In a guest post on Chuck Wendig’s blog, writer Delilah Dawson suggests ways to ratchet up the tension in your novel by making your character’s lives as difficult as possible. “A book in which everything goes right is exactly one sentence long,” Dawson says. “That means it’s up to the writer to uniquely torture their characters.” She suggests 10 steps to torture, including:
- Make torture part of the premise. “You want a character with specific flaws and fears who is uniquely challenged by their world,” Dawson says. “Pain should be baked right into that backstory.”
- Kick off with failure. “Since your protagonist generally triumphs at the end of the book, it’s nice to give them a symmetrical failure at the beginning,” Dawson writes. “The bigger the fall, the better the rise.”
- Think about the worst possible thing that could happen—and make it happen. “Let tragedy strike,” Dawson recommends. “Have them be attacked. Have their ex show up. Hit them with food poisoning.”
- Even one small pebble can feel like the end of the world. “If your character is on a journey through the forest and time is of the essence, a horse throwing a shoe is the biggest problem in the world,” Dawson says. “Don’t neglect the small things that become big things.”
- All this pain will be valuable to you someday. “When you hit the climax of the story, that’s when you take your long list of tortures and show how your protagonist uses what they’ve learned to fight back,” Dawson writes. “The purpose of all that torture was to mold your protagonist into someone capable of defeating not only the bad guy—but also that poor sap they were at the beginning, the weak wiener with all the worries.”
