Want Deliciously Unbearable Tension in Your Novel? You Might Need Less
of This Surprising ThingWhat makes for great tension in a novel? You might think the answer is horrible stuff happening to your character at every turn. But this actually isn’t true. The tension in your novel is what keeps readers reading. Without that delicious fear of inevitable conflict, readers will fail to see the importance in your build-up scenes—and they’re likely to give up on your book. What makes for great tension is the threat
of horrible happenings. My personal favorite adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist is the 1968 musical Oliver!
Aside from the lovely musical numbers, the greatest reason for this is Oliver Reed's stunning turn as the villainous Bill Sikes. He’s thunderingly and physically horrifying, and he dominates every scene he’s in and makes me want to hold a pillow in front of my face every time he shows up. Yet he does very little onscreen that’s actually all that bad. Until the second half when he hits Nancy and tries to beat Oliver, he doesn’t do much at all.
Mostly, he just stomps around and looks nasty. And that, right there, is the key to his success as a villain. Sikes ratchets the tension in this movie to unbearable levels, and he does it by stretching that promise
of horrible happenings as far as it can possibly be stretched. Everything about him screams danger, but that promise isn’t paid off until the latest possible moment. The result is that viewers—for all their fear of the foreshadowing—are left to imagine on their own just what Sikes is capable of. And we imagine quite a bit! When finally the story pays off the promise of Sikes’s danger in the shockingly brutal scene when he beats Nancy to death with his walking stick, the tension releases in a burst of horror every bit as bad as viewers expected.
The tension that kept us riveted throughout the story turns into conflict that’s just as phenomenally big as we expected.
|