How I published as much as I did early on is a mystery, because I ignored one element crucial to good writing. And most writing doesn’t have it. That element is tension. The short answer to my question, how to write a story that nobody wants to put down, is: You have to know what tension is, and you have to learn how to build it into a story.
I credit Benjamin Percy’s Thrill Me with opening my eyes. Actually, that book threw a pan of ice-water on me. I’d heard endlessly about tension, of course. But something about the way Percy laid it out woke me up.
Why Tension Works
People want to know what happens to other people. That’s one of the beauties of us humans. Therefore, once people get engaged in an outcome, they will not. stop. reading. until they find out what happens.
Sometimes we writers get lucky, and tension is inherent in a piece. For example, what is more poignant than a farm family threatened by a coal plant?
Flannery O’Connor talks some about this, about the inherent tension in culture, including in the south a set of manners that belies violence. “A great deal of the Southern writer’s work is done for him before (s)he begins,” she wrote in Mystery and Manners. Barry Hannah said something similar to me once, as we stood on the banks of Sardis Lake. “You live here in Mississippi, stuff’s just handed to you,” Barry said.
Sometimes the tension is handed to you. Mostly you have to create it.
Meting information out in morsels is how you do it. You gotta become a tease.
How to Build Tension
The first line is especially important. Strive for a breath-taking first line that keeps a person going to the second line. Then nail a first paragraph that grabs the reader and mesmerizes them and hypnotizes them and seduces them, so that the reader devours the second paragraph. And so on.
I’m going to give you an example and then let you get on with your goals for today.
A Small Example of Tension
Once a writer interviewed me for a piece and then gave me the huge favor of letting me see it before it went to print. She’s a fab writer, and her first line read:
Growing up in Baxley, Georgia, writer and environmental advocate Janisse Ray learned early that even when there wasn’t much else of value around, stories about the people and places of her “small, sleepy town” held power.
I asked her if she would cut “wasn’t much else of value around” because I was surrounded by things of value growing up. And I suggested a way she could build tension.
I’m showing it to you just so you can see an example for yourself of how to build tension into a story.
Growing up, writer Janisse Ray learned on the front porches of Baxley, Georgia something that would set the course of her life.
That’s not the greatest first line in the world. But you see what I’m doing. I’m simplifying the sentence and also teasing you so that you want to keep reading and learn what I learned on the front porches of my hometown.
Okay, go do it. Go be a tease. Go back to something you’re working on and figure out how you can revise the first line so that you withhold something. We will desperately want to find out.
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