FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What is Tension in Writing?

You know the moment right before two characters kiss for the first time? That’s tension. It’s the secret ingredient that makes a story compelling, the thing readers can’t look away from. Tension is essential beyond thrillers, though it’s a major component for the genre. Every story requires tension to be compelling. For example:

Imagine driving by an accident on the side of the road. The two drivers are standing near one another, but their faces are knitted in frustration or anger. Traffic is slow and the show is interesting. For that moment as you drive by, you are witnessing tension between two people. The context is the accident—a conflict. How the drivers react is tension. 

Tension goes wrong when it’s forced—when there isn’t context. Romance, for example—the yearning is tension and you can’t get there without understanding the characters and the context of their points of view—their experiences. Introducing a character and killing them within two paragraphs, with a huge emotional reaction from the protagonist usually isn’t going to provide enough context to hit the right level of tension. 

To test how tension is showing up in your scenes, pay attention to your body’s reactions while you read it back. Do your shoulders go up? Do your muscles still? Does your leg bounce on its own? Or does your body have no reaction? If you don’t feel it, your readers won’t either. 

Remember, tension building happens in revision. Don’t stress about making sure every scene is filled with tension in your first draft. Just keep writing!

What is Misdirection in Writing?

A character is looking around a crime scene. They clock a smear of blood, a hand mirror, contact solution, a hairbrush, a textbook on human anatomy, some hypodermic needles, vials of liquid medicine, and a gun. 

One of these things is the clue that breaks the case wide open. 

Where does the character track down first? The gun, right? That’s the obvious answer. Later, she learns the victim didn’t die from a gunshot—he died from poisoning. So she investigates the vials of liquid medicine. Oh wait, those lead to a dead end too—they were all prescribed to the victim and had expected quantities in their blood. 

When it becomes clear that the victim was drugged through their eye ducts, the truth about the contact solution comes to light—it carried the poison. 

This is an example of misdirection. It’s the way writers play a guessing game with their readers. It’s directing the reader to look where the author wants them to look—believe what the author wants them to believe in order to effectively deliver the gasp-inducing twist or reveal. 

Effective misdirection in writing turns the reader’s beliefs on their head by hiding the truth in plain sight.

How Do You Write Better Dialogue?

Dialogue can be one of the more challenging aspects of narrative fiction. It has to do so much work with little words. Readers don’t want giant monologues, silence fillers, or conversations that go in circles—which is how we speak in real life. Writing better dialogue takes work. 

A few tips of advice: 

• You’ll hear the old advice, “go to a coffee shop and listen to conversation.” That’s great advice—you should definitely do that. But the reality is that it’s not enough and doesn’t work for everyone. You want your dialogue to sound realistic and conversational, but not exactly the way we speak in real life. It needs to be smoother than that. 

• Study the dialogue of your favorite novels. Take the time to see how the author managed a back-and-forth conflict, banter, or deep conversation. Notice how they break up the dialogue with action beats or interiority and reactions. Notice the amount of white space on the page. 

• Study the dialogue of your favorite novels again—but this time, look at what isn’t being said. What are the characters hiding? What is the tension between them? What aren’t they saying? 

  • I recommend checking out the first scene in Chapter 7 of Razorblade Tears by SA Cosby. The scene is between Ike and his wife as they discuss what they do after their son was murdered. Pay attention to what isn’t being said. Think about Ike’s expectations and Mya’s responses. 

• Read your pages out loud. Yes, it’s going to feel silly. Hide in your car or lock yourself in your bedroom. Whatever it will take you to feel most comfortable. Then read your pages out loud. This is the quickest way for you to recognize clunky dialogue. You will notice that people don’t speak in grammatically perfect sentences so when your characters do, it will feel wrong. 

Writing great dialogue is a matter of persistence, practice, and study. You can do it—it just might take a few tries to get it right. And that’s perfectly okay!

How Do You Write a Great Villain?

Unless your protagonist is a Jack Reacher or James Bond type, the character that’s going to most intrigue a thriller reader is the villain. So how do you write one that’s memorable? Yeah, you could give them a sympathetic back story. Or—you could take off all the shackles and let your villain be wild. 

I’m of the opinion that the villain is the most fun of all the characters. Let him be unhinged. Let her be outrageous. Your villain doesn’t pull punches. He thinks differently than your hero. Villains epitomize ‘fuck politeness’. Go all in when writing your villain. You can always pull back later if needed. 

The hook for a standout villain—Hannibal Lecter, Patrick Bateman, The Joker, Annie Wilkes—to name a few—is their quirks. The things that make them different from the everyday person. The way they think, the way they act. Have fun writing your villain. The more you enjoy letting go of proper etiquette and polite society, the more fun the reader will have. 

Whatever your villain does to stop the protagonist in their tracks, whatever their crimes or actions, will resonate through their motivations and logic. When landing those ‘oh wow’ moments, it’s important for you to know why they are doing that. And sometimes (not all the time but often) the reader wants to understand why the villain did what they did as well. Readers often read to make sense of the world. Villains are one way for them to process darkness in reality—and to understand how these things happen. 

What is Conflict in a Story?

While tension makes a story compelling, conflict is what makes a story a story. All stories start with conflict and (usually) end with conflict resolution. Let’s think about conflict beyond the idea of a fight or argument with another person and look at it from a 30,000-foot view. 

You are driving down a smooth two-lane road. No cars around, no animals in the road, just smooth sailing. Then the conflicts begin. First—a speedbump comes out of nowhere. Then another. Now you’re trying to keep the car in the correct lane, but the brakes are loosened because the car slammed down so hard. The car fishtails and now there’s another car coming straight at you. You grab the wheel, pull hard to the right, push the brakes as hard as you can, and come to a screeching halt. After taking a few deep breaths, you put the car into drive and press the gas—though this time, perhaps a little more cautious. 

The conflict in this example shows that things are going along for your character as normal—then something happens. Conflict interrupts their normal. It could be an internal conflict or an external one, but it’s the thing that forces your character to react, adapt, or change. There really is no story—especially a thriller—without conflict. Humans go through conflict every day—so should your characters. 

You want your character to continuously meet conflict throughout your novel. Sometimes they need to fail and the conflict wins. That’s how they learn and change. Sometimes they are able to sail through with Jason Bourne martial arts precision, but more often than not, readers want to see your character try, fail, try again, fail again, try again, win.