Life includes suspense. Good stories, then, include suspense.
Your memoir needs suspense. Hook your reader and make her
eager to know the outcome—but make her wait for it. Suspense implies an
uncomfortable waiting mixed with impatience for a good resolution . It arouses
curiosity. It keeps her reading.
Today we continue with these all-important ingredients for your memoir: Suspense. Tension.
Conflict.
A critiquer had returned one of Becca’s manuscripts and had
noted, several times, the need for tension. “Where’s the tension?” and “Add
more tension.” (Becca’s manuscript was fiction but remember: Many fiction
techniques are important nonfiction techniques, too.)
Becca said, “No tension? What’s she talking about? The main
character was just abandoned by her father. Her best friend was attacked by
racist pigs. The family farm is about to go under.… There is conflict ALL OVER
the place, so how can she say there’s no tension??”
Becca was puzzled but eventually recognized that conflict
and tension are not necessarily the same thing. She adds, “Although the terms
are often used interchangeably (and they CAN be synonymous), they aren’t
necessarily the same.”
Conflict is when a character has a goal but an obstacle
prevents him from reaching it.
Tension, on the other hand, stirs up the reader’s emotion, grabs
hold of him, and makes him care about how the story will end—and it keeps him reading. Tension, Becca says, is “that tight, stretched feeling in your belly
that makes you all jittery. That’s what you want your reader to feel.…”
So how do you stir up your reader’s emotion?
Your own emotion—excitement, fear, joy, doubt, wonderment,
or awe—will impact your readers’ emotions.
“Emotion is an
involuntary action:
The best stories in
the world
always have an
emotional appeal.
They inspire the
audience to act, to think,
to laugh, to cry or
to get angry. …
If an audience is
moved to feel something,
they become more
emotionally invested in a story
based on that
connection.”
Slash Coleman
How much tension should a writer include?
Every scene should have tension, FaithWriter’s Lillian Duncan
says, sometimes big, sometimes little. “It may be internal or external. It may
be real or imagined, but there should be a sense of unpredictability in every
scene.…”
Lillian offers this word of caution: Melodrama is not a mark
of good writing. Avoid overwriting. “Keep your ‘flowery’ writing to a minimum.”
Word
choices
Exclamation points
Too many
adverbs and adjectives
Emotional reaction equal to the
event
Cut every unnecessary word
Read more at Lillian’s Writing Suspense. Many if not all
of her fiction techniques also apply to nonfiction.
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