I wrote about Writing Excuses almost two years ago, as a part of my Reference Desk series. It’s still my favorite podcast about writing. I’m not a consistent podcast consumer, so I tend to let quite a few episodes build up and then burn through them. I’m currently enjoying several episodes on mystery and tension in Season 18.
If you haven’t listened before, don’t let that number of seasons intimidate you. Each episode is only 15-20 minutes and generally self-contained, so it works perfectly well to just start with the current episodes and work your way backwards.
While the show has had a rotating cast of hosts and a lot of guests over the years, they’ve announced a slight format change with the latest season. The core hosts now include several long-standing members and a couple of new-ish faces who have guested previously. The show is more diverse than ever, not only in terms of gender, race and orientation, but in the different perspectives each host brings to writing and publishing.
Writing Excuses also feels a little bit more organized now, with each host lined up to do a deep dive this season. However, it’s still very much unscripted, and still contains unexpected tangents and the occasional bad joke. It mostly feels like a group of smart people who love stories and writing, sitting around and having a chat about a particular topic each week.
The Tools of Tension
The Writing Excuses folks suggest a list of tools for building tension:
- Anticipation
- Juxtaposition
- Unanswered Questions
- Conflict
- Micro-Tension
Anticipation, or suspense, is anything that lets the reader know something is coming, whether it be good, bad, or of uncertain providence. It’s Alfred Hitchcock’s bomb under the table. It’s the flash-forward at the beginning of the police procedural that lets us know what’s going to happen, but not how. It may even be built into the genre itself, like the detective’s big reveal at the end of a classic murder mystery.
Juxtaposition is anything that plays with the differences between two or more things. In movies, this might be a contrast between the style of music or voice-over and the action on the screen. In fiction, it might be the calm and collected way the high-class villain writes about the gruesome murder he has committed.
Unanswered questions can find a home in almost any kind of story, but are exemplified in the Mystery Box style of story. The reader keeps reading to find out why strange things are happening, and what will happen next. This was the type of tension that I chose as the driving force in my serial novel, Razor Mountain.
Conflict is that old classic that everyone talks about. It’s characters who want the same thing, when only one of them can have it. It’s a clash between diametrically opposed viewpoints. It’s the kung-fu fight in the martial arts movie, or the shoot-out in the western. It might just be the easiest form of tension to write, and the easiest for the reader to parse, which explains why it’s so popular.
Finally, micro-tension is any of these forms, shrunk down into a tiny little dose. It’s what pulls us through each conversation between characters, each scene, each chapter. It’s what keeps us turning the page. Contrasts are important for pacing, but micro-tension keeps the reader engaged in the lulls between the bigger payoffs.
Just a Taste
This is just a condensed example of the kind of conversations about craft that make Writing Excuses so great. If this kind of nuts-and-bolts writing advice interests you, I’d highly encourage you to check it out.
The episodes on types of tension run from 18.9 – 18.14.
