Tools for raising Tension in a Thriller

I talked earlier about some of the basic ways of writing a thriller, in this post, I'm going to focus on actual tools you can use to raise the tension in your audience. Each can be used in the right circumstances to put your audience on the edge of their seats and put that sick feeling of sympathetic tension in the pits of their stomachs. I think of them as "Does he know?", "Will they find out"?, "Hurry up" it's brother "Slow down", and "Will it break?" So, lets get right to it.

     "Does he know" is the tension that happens when the person interrogating you seems to know what you're trying to hide from him and it's like he's just toying with you. Pacing is important here. For example, you're a Jew trying to escape Nazi Germany with forged papers. The train that can get you to neutral Switzerland is right there. It leaves in 3 minutes. The SS officer takes your papers. He looks at them. He looks at you. He ask you what the purpose of your trip is. You tell him you're visiting your sick mother in Geneva. He ask you a question only someone from Switzerland would know. You think you got it right. He looks at your paperwork again, and compares it to a list. The train gives the last all aboard call. The phone rings. The SS officer answers and looks at you. "Ja....Ja...Sehr Gut." He returns. "My apologies Herr Shmidt, we can't be too careful these days.
You turn to get on the train as it begins to move. "Herr Schmidt"! You freeze. "Don't forget your papers."

    "Will they find out" is a fairly standard tension builder. It's that guilty feeling you get when you pass a cop car whether you've done something or not. An example would be you were on vacation in Mexico, and a drug cartel kidnapped your wife and made you mule drugs across the border. Now you've got 10 kilos of cocaine hidden in the seat of your car, and the border guards are heading towards you with the drug dogs. You know if they bust you, your wife dies. You're being watched. If you try to tell them, your wife dies. if you don't make the rendezvous in Texas your wife dies. Now the police are only one car away....

     "Hurry up" and "Slow down " are related, and I'll handle them at once. Hurry up is the tension that happens when something isn't happening fast enough. You've broken into the Chinese consulate and you're decrypting files on his computer. Your decryption gadget in running as fast as it can and its only at 53%. Your handler warns you that the guards are coming over your earpiece, and you have to get out of there, but you know you'll only get one chance at this, and thousands might die if you don't get the information.You hear the elevator open in the hall, and you're only at 85%.....Slow down is the flip side of that tension. The Ambassador was supposed to be out of his office for the night, giving you time to work, but he realizes he forgot some paperwork and is coming back way too quickly. Your accomplice tries to delay him in the lobby, but they were only able to buy you a minute.

    Finally, "Will it break" is the tension of thin ice and frayed rope. The answer is yes, it will break, but the tension is will it hold long enough to get you to safety. The bad guys are after you. You can hear them behind you with the guns and the dogs, in the woods, but you've made it to the river. Its frozen over. You've made it a couple of dozen steps onto the ice when you hear the first sharp crack. You can see the ice begin to fracture out in a spiderweb from where your foot is planted. You take another step and the ice cracks even further. The other side and safety is just  100 feet away, but you can hear the dogs getting louder and see the flashlights moving in the trees behind you. You drop to the ice and begin to crawl, spreading your weight out. One of your knees goes through the ice the next time you put it down.

Building the Playbook

          If you have a favorite writer, who's fairly prolific, and you've read or watched pretty much everything they've ever put out, you have probably noticed patterns emerge within their writing.  There will be scenes or bits of dialogue that get recycled into different stories.  I think that this is not so much a lack of fresh inspiration, but a function of a writer knowing what works for him and using that whenever possible. Different in the details each time of course, but with the same overall structure.  To me it seems comparable to the way a quarterback may build a repertoire of passing plays and running plays and offensive formations that he does well and can use as needed to put together an effective drive down the football field. A good writer has his own playbook of comedy bits and dramatic exchanges and various blocks of writing that he can do well and use at will to make a good story.

          Today I'm going to talk in general about things that should be in every bodies playbook. Later I'll get into specific plays with some examples drawn from books and video. For writers who aspire to write romance there are standard beats you have to master. The cute meet for instance,  arguments both mild and vicious, sincere confessions of love, breakups both amiable and ugly, awkward meetings after breakups, reconciliations. to name just a few. Watch enough romantic comedies and you'll pick all of these out readily enough. You should be able to write conversations with friends outside of the relationship. Friendly ribbing and one-up-man-ship , and support between guy friends, Good Will Hunting had some great examples of that.  The female equivalent of that with optional sassy gay friend. Mystery writers have to master the big reveal, that ones pretty much non-negotiable. Action writers should know how to write fight sequences both personal, and expansive, but also know when to skip to the aftermath like in the Hobbit  or HBO's production of Game of Thrones, when the story demands it.  A writer specializing in thrillers will probably want to master sequences of extreme tension like the secretary that the FBI is making plant he bug in the office of the sinister banker moving terrorist money and he catches her, then she tries to explain herself, and you don't know if he believes her, or if he's just toying with her, then she almost makes it to the door, and he stops her, and she can almost feel the bullets in her back, and he tells her not to forget her purse.

           I asked a friend of mine with nearly 70  good sized stories under her belt, what the most important thing for a writer to master would be, and she told me ending it right was hardest part of a story. That making sure that all the plot threads were tied together smoothly and that it built on everything that came before it,  and closed the story on the right note was the trickiest part for her.  That's something to keep in mind from the very beginning. Keeping a tight control of your pacing and character development  will put you in a better position to get your story across the finish line in good shape. The less you have to fix at the last minute, the better. So learning how to end your story in a way that makes your reader feel their time reading it was well spent is a critical skill set.

     So that's the basics. Learn to use the tools of the kind of story you want to tell. Learn to use them well. Practice writing those kinds of scenes even if you don't end up using them in stories.  Then start expanding on that knowledge.  Build your playbook until you're ready for anything.