Some of you might have seen that I released the book cover for Thirst yesterday. If you haven’t seen it, I wanted to post the cover here to celebrate with you all since I wrote that book as part of this blog during the #WeWriteBooks year. So here it is! What do you think?
If you’d like, you can add Thirst to your Goodreads page. And if you’re interested in learning about the pre-order deals and pre-order swag for this title, click here.
Okay, that done, let’s get into the book! This week as part of the Go Teen Writers Book Club, we’re discussing Story Trumps Structure by Steven James, Chapter Four: Escalations.
Chapter Recap:
The chapter starts out talking about how, scene by scene, the tension should escalate until the story reaches its climax. Things should get progressively worse as the story goes on, not better and better.
Many story structures advocate for rising action, but Mr. James says that’s not what a story needs. Instead, it needs rising tension.
Work hard to not only increase the number of setbacks, but to make them more emotional and difficult to overcome.
Mr. James talks about four things keep readers flipping pages—concern, curiosity, escalation, and enjoyment—and the corresponding emotion these strategies evoke—anticipation, inquisitiveness, anxiety, and pleasure.
He gives nine ways to escalate tension in your story:
1. Distant danger gets closer and closer.
2. A danger that started out small grows bigger and bigger.
3. A ticking time bomb in which time is running out.
4. Change the time left. They had three minutes, but something went wrong and now they have thirty seconds!
5. Show points of view from the antagonist setting up traps or a nefarious plan to wreak havoc.
6. Present increasingly difficult moral dilemmas.
7. Make the problem personal to the main character.
8. Raise the stakes.
9. Isolate your hero and force him to become self-reliant.
Be careful that you’re not being repetitive with characters who do the same thing, action that is repeated, similar resolutions to inner struggles for your different characters, and characters sounding or acting the same.
What Stood Out:
“We intensify the
struggles rather than just compounding them.”
“Action does not equal tension.”
“Just when readers think things can’t get any worse, then need to.”
“Four things keep readers flipping pages—concern, curiosity, escalation, and enjoyment.”
What I Found Helpful and Intend to Apply to My Writing:
Mr. James said, “As
the story moves forward, the consequences of not solving the struggles becomes
more and more personal (or universal) or devastating.” The hero is trying to
fix everything—to either put things back to the way they were before the
problem happened or to create some kind of fix. But it’s not working.
“Repetition will eventually make anything boring.” I need to look at my scenes with a critical eye and make sure I’m not being episodic.
I really liked taking a closer look at my writing for escalating in regards to:
1. Verb strings—make sure your action goes from low to high, big to little, like: “I strode toward the door then ran out into the street” vs. “I ran to the door then strode out into the street.” The former gets more intense—it goes from slower to faster—while the latter slows down. Getting your verbs in the right order will help your prose increase tension.
2. Punctuation—the same is true of punctuation. We’ve said to use exclamation points sparingly, but if you want to increase tension, better to write, “Get out of there. Now!” rather than “Get out of there! Now.”
3. Paragraph length—as the story grows more intense, use shorter scenes, paragraphs, and sentences.
4. Word choice—use fewer words in general to increase tension, but especially cut out description, adjectives, and adverbs.
5. Releasing tension—Don’t get your couple together too early in the story. Don’t let your character cry or blow up in anger until you absolutely must. Draw out that tension until just the right time.
6. Pace considerations—Don’t add major descriptions or people or places or introduce new people or places late in the story when the tension is high. It will kill your tension.
Tip of the week:
“A story is not about
something else going wrong; it’s
about something worse going wrong.” —Steven
James
Go Teen Writers Archived Articles to Help You Go Deeper:
Creating Tension: Raise the Stakes
How to Add Tension to Your Plot
Shedding the Need for Comfort
Creating Tension: Character Conflicts
Questions:
Answer at least one of the following (or as many as you’d like).
•Do things get progressively worse in your story?
•In what ways do you escalate tension in your story?
•Take a good look at
your story. Do you have any repetition there with characters, plot, or action?
•Any questions?
Writing Exercise
In the book on page
61, Mr. James gave a writing assignment that I thought you might enjoy. Choose
one of the following sentences and write out a progression of four events that
would escalate that situation. What would make these bad situations worse?
1. There’s an outbreak of a fatal disease in your town.
2. You are lost in a strange city.
3. The elevator you are in gets stuck.
4. You awake to find
your bedroom door locked and the windows boarded up!
congrats on your yet having another book I need to get and read!!!
And this book you are all going through sounds lovely and motivating 😉
MB: keturahskorner.blogspot.com
PB: thegirlwhodoesntexist.com
It’s a great book, Keturah!
Jill, you highlighted a lot of what I underlined as I read. Something else I found really helpful was:
“The strength of your protagonist is measured against the difficulty of the struggle or the strength of the antagonist he has to overcome.”
This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently, the correlation between developing a strong antagonist and a strong main character. My first efforts with antagonists tend to be weak.
Oooh. I love the cover art! Congrats on getting another book out.
I definitely need to streamline the escalation of tension in my book. One of the whole principles behind my plot is that something is supposed to get worse as time goes on, but I haven’t done enough of that yet. I’ve only alluded to the fact that it should be happening. I’ll definitely revisit this chapter when I get to rewrites.
There’s an outbreak of a fatal disease in your town.
1. Your little sister gets it; ends up at the hospital.
2. It’s contagious and it starts getting to the doctors, one at a time.
3. Your little sister dies.
4. Find out you have the disease and it isn’t curable.
One quote I really liked: ‘SInce things must continually get worse for the protagonist. characters actually descend through difficulties and pain into transformation. They do not slowly ascend into change.’
Oh, I really like that quote, Macey! It feels very applicable. My WIP doesn’t have enough tension, which is something I’m definitely keeping in the back of my mind as I move forward.
Me too. There are quite a few things I have to work on in my WIP.