Ah, contest season. Love it! I just finished judging 1,385,643 contest entries. Okay, maybe it only felt that way. But I found a common issue in many entries – something that took me a few years as a writer to really understand. A scene has to have the right set up to create enough tension to draw a reader all the way to the end. Many writers fall into the trap of writing what I call, the police report. They simply tell us what happened/is happening, as if they are narrating the story, or letting the characters narrate what is happening. Sure, there are “things” that happen in the scene the might be interesting, but without the right set up, the scene is boring. It has nothing at stake, nothing […]
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About Susan May Warren
Former Russian Missionary Susan May Warren is the best-selling author of more than 40 novels and novellas with Tyndale, Barbour and Steeple Hill, and Summerside. A Christy award and RITA winner, and multiple finalist for the RITA, Christy and winner of Inspirational Readers Choice contest, Susan currently has over a million books in print. A seasoned women’s events speaker and writing teacher, she is the founder of http://www.mybooktherapy.com an online community for writers, and runs a fiction editing service teaching writers how to tell a great story. Visit her online at: http://www.susanmaywarren.com.Author Archive | Susan May Warren
2014 Frasier Award Finalists!
Congratulations to the 2014 My Book Therapy Frasier Award Finalists!
Join us on September 26th in St. Louis, MO at the 2014 ACFW Conference/My Book Therapy Frasier Award and Pizza Party to discover the winner!
(Click on Read the Rest to discover the finalists!)
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Extreme Book Makeover: 7 Key Ingredients to Creating Powerful Scene Tension
I watched the season finale of Once Upon a Time last night (*warning! Spoilers!*) and it was one of the best episodes in the series. Why? The tension! The plot was simple – the heroine, who’d finally found her happy ending with her family, accidentally fell back into time, and thwarted the epic, historical meeting of her parents. She pulled a “Back to the Future” and erased her future.
What does she want? To return home and live happily with her family. Her goal – make sure her parents met, somehow. Why? Because after a horrible childhood, she’s finally found a home. What’s at stake? Her life – and her son’s life.
And…standing in her way is the Evil Queen (as well as the lack of magic needed to open the time portal.)
Great set up for the episode – and even better, it makes for exactly the right ingredients to talk about how to create powerful tension in a story – and especially how to keep your Act 2 tension from saggy by creating tension in every scene.
Let’s start a definition of tension. Obstacles and Activity are not Tension. Tension is derived from a sympathetic character, who wants something, for a good reason, and who has something to lose, who then creates a specific, identifiable goal, only to run up against compelling, powerful obstacles, which then creates the realistic fear of failure.
In other words, the MBT Scene Tension Equation.
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Extreme Book Makeover: 7 Twists and Turns to add to your novel!
A great story is plotted by looking inside your character, figuring out what his lie is – and how this journey will somehow set him free – and then putting him in situations that make him confront his lies, his flaws and his weaknesses until he takes a good look at himself, figures out what he wants, and charges forward into a new future.
I know, that’s a bit oversimplified, but a story, boiled down, is simply about a character’s inner change, brought about by the external circumstances.
However, how do we make those circumstances intriguing enough to keep our readers’ attention?
At My Book Therapy, we have a character change chart/questions that helps us generate ideas on this journey. However, if you’ve already plotted this journey, and are still stuck, here are 7 ways to add more “trouble” or Twists and Turns into your plot.
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