I went to my first My Book Therapy (MBT) retreat in 2009 – the first-ever Storycrafters Retreat. I’m four years further along the writing road, on deadline for my fourth novel, and I often review things I learned at back then. One of my favorite MBT techniques is FOCUS, an acronym that helps you craft vivid scene descriptions.
FOCUS stands for:
First Impressions
Observations
Close Up
Simile (or Metaphor)
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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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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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I was thrilled my publisher wanted a third book from me – and just a bit proud that the pitch I’d worked so hard on had done just what I’d hoped it would do: grabbed my editors’ attention – and landed me another book contract.
But what’s that Proverb about stumbling over pride? Yep, I fell flat on my face a few months later. That oh-so intriguing one sentence pitch had me in a headlock and refused to give up and say “Uncle,” so that I could wrestle it into a synopsis, much less a real story.
Beyond that single sentence I had a whole lot of nothing.
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