Building Suspense and Creating Tension Part 3
Building Suspense and Tension – Part Three
Reversals – Another time-honored way of building suspense and creating tension is to create radical reversals for your characters – reversals that jar the reader, create confusion, uncertainty, and doubt.
Self-inflicted reversals – For example, a recovering alcoholic with decades of sobriety could fall off the wagon. An ex-gang member could succumb to loneliness and decide to go back to his old gang and the streets.
Antagonist-caused reversals – More likely, your dramatic reversals will come from your antagonist.
Just when your protagonist appears to have everything under control, your antagonist will appear to throw a monkey wrench into their plans and knock them to their knees.
Radical reversals work best if you roll out a nice beautiful red carpet for your character. And just when they’re comfortably situated on it, your antagonist will yank it right out from under them. It may sound cruel, but there’s a purpose for it.
Dramatic changes of heart in your characters is one form of reversal. Maybe your main character’s son no longer wants to go to dragon school, dashing the hopes of his mother who’d always dreamed of her son becoming a dragon tamer. Maybe Prince Charming no longer wants to get married, or worse, decides to marry someone other than the peasant girl. Or your bank robber is set up to do the job and at the last minute decides to go straight.
Traitors – Often reversals come in the form of allies turning against your protagonist. Best friends who stab your protagonist in the back. Or lovers turning on one another.
Whatever reversal you choose, the object is to sow confusion and despair, to crush hopes, to give the appearance that all hope is lost. But fret not! Because it is from the ashes of such setbacks that your protagonist finds the strength and the courage to go out and obtain the object of their desire, or attain new heights of achievement.
Dramatic reversals are the darkness just before the dawn. They remind your character of the preciousness and brevity of life. Reversals awaken them to the value of good friends, family, and love.
The idea of such reversals is not simply to torture your characters. But rather to forge your character’s soul in the fires of adversity; to force them to make the changes needed in order to learn and grow.
Reversals should generally be placed following a string of good fortune for your character. And whenever possible, the reader should have no clue a reversal is coming.
Of course, a discriminating reader usually knows when things start looking too good for a character, that trouble is sure to be on the horizon. If you can’t place a reversal after a period of happiness, at least place it following a lull in the action, or at a place when the character appears in control of the situation.
Next: Building Suspense and Creating Tension Part 4
