Tension Techniques:
-Cliffhangers at the end of every chapter, and, if possible, at the end of every paragraph
A cliffhanger is when a whole new set of possibilities open up. Such as: when a character realizes that she's screwed up, that her assumptions are wrong, when she is plunged into a new world, a relationship is destroyed, or begins. The moment when the character gasps because she's confronted with something new and doesn't yet know the consequences.... that's a cliffhanger.
-Permanent, horrible stuff happens. The consequences seem more real and more dreadful if the reader gets an early taste of defeat. It helps make the stakes feel bigger, and like the protagonist is in more jeopardy. Plus, if something bad COULD happen to the protagonist in any given situation, it probably should- she never has the easy way out. It's ok to be tough on your hero- that's what makes her heroic! Like Job, I guess :)
-Increasing the stakes by putting more and more people in jeopardy. It might be that over the course of the book, the protagonist realizes the threat is much bigger than she thought, or it might be that the villains actually do become a stronger, bigger threat. Either way, if the stakes stay the same, it gets boring. The ultimate threat loses some of its horror through repetition, and so does the ultimate goal. So things have to KEEP going from bad to worse. The rewards have to KEEP getting better- and farther away (in the protagonist/reader's prospective anyway).
A book I've read (don't remember which one) referred to this as "Yes, but...." and "No, and furthermore..." The idea was that there should be no categorical wins or losses- the protagonist should always leave a climax in even worse shape than she went in. Even if she won the battle, it had to feel like she'd lost the war.
-Giving the reader more information than the protagonist has. If the protagonist has more information, I, as a reader, feel cheated and manipulated. The tension feels false. But if I want to leap through the page and warn the protagonist of things, I feel like a part of her team. And the frustration hightens the tension, too.
Some books (most thrillers) do this by showing the villains directly, when they are unobserved by the protagonists... especially when the protagonists aren't observing the villains because they are caught up in a conflict that turns out to be wrongheaded or petty compared to the real threat.
I think it's more interesting when the reader gets a jolt second-hand- when a character knows or notices something that is unimportant or obvious to them, but would become crucial if combined with another character's seemingly unimportant or obvious information. The characters aren't keeping secrets, they are just self-absorbed and locked in their own prospectives, like real people :)
I think it's also harder to give a second-hand jolt, because it's more subtle. It's important that the characters don't come off as secretive or stupid- just limited in the same way any regular person is. The payoff for these second-hand jolts has to come sooner, too, to keep the reader from becoming contemptuous of the characters or getting too frustrated.
BUT, I think the combination of all these limited POV's is more involving/interesting to the reader (and the writer), truer to real life, and less hackneyed. It also allows for something I ESPECIALLY love: an opportunity to mix up the antagonists and the protagonists. Villains aren't evil- they're the heroes of stories you happen not to be telling right now. I LOVE getting a glimpse of their stories, of their prospectives- I LOVE getting a glimpse of their "heroism."
Anti-heroes are evil people you root for anyway, right? I don't do anti-heroes, but I specialize in anti-villains ;)
(I got the idea for this post from YA author Megan Crewe. She's got a fantastic post on Tension on her blog, megancrewe.livejournal.com- definitely read it!)
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