The best stories are the ones that keep us interested and what interests most readers is tension. Tension is that feeling of conflict between what the protagonist wants and the barriers in the way of that happening. The best way to think of tension is to imagine what it means in our own lives. When we are tense, it is usually because there is some level of stress and conflict in our lives. Perhaps you have just had an argument with your spouse or can’t pay an important bill. This causes stress which in turn makes us tense.

It is no different in the definition of fictional tension except that this tension is engineered by the writer. Tension in real life ebbs and flows usually and often never really achieves any sense of closure. In stories, this would be unsatisfying to the reader so this engineering gives us latitude to do a variety of things that makes everyday tension into entertainment. The first and most important thing is to increase the tension throughout the story and the second is to provide closure in some sense by the end of the story.

Increasing the tension in a story looks somewhat like a bar chart. You start at a baseline and describe what the conflict will be. Then, create a barrier that the protagonist has to overcome. While he or she is working on overcoming this, make another more difficult barrier. In fact, often the tension is increased because solving the first problem creates a second more difficult problem. With each increasing problem, the risk needs to increase too.

For example, your main character may start with self esteem issues and begin the story by losing his job due to an error he made. Then, because of his loss of income his mortgage is going to foreclose on him and his wife is going to leave him. So, desperately he seeks work and ultimately takes a job unwittingly with the mafia that endangers his life and an error he makes on the job puts his family’s life into danger as well. See how trying to solve the problem makes the tension worse and the story more interesting? Your character starts by feeling bad about himself and ends up putting his family’s lives in danger because of errors he made.

The wrong way to build tension for this story would be to have your character make a bargain with his mortgage company and go back and make a deal with his old boss who hires him back. This may be how a real person would react, but it makes for a boring story because the tension does not increase.

So, now that you have built up the tension in your story, you will have to find a way to resolve it. Usually, this will have something to do with the main conflict that your character has with him or herself initially. In the case of our story above it is self esteem. Somehow, the main character will need to resolve his issues, build some confidence and save his family. That provides closure that is more abundant in fiction than in real life and certainly more satisfying. Of course, you could have your main character fail and everyone die. It has been done before but you need to make sure that you are doing this for a reason or your characters will feel betrayed. And it should also have been built in from the beginning. Not resolving conflict in a story is risky and needs to be planned out well.

Otherwise, if you work hard to build tension and complicate your protagonist’s life and work your way to a fulfilling and logical conclusion you will have done your job as a stress engineering fiction writer and your readers will love you for it.