Life includes conflict and tension. Good stories, then, should include conflict and tension.
But I have read a couple of memoirs that downplayed the conflict and tension—toned it down, diminished it. Skimmed over it. What a mistake!
When writers become vulnerable and tell us those important details of their story, when they tell us how they handled those times and events, we readers grow and benefit. That’s how a memoirist becomes a mentor. That’s how God uses stories to offer others help and hope.
If you want to get your most important messages across, if you want readers to benefit from your story, include the conflict and tension you experienced. And how you dealt with it, how you came through on the other side, what you learned.
Becca Puglisi at Writers Helping Writers discovered there’s a difference between conflict and tension.
Here’s how she learned that lesson:
A critiquer returned one of Becca’s manuscripts and had noted, several times, the need for tension. (Becca’s manuscript was fiction but remember: Many fiction techniques are important nonfiction techniques, too.)
Becca asked herself, “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. . . .”
Click on this link to read more of Becca’s Conflict vs. Tension.
So, how do you stir up your readers’ emotion?
Your own emotion—excitement, fear, joy, doubt, wonderment, or awe—will impact your reader’s 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.”
How much tension/emotion should a writer include?
Every scene should have some 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. “Keep your ‘flowery’ writing to a minimum.”
Click here to see Lillian’s checklist on how to avoid overwriting. It includes:
- Word choices
- Exclamation points
- Too many adverbs and adjectives
- Emotional reaction that’s equal to the event
- Cutting every unnecessary word
Read more at Lillian’s Writing Suspense. Many if not all of her fiction techniques also apply to nonfiction.
Find the conflict, tension, and emotion—
or lack of them—
in your manuscript.
Make changes as needed.
If you’ll do so, your readers will gain important insights,
and, believe it or not,
you, too, will benefit,
probably in enormous ways,
ways you can’t quite imagine yet!
