Try This: Piling Up the Tension

You're going to hate this

Let’s talk about paying the tension forward…

In my experience, newbie writers avoid creating tension. It only goes to follow that people who love reading might’ve had their fill of tension as children. They escaped into books. They want to have their effect from a distance. But as writers, their job is to create (and eventually resolve) tension. Here let’s consider a few ways to gradually (or suddenly) build up tension.

Dialog

Hence the goofy Mike Wallace photo, above. Check out the documentary Mike Wallace Is Here currently on Hulu. I noticed that Angus Wall and his company Rock Paper Scissors produced the program, and Angus is famous for fast, intense editing. The best Nike commercials, not to mention the iconic opening credits of Se7en, were edited by Angus. The machine gun-fast editing throughout the documentary is brutal as Mike Wallace blasts people with gotcha questions, and the cutting does not allow for any response. Your blood pressure will spike straight away.