Wattpad India Awards 2021

Learn: Tension and Slice of Life Narrative

Let's talk about a tension narrative:

This is your standard story, from classic romance to modern superhero. It is often called the Three Act Structure but it doesn't have to have three acts like this graph.

The important takeaway is that a tension narrative has to escalate both its tension and stakes over the course of the story, concluding in a climax (the highest point) that then falls down into your resolution, where the tension is released for a final time.

In a tension narrative, you can't have the characters do things that are less important than what they previously did. The story has to march upwards and onwards until it eventually culminates in something that brings it all down again.

The other thing you'll notice in a tension narrative is that it does have some dips, which are generally recovery periods after a peak moment. It can't be all action all the time, but these dips never fall back to where you started – this is the post-battle scene when you sort through the wounded, this is when you call up your friend after your whirlwind night with mister hot.

But it's important to remember that tension narratives are continuous and things will have to go on with mister hot. He couldn't vanish from the narrative and let a new guy step in as that would start the whole narrative over again.

Lastly, the tension narrative tends to start at a zero point. This is where you're introduced to the setup, and then the story immediately kicks off the plot with a very rapid ascent. It (usually) can't start in the middle of the plot with things already well underway and it definitely can't wait to start for several chapters or take its time to ramp up. It has to go somewhere and it has to go there right away.

Slice of Life Narrative

Slice of Life Narrative is quite different, as shown in the visualization.

A lot of the rules for writing a tension narrative can go out the window as a slice of life narrative is more about meandering along with your characters and the ebb and flow of their existence, than it is about pushing up tension.

In the slice of life narratives, you've often already started above zero. You're jumping into an existing plot and joining it – four friends who've just opened a coffee shop together and are trying to keep it afloat; a relationship between a high school couple one year in, struggling with keeping things fresh.

As you can see, they're often very personal and rely heavily on the audience's ability to connect with the characters and their experiences rather than being hooked by the plot or premise. Since there's no tension driving up your interest, you're usually engaging with the characters' emotions, with humor, with relatability, and with cuteness (be real, if that high school couple is going on adorable adventures to the beach, you're all in, don't lie).

Many of the chapters in a slice of life narrative will be self-contained, largely resolving by the end and not necessarily leaving you with a cliffhanger or a compulsion to continue for plot reasons. The main character may wake up and fall asleep at the start and finish of each chapter.

Sometimes a few chapters will string together into a longer scene, sometimes there would be time skips and sometimes there might be a little bump in tension from time to time, but they're typically not much longer than that. The whole thing will be made of a lot of very small resolutions.

In the example graph, the ending culminates in a spike in tension that helps to resolve all things. It doesn't go as high as the tension narrative one since that would be quite a leap, and it does feel a bit out of place but this is a consequence of the style. There are some slice of life narratives that forgo this entirely, fading out in a mellow sense, but a lot of them will at least try to do something to help close the book or give it a sense of ending or closure, even if it's over something small.

There are also some rare cases where a story starts out as a slice of life and eventually morphs into an escalating tension narrative, though this can't really work the other way around.

When you're working with these arcs, you want to ensure that you pick one and you stand by it. Where they run into problems is when people start to mix the two and have a tension narrative with self-contained chapters, or a slice of life narrative that tries to pitch its plot as the hook. Here's an example plot that might help you differentiate between the two:

A squad of spies is tasked with infiltrating a covert base and stealing the plans to a deadly weapon that threatens the safety of the world.

A squad of spies finds the missions they go on a bit boring, so they set out to also be culinary bloggers on the side, delighting in the different foods and people they encounter when not saving the world.

They look and feel like very different stories, and they'll be told in very different ways. One of them will probably be cute, a little educational, relatable, and inspiring (and probably funny). The other will be gripping, intense, and daring (could also be funny, probably in different ways). Neither is good or bad or better or worse, they're just different in their style and in how they're written.

And that's narrative arcs! Make sure you know which direction you're going when you start and then stick by it to the end. There's no wrong choice between the options. Take advantage of the natural flow of tension and adhere to its rules.

Once you're aware of your backbone, you will feel it all the time. Yoga helps too :p

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