Hi Reader,
Have you ever been watching a movie or reading a book and felt utterly glued to it, breathless because you absolutely cannot look away? Gah! It’s one of the best feelings when we are reading our writing.
Usually, this feeling of being-on-the-edge-of-your-seat isn’t about action-packed physical sequences, like car chases or murderous rampages, or high-stakes danger (though those definitely have their place in fiction!). Equally, or more often, it’s all about micro-tension.
Micro-tension is moment-by-moment friction that arises from conflicts in desires, expectations, emotions, or subtext.
While the plot and physical action might make up the macro (story) tension, the micro-tension is all about the fine scene details. It’s the difference between taking a sledgehammer to your characters or killing them with a thousand small cuts.
Micro-tension is often the internal part of the scenes, versus the external. It’s a character struggling with the things they don’t want to say, or the feeling of wanting something (someone?) they’re not supposed to. It’s questions they hold about faith or values or trust, etc. being tested right there in the scene. It’s watching them struggle with something and seeing it play out in their interiority.
Micro-tension can also be relational—riveting you to the page as you watch what happens between two or more characters. Are the characters going to kiss? Is he going to strike the man who is sleeping with his wife? Will there be a moment in which a secret the audience knows about will be revealed?
Readers are hooked not just because of what is happening, but by how it’s happening and what might happen as a result. Micro-tension is one of the forces that creates narrative drive.
Next week I’m going to dive more into the three sources of micro-tension, but before we go there, I want you give you an absolutely masterful example of micro-tension in action.
The opening scene of Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 film, Inglourious Basterds is positively brimming with micro-tension. If you haven’t seen the film I do apologize for the dark subject matter, mentions of racism, and gruesome murders. The full movie is hard to watch. However, the only reason I am using it as an example is for its tension in the opening scene.
The scene begins with a farmer chopping wood in Nazi-occupied France in 1941. Some Nazi soldiers, including the formidable, yet wickedly charming Hans Landa, arrive to question the man about his Jewish neighbors who have gone missing. It is soon revealed that the missing neighbors are hiding beneath the farmer’s floorboards, wide-eyed with fear, desperate not to be caught.
Now, Tarantino could have played this scene very differently—he could have had the soldiers barge in and upend the whole house, searching for the suspected fugitives, but instead, he used micro-tension to really amp things up. Hans Landa and the farmer sit together and have what seems to be a perfectly pleasant conversation over a glass of milk. The men are mannerly, respectful, but it quickly becomes clear as the conversation progresses, just what is at stake and what each man suspects of the other.
This is a picture of two men doing a very dangerous dance. Landa suspects the farmer of hiding the Jews, and of course the farmer is desperately trying to keep them safe…
That is, until Landa—in all his gentle charm and good manners—suggests that the farmer’s family and his own life will be in great jeopardy if it is discovered that they are hiding Jews.
The acting is superb (Christoph Waltz won an Academy Award for his performance as the despicable character), and much of the tension is due to both men’s acting. But it is also about the line-level conversations and the conflicting tone and manners the men use as they converse.
To watch the scene, click here. It’s about 20 minutes. If you’d rather read the screenplay, you can look at it here.
The scene is so riveting because the audience knows by a certain point that the farmer is hiding the Jews, then they realize a few minutes later that Landa knows he is hiding them. And so the tension lies in what each man will do given the very tense situation. It’s in the dialogue, and in the internal dilemma Landa forces the farmer to into. It’s relational and internal micro-tension. It contains conflicting desires, emotions, subtext, and expectations.
In other words, Tarantino nails micro-tension in this scene (and in much of the movie).
You might argue that this is a drama and the situation is very high-stakes, so of course it will be tense. To that I say that the next weeks, as I unpack this micro-tension series, I’ll choose a light-hearted romance, followed by a fantasy, so you’ll see how it plays out in other less-tense genres. So stay tuned for that next week and the following.
Before we get into all that, I invite you to pull out a scene that you’ve been working on. Read it over and as you go, underline every moment of micro-tension.
Where does your character struggle against a conflicting desire, emotion, expectations, or subtext internally? Where do they struggle relationally? If you haven’t put them in any sticky situations, then it’s time to revise. Or if you see loads of text with no underlines, perhaps you may need to add some micro-tension.
If words like “conflict” and “tension” still feel too vague to you then try thinking of it as opposition. What person, value, force, etc. is opposing your character? What is causing them to go “oh crap, I don’t like that.” Or “I want that so bad but…” And again, we aren’t looking at big plot-level things, like someone winning the promotion your character is after. It’s the scene-level conversation that they have with their boss that breaks the news in which the conversation could go either way: promotion or firing.
That’s why I want you to focus on just one scene at a time.
If you can master micro-tension, you will have readers glued to your book’s pages, I guarantee it.
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Happy Writing,
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