was much more boring than that. It was the intermission. Or, more accurately, the effect of the intermission on the story’s shape, pacing, and tension (read my post The shape of your story if you haven’t already). The high energy of La Vie Boheme wouldn’t resolve well into the contemplative and nostalgic Seasons of Love without a little breathing room.

I don’t think it would be possible to induce that nostalgia for the characters in an audience who had just seen them seconds before. But what happens is this: you go into a fifteen minute intermission after having a rollicking good time offending the stuffy sensibilities of The Man. Your energy subsides. The house lights flash, you take your seat. And then the lights dim and you see all your friends in a long line on stage. Suddenly the song becomes so much more poignant.

Don’t rush, even when things are moving fast

The effect of the intermission fits with something else that has come up in a couple of recent manuscripts that I’m editing. There is a tendency that most writers have to want to serve their readers by getting the important stuff out rapidly. I don’t mean that they want to write it fast (though I’m sure they do), but that the pacing in the manuscript is fast—and faster when something important is happening. But sometimes it works better, and serves readers better, to draw out the action, letting the natural tension build until the resolution finally comes.

Quentin Tarantino talks about this in the way he writes his movies. He calls it “stretching the rubber band” and he describes a scene in which he’s trying to build suspense: there’s something bad that might happen. If he got to the end of the scene quickly, you’d have the answer. But if he builds the scene—stretching it out—the longer the scene takes to resolve, the more satisfying it will be to the viewer. I went looking for the interview where I heard him talk about this, and I found this Youtube short that gets right to it:

You can do the same thing in almost any sort of writing, and you absolutely should be doing it anytime you want to be compelling, memorable, and effective. Obviously it has to be believable—gratuitously padding a scene wouldn’t make it better and it wouldn’t feel good to anyone. It’s not going to be easy to pull off at first, so give yourself some practice. But it will pay off, and there is a straightforward way to start using this technique in your writing.

First, read through a piece you’ve already written, and try to identify at least one place where there is some natural tension. Is somebody waiting for news? For a diagnosis? For a call? Did somebody submit a college application or interview for a job? Those are just a couple of examples, but if your work is about something important, I guarantee you that small areas of tension abound.

Next, pick which moment, among all the ones you’ve identified, will lend the most honest tension to your piece (whether it’s a chapter, a part of a chapter, or the whole book).

Then look at how you treat the tension. Do you immediately dispel it by satisfying your reader’s curiosity? Or do you let it simmer for a minute? Plot out the beats of the story that you can use to create a drip of suspense, and then look at where it makes sense to place them in the piece. It could be that you build the tension through a whole chapter before resolving it, especially if it’s central to the chapter’s main idea. Or it might be a smaller piece of the chapter and you decide to resolve it within a couple of paragraphs.

There will be easy ways stretch the story without being obnoxious. If you have a story that says, “on Friday, Steve checked the mail and found out he got into Harvard. He was relieved, because he’d been worried about it all week,” you have a story that opens and closes in the space of a single sentence. Not only that, but you relieved the tension before you introduced it. Instead, you could easily start the story’s timeline earlier. “Monday: no mail from Harvard. Tuesday: no mail. By Wednesday Steve was locked onto the sound of the mail carrier’s tuneless whistle. Thursday, Steve showered three times just to keep himself from checking the mailbox again. He ran out of shampoo. Friday, there was the envelope…”

The key is that you can write the facts in different ways, in a different order, and with different pacing, without being dishonest at all. You’re introducing drama by helping your readers feel it where it truly occurs. Try this some different ways with the moment you choose and see what it does for your writing. I’m confident that if you use this technique to make the pacing of your storytelling more dynamic, readers will love you for it (yes, even if it takes longer for them to get to the resolution). When you get this right, you’ll have figured out one necessary element of writing a page-turner. It will be more likely that readers will stick around long enough to receive the information you’re trying to give them, and it will stick better when they do.