Maintaining Tension

Literary agent Don Maass recently ran a Twitter-based series of writing tips. Among his many suggestions was one that dealt with secrets.

What secret does your protagonist hold, and what secret does another character hold that the protagonist doesn't know?

What does it mean? You can find a good example in Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter.

The two characters who drive the narrative both have secrets that they have not shared. The mystery that underlies the plot arises from the secrets, which you the reader uncover over the course of the book.

Bit by bit, the protagonist's backstory is revealed. That's what gets you turning the page, to find out a little more until you can figure out what happened at that key moment in the past when the story began.

By parcelling out clues, the writer maintains the tension. It doesn't take long paragraphs. It can be something as minor as a single sentence that reminds the reader of why they're sticking with the novel.

But it's not just the first character introduced in Chapter One who keeps the tension going. It's the second character's narrative that really bubbles under the surface. And it's the second character who has a secret that the protagonist doesn't know.

Again, the reader is reminded of this secret-keeping at various intervals, usually through internal dialogue where the character remembers "that night" or "what he did". Nothing fancy. No soaring prose. But the reader recovers the tension with these little bon mots.

It's not a perfect book. Native Chicagoans will cring when they notice that the secondary character identifies himself as a native of Joliet, Illinois, and then proceeds to describe it as the south side of Chicago.

Not even close.

And a south sider would never, ever, wander up to Wrigley Field on the north side to cheer for the Cubs, to stand in the parkway (there are no grassy medians in Chicago, except in boulevards, which Sheffield and Waveland are not).

Tension is not created by fact-checking your manuscript and making sure that the details that flesh out your novel's setting are spot-on accurate. You create tension by inventing a secret for your protagonist and another secret for his friend.

Then you bring up the secrets here and there, pulling the reader along. Towards the end, you build to a climax where the secret-keepers reveal their truths and put wrongs to right. And if you've kept the tension flowing, your readers are still with you.