You’ve added lots of conflict to your story, but readers are still telling you it’s boring. What gives? Unfortunately, a number of different things can cause this problem. To help you troubleshoot, let’s go over some common reasons that tension might be missing.
1. The Consequences of Failure Are Unknown
Tension is created by the possibility that something bad might happen. For that to work, your audience must know about the bad thing. Storytellers often take it for granted that if they put their protagonist in a fight or another standard conflict, then the stakes of that conflict are known. But the audience might not realize that a fight is to the death or that an argument will determine whether the protagonist is imprisoned. To create tension, you need to actively inform your audience of what will happen if everything goes wrong.
Even if your audience does know what’s at stake, describing it can help you increase tension. When the consequence of failure goes unmentioned, it doesn’t feel very important. However, if you remind them about what could happen, you’re also creating an opportunity to emphasize what a big deal the failure is and how hard it will be for the protagonist to avoid it.
Working this information into the narration is usually simple, particularly if you’re writing from the point of view of your protagonist. They’ll have plenty of reason to think over the obstacles they’re facing and worry about what could happen to them.
Example
Mitch McHero looked at the scared faces of his warriors, and then back at the lines of spears held by their enemy. His forces were outnumbered three to one. The only chance they had to escape the slavers was if he challenged their leader to single combat. But even if she accepted, she was known far and wide for her skill in combat. When she was done with him, he’d be no more than a bloody smear.
If you aren’t working in a narrated medium, you’ll want someone to say something like, “But you can’t challenge her to single combat! She’s the greatest warrior in the land. Once she’s done with you, you’ll be nothing but a bloody smear.”
2. The Hero Isn’t Likable Enough
When readers are bored, writers generally assume they have to make their fights fightier. But sometimes the answer has nothing to do with those fights at all. Unfortunately, that makes the root of this problem difficult for writers to catch.
Here’s the thing: having consequences for failure isn’t enough. Those consequences also have to matter to your audience.
What does it mean for something to matter? There’s no objective benchmark; it all depends on the audience’s emotional investment in the story. The more emotionally invested they are, the more small things become important. And in any story, it’s the protagonist’s job to be a lightning rod for emotional investment. First, you make your protagonist matter to your audience, and then everything that impacts your protagonist also matters.
That won’t work if the audience doesn’t like your hero, and you can’t count on your audience to adore your hero just because you do. Like anything else your story relies on, you need to actively cultivate likability. If you aren’t sure how to do that, you can start with my list of twelve lovable traits.
If you do have a likable protagonist but the conflict has no impact on them, then that could also be your problem. Keep the plot focused on your hero; that’s what they’re for!
3. There’s Plenty of Time
So you’ve clarified the consequences of failure, and those consequences matter to your audience. You’re not done; it has to feel like your protagonist could actually face those consequences. For that, problems need some level of urgency. Even insurmountable problems don’t seem that way when there’s enough time to solve them. Obviously, this can happen if you name a deadline that’s too roomy, but it’s also easy to imply lack of urgency by mistake.
First, are your protagonists acting like the problem isn’t urgent? If they decide to go camping for three days instead of heading right to the villain’s fortress to steal that powerful artifact, the only conclusion is that they don’t really need the artifact. The heroes can still have a quiet scene to catch their breath during a fairly urgent situation, but wasting a whole day won’t look good.
Second, does a bunch of time pass without anything happening? If you jump to six weeks later, and your protagonists still haven’t made headway on their problem, they should have already failed and faced consequences. If everything is the same, the problem won’t seem serious. However, you can establish that an invasion is coming in six weeks, and the protagonists will need every moment of that time to secure their fortress. The difference is that you’ve explained how a deadline in six weeks is still a tight deadline, and that something was indeed happening as time passed. A deadline of three years may still be stretching it too far, but urgency can work on a timeline of months instead of days.
Finally, has your protagonist made an attempt to solve their problem without facing any consequences? This suggests they can keep trying again and again until they finally succeed. Add a tight deadline and show how their attempts waste precious time. Give them enough time for three tries at most. Even then, I recommend adding additional consequences so that each attempt is more difficult than the last. This will ensure that tension escalates as the story continues.
4. The Hero Succeeded or the Villain Failed
Even with a tight deadline, the chance your protagonist will fail may seem too remote to create tension. One of the biggest things your audience will take as predictive of success or failure is how the conflicts in the story have turned out so far.
Every time your villain fails at their objective, they lose some of their menace. With just a few failures, they’ll look like an incompetent pushover, not like someone who could defeat the hero. Storytellers often end up with this problem because they aren’t sure how to keep the story going without the hero and villain confronting each other. Then, since the hero can’t die, the villain has to lose. You can avoid these confrontations in the first place by filling in your story’s middle with other conflicts. If the hero and villain do fight each other early, it shouldn’t be a fight between equals. Instead, the hero should be trying to escape with their life because they know they are outmatched. Then when they manage to flee, the villain will still look threatening.
A hero who succeeds at one of their objectives can also drop the tension level too low. One reason for this is that anytime your hero’s job seems easier than before, tension will go down. So if your hero succeeds at getting vital information or finding a powerful weapon, then their chances of defeating the villain could feel too certain. You can restore the tension in these spots by making something go wrong. Another reason a heroic victory could lower tension is that after this happens several times, the hero may look undefeatable. This is especially likely if your protagonist is over-candied. Remember to give them some weaknesses!
5. The Throughline Is on Hiatus
A good story builds momentum as it goes, getting the audience emotionally invested in a protagonist and the big challenge they’re facing. Opening a story is tricky, but once that’s done, you should have an easier time maintaining tension in the plot you’ve already established. However, that investment won’t pay off if you wander away from what you’ve so carefully built.
For instance, let’s say you’ve established that mages in the city have been disappearing, and your protagonist has been tasked with discovering who’s responsible and stopping them. If you spend a whole chapter showing your protagonist fighting with their landlady – or worse, a completely different character fighting with their landlady – that’s going to be a letdown. You’ve already promised readers a story that’s more riveting, so they’ll be impatient to get back to that. Even if the landlady ends up being the mage-snatcher, it won’t change their initial boredom when hearing about her.
A similar problem can occur if your main plot stalls for whatever reason. Maybe the protagonist isn’t making any headway in finding the mage-snatcher, or they’re twiddling their thumbs while they wait for a warrant to make an arrest. At that point, any fights they get into could feel like filler, since those conflicts won’t impact the throughline. Whether the protagonist wins or loses a fight, they still gotta wait for that arrest warrant. So, wherever possible, keep your main plot moving. If you can’t avoid making your protagonist wait for something, summarize time passing and skip to when that wait is over.
If you’re still having trouble, ask your test audience some open-ended and neutral-sounding questions to discover where the problem is. Do they know what bad things will happen if the hero fails their struggle against the antagonist? Do they care if those consequences come to pass? Do they think the antagonist can beat the hero? The answer is in there.
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>The Consequences of Failure Are Unknown
This was a problem for me in middle of (of all things) the Hunger Games
Haymitch was making a big deal about Katniss being likable to the public. She was trying, but it just wasn’t her. I kept wondering why she even cared, especially considering how she felt about the audience, particularly the Capitol audience
Now, sponsors could provide food, equipment, even life-saving medicine. But somehow I’d missed that until the Game itself actually started. So the whole getting sponsors issue in the middle didn’t seem important
Also, I once saw a movie where thieves had stolen a diamond that was to be given as a lottery prize at a carnival. The carnival owner, whom we liked, reassured the main characters that the insurance would cover things.
What I’d missed my first viewing was that he was just lying so the MCs wouldn’t worry (he didn’t think they could help in any case). The insurance company had found a loophole not to pay him, so he was still obligated for its cash value, which he couldn’t cover
I guess the moral is to remind the audience, maybe a few times
This article is going in my short list of writing advice to revisit :)
Thank you for the clear and well-thought-out post.
Tension is so hard. I always want the hero to succeed but as a writer I have to make sure they don’t! Lol This is a great post!
> Storytellers often end up with this problem because they aren’t sure how to keep the story going without the hero and villain confronting each other. Then, since the hero can’t die, the villain has to lose.
On the opposite side, I personally find it dampens tension when it’s obvious that the heroes can’t succeed, or there would be no plot. This tends to happen when the villain has a multi-step plan, each part of which is critical to success.
For example, if the villain needs to collect the Runestones of Genesis and the corpse of the Ancient Demon of the Nebula, and bring them to the Altar of Celestial Origin at the moment of planetary alignment, you know that there must be a showdown near the moment of planetary alignment, with those factors present; any effort to deny the villain the runestones or the corpse is doomed to fail.
This happens because writers want us to see the villain inching towards his plan, and want us to know how bad it is. However, I feel many writers go too far in that regard; it becomes clear after awhile that the only victory the heroes will be allowed until the very end are inconsequential, because the writer doesn’t know how to allow the hero a meaningful victory without abruptly ending the plot.
Though I realize my preferences aren’t the standard, I’ve always preferred allowing the heroes to win in ways that disrupt the villain’s plans, and showing the villain adapting. The heroes should still need to struggle for a victory; but I personally feel that showing that the villain doesn’t need to have everything go perfectly according to plan has several advantages, mainly in reducing predictability and increasing investment:
* By showing that a villain doesn’t absolutely have to win in the most obvious way, there’s more uncertainty; you think “how can the heroes win this one?” instead of “how will the heroes lose, as necessary for the villain’s plan?”
* Defeats sting much more when it feels like the heroes actually had a chance. Heroes losing a major battle when it feels like they might’ve won is devastating; heroes losing a battle when winning would’ve ruined the villain’s plan is just an “oh well” moment.
* It humanizes the villain; they come off more as a person or group the heroes are working against, and less as a force of plot that stops once it reaches the station of the climax.
* It can make the villain look more competent. If, for example, the heroic forces commit to an attack to destroy the villain’s superweapon, and the villain then he has his forces surround and destroy the overextended forces before having them raze the target that’s no longer defended by the now destroyed force, then he’s down a superweapon, but still destroyed his target, and the problem of the superweapon is replaced by one of a much stronger force. It shows that defeating him won’t just come down to hitting some Achilles’ heel. You’d have to consider not just whether the villain can stop what you’re doing, but also what he could do as a result. By contrast, if the heroic forces just got obliterated in their attempt, you’d see that the villain was more powerful, but it wouldn’t show competence in particular.
Of course, as I mentioned, I understand that my preference here isn’t common. It’s much easier to keep an antagonist threatening by showing them approaching their goal as the hero fails to slow them down. It’s very easy to have a villain lose in a way that just makes them look weak or incompetent, and people often avoid that in a way that frames the heroic victory as inconsequential (e.g. “all according to my master plan”). Also, I have more of an appreciation for flexible planning, given my work history; things rarely go according to plan even when you *don’t* have people actively working against you, and adaptability is a common trait among the best military commanders throughout history. However, generally, making a big plan that goes off without a hitch is seen as more impressive than revising the plan as the situation changes, so a character that’s meant to be intimidating will more commonly seem to have everything under control until their downfall.
I’m actually with you on the competent villain. It’s fun to see a villain who can recover from disruption – or does have some plan B in case plan A goes wrong (as with the superweapon – sacrifice it and use the loss of protectors to destroy the target directly).
There are ways of having the heros win without completely destroying the villain’s chances.
Big agree. A villain who is good at adapting to setbacks is far more threatening, and makes for a far more tense story, than one who relies on a plan with a thousand and one moving parts where a single thing going wrong (including a bunch of possibilities they couldn’t possibly plan for or see coming) brings the whole thing crashing down. The best plans are always the simplest, because there are fewer things that can go wrong. And the best planners are the ones that can create those simple plans. A villain who sets up a Rube Goldberg scheme, sets off the first step, and watches it all fall into place doesn’t look diabolical – they look like an idiot who took a huge gamble which only paid off because the writer needed it to.
I’m pleasantly surprised to find more than one person agreeing with me on this here! Given how popular such characters tend to be, and how I’ve always seemed to be alone in my loathing of these “impossible strategist” characters in the communities where they exist, I figured my perspective was just unrelatable for most. Added to that is the fact that writing communities tend to put a lot of focus on making the villain menacing and dangerous, but relatively little on avoiding the impression that actions taken directly against them before the obvious climax are pointless. (This article is one example – that’s not a criticism of it, however. It’s not the trees, it’s the forest.)
Your plan being unwaveringly successful until the first setback causes everything to come undone doesn’t personally make a villain look impressive to me – it makes them look like they were able to brute force everything into their favor, or, even worse (like in the comment above), have the most random and unpredictable details fall into place by pure chance. It’s like painting a chess player as a grandmaster because they win after starting games with queens replacing all their minor pieces.
A Plan B, as mentioned in the other comment, can also be a really good way to show a villain’s foresight while also showing them being reasonably grounded. I absolutely love it and feel it hits very hard when done just right; but I feel that a lot of writers do it badly.
To me, a good Plan B:
* Should either be mutually exclusive with Plan A, or have a logical reason for being used as a fallback to Plan A (i.e. the villain isn’t just holding back in a high-stakes battle for funsies)
* Should be deployed as a result of Plan A becoming impossible or infeasible (i.e. the heroes did something meaningful to stop the initial plan)
* Should show an adaptation to the circumstances that would cause plan A to fail, as opposed to something randomly invoked to restore the power balance
*Shouldn’t seem like the villain is just doing damage mitigation as the heroes are rolling on through
I’ve always preferred the villain who can still ‘win it’ to a degree when the heroes have disturbed their plans. It makes the villain competent and far more dangerous than if they just follow their plan.
A good Plan B for me:
– is different from Plan A and would either be more dangerous to pull through with or depend on something less reliable (so Plan A is just the better choice)
– might not be quite as successful (‘I got the plan, but not the scientist – still a win’)
– should show that the villain can ‘think on their feet’ and change plans according to the situation
– should definitely not be only damage control, but also a win to a degree
Perhaps it’s because I’m writing a nominal ‘villain’ with Isadora, but I do love a good competent villain.
It seems we pretty much agree on what constitutes a good Plan B – not the ideal way the villain would prefer things to work, but an adaptation that shows that the villain is flexible, and that the heroes getting a victory doesn’t necessarily give them room to breathe.
If you don’t mind me asking, what would you be willing to tell me about your character in that regard? It’d be nice to get a better understanding of what people with a similar sort of appreciation for adaptable villains look for, given the dearth of such characters in fiction. For the same reason, I was going to use what I currently have outlined for one such character in my story to illustrate the points I made in the first post, but decided I didn’t want to come off as self-aggrandizing. It’s hard to find examples to illustrate what I’d like when they’re rarely done. (If you would prefer not to share anything, that’s also fine – I respect wanting to keep your ideas to yourself. I don’t want to be presumptuous.)
Isadora is nominally a villain – she’s a member of the Villain’s Cabal, the official organisation of the villains in this world (even an enforcer by the end of the second set of stories). Yet, she’s not really doing anything overly evil – she’s a freelancing necromancer, creating undead workers or fighters for others. Or fighting a century-old lich when necessary. Or taking out Dracula and his three lieutenants for good.
In her world, there are supervillains and superheroes, but there’s also a lot of rulework and guidelines for how they are allowed to engage. Isadora was born into an old heroic family and was expected to become a professional damsel (yep, that job exists) like her mother. She never wanted to and worked against it. Her father’s nemesis helped her – in the beginning mostly to annoy her father, later because he saw her talents.
Isadora’s own nemesis is her brother who wants to succeed their father one day. He chose her – it makes for a good story when the older brother is bringing the little sister back to the right side. Heroes work on popularity and he wants to gain as much as he can. Villains do it for the money, though, so Isadora isn’t usually caring for her official reputation.
Isadora is a mastermind, a strategist who directs her undead workers and fighters to defeat her enemies. She can think on her feet and she knows when to pull back and admit defeat, yet she can also turn the tides. She can fight as well, but it’s the last line of defence for her (well, the last line is a familiar she got with her powers to raise the dead). If she has to fight, something clearly has already gone wrong.
All in all, Isadora is less villain and more anti-hero while her brother Connor is less perfect hero and more ‘hero in name only,’ due to his behaviour. Yet, she’s not doing things ‘for good’ or ‘for the public,’ she is selfish in her acts quite often, even when investigating a crime (she’s been accused of it) or when she takes out a lich (she actually gets paid for it).
If you want a guy who clearly starts out villainous, you might want to look into the “Johannes Cabal” series.
Good points there. On a related note, heroes seem very reactive to the villain’s plans so often. Might stories be better if the heroes make one plan, see that fall through, and then go to plan B as well?
There are a few stories which do that. I usually like that better and Isadora is more proactive than quite some heroes. So is one of the MCs of the story “Changing Plans” I’ve also written. She’s a (later on) former villain and knows about being proactive and having a Plan B at hand.
Could #6 be “The outcome is painfully obvious?”
At the end of The Matrix, Neo is gunned down, but they’ve been hammering the “He is THE ONE” stuff so hard that it’s instantly obvious that he’s died to do the death and resurrection bit, just like any other cheap Jesus knock-off, and the buildup to the inevitable resurrection is annoying rather than suspenseful.
At the opposite extreme, we have any number of zombie apocalypse stories where the tone and situation are so bleak that we’d know these people are doomed even if it wasn’t a genre requirement.
Yes, certainly, that destroys the uncertainty required for tension. You might remember it came up in my Pendergast critique.