Wattpad India Awards 2021

Learn: Narrative Arc & Tension

Narrative arcs are the backbone of storytelling. They usually are the most adamant in a story. They prop everything up and they tell you what's going on.

Tension, on the other hand, is a feeling. This makes it kind of hard to describe. Think of the exhilaration you feel when you are going up a rollercoaster. Your body knows something is coming and it reacts, and then it releases that feeling when you spiral back down.

In this chapter, we discuss more about tension. It is often tied in with stakes, or "what is at risk here?"

Tension can come from the moment before you ask someone out, share a kiss with someone, or declare your love for them, and each peak is higher than the last.

Asking someone out? They could say no but that's not much of a loss, so the stakes aren't that high, and the tension this generates isn't that big of a deal.

But what if that person was notorious for rejecting everyone? And what if your character was also just recovering from the last time their heart was broken and they didn't think they could handle rejection again? What if they found out that person just so irresistibly perfect for them and now they just have to ask them out?

The stakes on that just went through the roof compared to where we started.

Kissing them on your date? That's the big stakes! What if it seemed rushed? What if it's awkward? Just thinking about it might already be setting you a little on edge.

Let's not even talk about declaring love...

If you understand where the tension comes from then you, as a writer, can also start to build on it and draw it out.

If someone took an entire novel to go through each of those stages of raising the stakes and increasing the tension then we would have an example of a slow-burn romance, which follows a tension narrative of escalation, even if those escalations are small in a relative sense.

The other important thing to note is that people are logical creatures.

They understand how stuff flows and what comes next. When you write a scene where the person your character just met gave them a little smirk as they get into their car, people know what that means. They're already thinking about what is going to come next and where that will lead. The tension has already started to grow.

You can use this to your advantage to help increase tension throughout a story and it lets you showcase the pair a second time, going to get coffee. Maybe this time they lightly brush hands. Was it an accident or did it mean something?

And away your mind goes!

But, this has a consequence of its own...

(See what we did there? A cliffhanger brings up the tension!)

You have to play by the rules you've set up. The tension has to grow, and it has to close in something or the lack of pay-off would be disappointing. Of course, there's the concept of a misdirect, but we'll keep things simple for now.

Next week, we'll look into details of both - the tension narrative and the slice of life narrative.

<< Question of the day >>

What is your favorite way of building tension in a story? Do you increase it at every step as the story goes on? Or do you introduce the problem right at the start and solve it slowly throughout the story?

<< Fun activity >>

In maximum 10 lines, write a scene that ends with a cliffhanger. (write in comments)

We'll the share our favorite ones on Instagram!

Hope you are on track to get your story ready for the Wattpad India Awards 2021. Don't forget, submissions open on 1st October!