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Professor Henry Sutton, crime writer, lecturer and UEA's MA in Crime Fiction Course Director, explores the key elements and techniques behind the essential component of good crime fiction: tension.
What key elements of writing help to build tension?
You can’t build tension without strong and compelling characters, and a cracking plot. These two aspects to writing fiction, are your most essential ingredients – character and plot. That is if you want to create a fast-moving story, full of purpose, energy, urgency and necessity.
I’m going to talk about crime fiction, because good crime fiction has all of the above, plus a large dose of menace and motivation. Again, these concepts are wholly aligned with character and plot. In this brief guide, I’ll explain how.
Since Aristotle, it’s been recognised that character and plot are dependent on each other. F. Scott Fitzgerald maintained that ‘character was plot in action’. So how do we develop a character that is a ‘plot in action’, and where the plot/action is of a fast and furious nature? This all goes towards heightening the tension, believe me.
We can begin to raise the tension, or effectively the stakes. We can have seat-of-the pants duplicity, betrayal, jealously, passion, and life-threatening encounters, fights, chases, escapes.
First off, we need to create a character who wants something rather desperately. This was notoriously articulated by Kurt Vonnegut, proclaiming in his eight rules of writing: ‘Every character should want something, even if it’s only a glass of water.’ If we then bring into the frame aspects of menace, murder and mayhem, we develop a problem, or an antagonist, who doesn’t want that character, the protagonist, to get that thing they most desire.
Now, the protagonist may not be benign. Rather than wish for world peace, they might simply want a great deal of money, to stage a heist, for instance, or see a love rival dead. This could then mean their adversaries are either powerful law enforcers, or ruthless criminals. This is how we begin to shape a crime fiction, a fiction boiling with tension. Running alongside tension, we have jeopardy, fear, risk. We can begin to raise the tension, or effectively the stakes. We can have seat-of-the-pants duplicity, betrayal, jealously, passion, and life-threatening encounters, fights, chases, escapes.
How do plot and character combine to create tension?
Tension is a by-product of conflict. Conflict drives a great deal of fiction. It’s just that in crime fiction the conflict is often a matter of freedom or imprisonment, life or death.
Indeed, way back in 1927, a Russian literary formalist by the name of Boris Tomashevsky came up with the brilliant equation: STORY + CONFLICT = PLOT. As already suggested, conflict is one of the crucial ingredients of fiction, being bound up with plot (which is largely indistinguishable from character).
We can hate [the character]. But we must be invested in them, and their plight – whether we want them to escape, or be caught.
However, there’s conflict and conflict, characters and characters. In my teaching, I talk about active and passive characters. In other words, characters that do something and those who allow the world to do things to them. Such characters might even be happy just observing the world and reflecting. But that doesn’t necessarily make for fast moving, plot driven stories. For that we have to raise the temperature, or the tension, the very nature and setting of the conflict, and the myriad possibilities of resolution.
Are there any tricks or techniques which crime authors use to build tension?
Further ways to heighten tension include keeping the narrative tight. By that I mean, using a prose style that is succinct, always purposeful, and not prone to exposition, interiority, or lengthy reflection. Keep sentences short and on track. Make dialogue exchanges say things that matter, rather than just pass the time of day. Don’t bring in unnecessary characters or diversions (though a few red herrings might just suffice). Cut any flab. And make those characters, those situations, believable, engaging, compelling. That doesn’t mean we have to love them. We can hate them. But we must be invested in them, and their plight – whether we want them to escape, or be caught.
The other key consideration here is length. In part this is down to structure, to timelines, to how many points of view you might have. Most importantly, however, it should be down to control, and knowing when to end. As such, it’s down to seeing the ending as soon as possible, and building a narrative (wholly focused on tension in all its guises) that rushes towards the very end.
John le Carré came up with the best line on this I’ve ever heard. Asked where to begin a novel, he replied: ‘As near to the end as possible.’ Except, actually, he borrowed this line from Kurt Vonnegut, who might well have borrowed it from someone else. Writers borrow ideas and concepts from other writers all the time. It’s what we do. If you want to check out some crime fiction that’s loaded with tension, try Lee Child, Attica Locke, Patricia Highsmith, Gillian Flynn, S. A. Cosby, Elmore Leonard, James M. Cain, Dorothy B. Hughes, Walter Mosley and Rebecca Kuang.
But how do you know what that ending is? When it should occur? How do you resolve all that tension, all that conflict? When there are no questions left. When the story, the plight, has run its course. When someone has got away with it, or not. Of course, not everything might be resolved. There might be a final twist, which could well lead to a sequel. Like life, fiction is not always tidy, even at the very end.
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Henry Sutton is Professor of Creative Writing and Crime Fiction at UEA. He is also the course director of UEA’s Creative Writing MA Crime Fiction.
He is the author of 15 novels and a collection of short stories, including My Criminal World, Kids’ Stuff and Get Me Out Of Here. His new monograph, Crafting Crime Fiction, is published by Manchester University Press. He is co-editor of the 30 monograph series Elements in Crime Narratives, Cambridge University Press. He also co-edited, with Dr Laura Joyce, a collection of essays, Domestic Noir: The New Face of 21st Century Crime Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
Creative Writing at UEA
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What does it mean to be a writer?
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