In a post on Writer Unboxed, Donald Maass says you can add tension to your fiction by ramping up the consequences of your characters’ choices.
Maass examines a few novels to make his point. In Hannah Morrissey’s Hello, Transcriber, a woman who works nights transcribing police interviews becomes involved in an investigation of a man who deals drugs to children. Despite being warned at the outset that the interviews can be graphic and disturbing, the protagonist’s curiosity propels her forward. Maass says it’s important that this warning comes early in the novel. “When The Warning is delivered first, the choices that follow are all-the-more deliberate, fateful and loaded,” he explains. “You knew! You knew what could happen! You went ahead anyway! Already the story is more dramatic. Already it is heightened.”
In The Cry of the Owl, Patricia Highsmith’s main character is a literal voyeur, a man who regularly drives out to the edge of small town to peer on a young woman at home alone. Though he justifies his behavior, he knows what he’s doing is wrong, and does it anyway. “Highsmith heightens the situation by making Robert aware that he is transgressing,” Maass writes. She also ensures there is punishment for the transgression, which triggers another chain of choices and escalating consequences. “If a wrong is committed, a great storyteller knows this: Magnify the payback,” Maass writes.
“Whatever the style or of your WIP, I will bet that it involves characters who perform actions,” Maass says. “Every action is a choice. Every choice has consequences. The only question for you is, how big?”
