C.S. Lakin offers another articles about micro-tension, the small details that create an underlying sense that something is wrong, letting your reader know that bigger things are cooking.
“Tension is created by lack,” Lakin says. “Lack of understanding, lack of closure, lack of equilibrium or peace. When your readers have questions, that creates tension. When they need to know what happens next, that is tension.”
While it’s one thing to show your characters in a state of tension, it’s another to create that feeling in your readers. Lakin says the key is microtension, but what is that? “Just as the prefix suggests, it’s tension on a micro level, or in small, barely noticeable increments,” Lakin explains. “For example, anytime a character has conflicting feelings, you have microtension. Microtension can be small, simmering, subtext, subtle. Even the choice of words or the turn of a phrase can produce microtension by its freshness or unexpected usage.”
For Lakin, surprise is the key ingredient of microtension. When characters act or respond in a way we don’t expect or when images are juxtaposed in an interesting way, you create microtension. Lakin uses multiple examples from Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl to illustrate her point. In them, the narrator responds negatively to his wedding anniversary and happy memories of dating his wife. This unexpected reaction tells the reader that something is off. When you make the reader ask “why”, you create a mystery they can solve only by turning the pages.
So, how can you create microtension? Lakin suggests you can use:
- Dialogue. “Subtext can hint at what characters are really feeling below the surface, and that creates mystery,” Lakin says. “Keep in mind the tension is in the relationship between the characters speaking, not in the information presented.”
- Action. “Think how to make an action incongruous,” Lakin writes. “Real people are conflicted all the time. Real people are complex, inconsistent. So by having a character react in an incongruent manner, and having incongruent developments in the storyline, will add microtension.”
- Exposition. “Show ideas at war with one another,” Lakin suggests. “Use word choices that feel contradictory. Find fresh, different ways to describe common things.”
