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mbarkerWriting Excuses 19.35: A Close Reading on Tension: An Overview and Why Ring Shout
Key points: Tension: how do you create, build, and release it? Various forms, contextual, in text, anticipation and denial, movement and resolution. Lizard brain or primal tension, intellectual tension, emotional tension. Discordance. Historical fantasy pits what the audience knows about history against the tension of the story and how you have changed the world. Tension as potential energy, the rock on the top of the hill. It's going to roll! Tension can be horror or suspense, released by the jump scare or awful revelation, but it can also be released through a joke or comedic drop. Sometimes we braid physical, emotional, and intellectual tension. Tension: someone walking towards an open manhole. Tension plays with pattern recognition, tapping into narrative inevitability, patterns and expected resolutions.
[Season 19, Episode 35]
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
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[Season 19, Episode 35]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: An Overview and Why Ring Shout
[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
[DongWon] So, this week, we are continuing our close reading series by looking at Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark. We wanted to talk about this book in particular because as we're looking into the segment on tension, and how do we talk about how you create, sort of build, and then release tension over the course of a story, we realized that shorter works can be really useful in examining how these techniques work in the best ways to go about doing that. So we wanted to pick a novella, and this is a very tense, very dark novella that we want to talk about in a little more detail.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I particularly found compelling about it is that it uses tension in more than one way. We'll be talking about a bunch of these throughout the next couple of episodes, contextual versus in text, anticipation and denial, movement and resolution, but you're also seeing it in terms of the speed with which the tension is deployed, and many of the tools that he's using from the character to the situation. It's got a lot of good examples for us to use.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Erin] I also think it's just really cool as a… To compare with our other novella from earlier in the year. Because This Is How You Lose the Time War is about fantastical, imaginative landscapes and this is a very grounded, very sort of feels like it's got a foot in the real world, but still fantastical story. So I think it's really important to think about how do our tools work, both when you're creating something completely new and when we're drawing from something that we know maybe a lot better.
[Howard] I loved reading this so much that I read it all in one afternoon. Maybe that's because the tools were just used so well to keep me tense that I couldn't put it down until I was done with it.
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to say, for those of you who are a little bit jumpy, I was listening to this audiobook, and I had to stop because I needed to be able to skim over the parts that were too much for me. I can't do horror. While this book is not actually horror, it's a straight up monster book. It's monster hunting, and it's basically an adventure novel. There are parts of it that are using tools from horror to create tension, and I couldn't listen to it in audiobook.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] It was really good, and I was like, I have to stop. This is not okay.
[DongWon] As the cover might indicate, it is also dealing with a lot of real-world trauma and tension. A lot of this is pulled from actual history or begins in actual historical events, and then adds a fantasy layer on top of it. So, just a heads up to all of our audience, that we're going to be getting into some pretty heavy topical topics and conversation here.
[Erin] Be ready for it.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Or as ready as you can be. So, but it is good to note, especially if you're just starting to read the book now, so that you're not… So that you have some preparation for what is to come. But who can really prepare for tension in truth?
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] No. No. That was… That's actually one of the things… We'll talk about this deeper into the episodes, but one of the things that I particularly appreciated and why it was so hard is that I would see the tension and I would brace myself for one kind of problem, and then it would be something else that was sig… I was not prepared for.
[DongWon] The bait and switch is such a useful technique.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] One place I'd love to start, actually, as we're diving into this conversation, is actually to not start with the writing itself, but to start from a publishing angle, because I just touched on it briefly, but I think the cover of this book is absolutely brilliant, and does such a fantastic job of signaling the kind of story that we're going to be engaging in, and already increasing the tension there. It really hits on the thing that you were just saying, Mary Robinette, of you have this figure of the white hood, which is very iconic and symbolic and menacing. But then when you look closer, Erin, you and I were talking about this right before we started, you can see the teeth eyes… The teeth in the eyeholes, which again, I think is for you, like, expecting one thing and then realizing, oh, there's another layer here that's upsetting and difficult.
[Howard] Okay. I didn't even look at the cover. I was… Admission, I read this on assignment. I had not picked it up before I knew we were going to record it. But then I picked it up and immediately just opened it up and started reading. Sat down and started reading. The first time I stopped and set it down and looked at the cover, I looked at it and went, "Ewww."
[Laughter]
[Howard] Because they… Because now I knew what might be there and, whew, boy, it was fun. It's very stylized. It's not like…
[DongWon] The cover. Yeah.
[Howard] You're looking at something graphic. It's just… That's just cool.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I have to admit that I was reading it in the airport and I had the thought of this book does not look like the book that I'm reading to someone who does not know what this book is.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That creates another additional tension. That I think is very intentional tension.
[DongWon] Yeah. It's a book designed to make you uncomfortable in a number of ways. Some of that is the contextual elements in terms of the packaging and the design and how it was published and some of that is the content itself.
[Erin] Yeah. I just keep thinking about the teeth eyes.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Erin] Sorry, I'm like…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] The teeth eyes… I have a… Uhn Uh.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I love that. I always think… This is a slight tangent, but I think there's something about putting things together that just don't feel like they could ever belong together that creates like a visceral lizard brain tension.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Because I think that we can have tension, like, in the front of our brains, where it's like this is an intellectual tension. Why is it like this? But then there's like the part of us that's like, "No. Eyeholes with teeth? Bad!"
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[Erin] Like the parts of you that would have been afraid of, like, a wolf back in the day is activated. I love when stories are working both on that primal tension level…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And the intellectual. And the emotional tension level. I think this one does all three, which is so cool.
[DongWon] Yeah. For me, one of the big things for me is like a kind of discordance. Right? So if I'm watching supernatural horror, I could ride with lots of gore, lots of violence, doesn't throw me at all. But you put me in a real-world context, like a home invasion story, or somebody using something that's not meant to be a weapon as a weapon, I'm deeply unsettled and very uncomfortable, and often have to bail. There's a memorable scene in a movie called [Taten?] Involving a knitting needle that if anybody's seen it, I was like, I'm done. I gotta bail on this movie. I very rarely bail on movies. But sometimes that discordance, being able to lean into a kind of tension where you're making people uncomfortable by creating things that shouldn't go together can be so powerful and disruptive.
[Mary Robinette] It is one of the best tools to use when you're writing anything that's set like any sort of historical fantasy. Because there is the tension of what the audience knows about the history that is in conversation with the tension of the story that is also in conversation with the tension of the way you have changed the world. These three things can cause the story to become wildly unpredictable to the audience, and for them to also bring their own… Like, the places where they're putting their own pressure on the story from the outside, from a… Which this does great things with.
[Howard] I sometimes think of tension in terms of potential energy, the rock at the top of the hill. I know that there isn't much keeping this from rolling, from heading down the hill, and I think I know which way it's going to roll. It doesn't have to be frightening. It doesn't even necessarily have to be uncomfortable. It just has to be this awareness that this state of things cannot hold. Something is going to move. I don't know what's going to move, but it has to move, because this can't keep up. That's every other page for me on the way through Ring Shout.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] Love it!
[DongWon] Well, this is something you talk about a lot, Howard, is that tension can be multiple things. Right? We're talking about tension in a horror context, or, like, a suspense context, because of this particular book. But tension also can be released through a joke. Right? You can use a comedic drop instead of the jump scare, or the reveal of something awful. That's still tension building the same way. I think about the movie director Jordan Peel, being such a brilliant horror filmmaker, because he's a brilliant comedian, too. Right? So many of the skills that go into one can go into the other. There's a moment in the Candyman reboot that they did a few years ago where a woman opens the door down the basement stairs, and it's like these long stairs descending into darkness. This is like this incredibly tense moment. It just feels awful. Then she just goes, "Nope," and closes the door.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] The theater I was in just burst out laughing completely. It was like a perfect use of tension and release in that moment, although, even though in a horror movie, not for a horrific purpose. In a way that, as we're talking about this, I want you to think about all the different ways in which tension can be deployed as a narrative tool, even though, because of this, we're going to be focused on the dark side of it.
[Erin] Yeah. I think we often like braid the different types of tension, and just… Like you're saying, call them all tension. But, thinking back to kind of the, like, physical, emotional, and intellectual tension, I was thinking about it again when you are talking about the rock at the top of the hill, because I'm thinking, if you're watching a snowball go down a mountain and you're at the bottom, like, intellectually, you know it will gather speed and eventually crush you. Eventually, it will come close enough that you will really know that it's about to crush you…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Also… I don't know, your mom's standing there. So you have to save her from the avalanche that is about to come up on you. But, different people will react in different ways. Like, some people can see the most terrific physical, like a slasher movie, forever…
[DongWon Yep.
[Erin] And it will have no impact. They will not feel any tension. They're like, I don't care about physical danger, but emotional danger gets me.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Erin] Like, somebody being embarrassed to me is harder to watch than somebody being hacked into bits.
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Erin] So, if you're thinking about all the time where are you deploying each of those types of tension, then you'll get the widest audience possible feeling tense.
[DongWon] Yep. Speaking of keeping balls rolling and moving things along, we're going to take a break for a moment and we will be right back.
[DongWon] Late last fall, Netflix released a new animated show called Blue Eye Samurai. I was initially skeptical, but was completely won over by the stunning animation style and impeccable action choreography. Frankly, I expected a simplistic good time, kind of like a John Wick thing, but was surprised by how thoughtful the show is about race and Empire and violence. It's one of those hyper kinetic action shows, but one that knows when to slow down and ask questions about its hero and the world she inhabits.
[Howard] Mel Brooks famously said that comedy is you falling into a manhole and dying. Tragedy is me with a hangnail.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] When I think of tension in terms of this, you see someone walking and you see an open manhole and there is tension, but you don't yet know if the resolution is going to be comedy or tragedy, because you don't know what's in that hole. That's part of… That unexpected aspect of it. I mean, there's the tension of the potential energy of something is going to fall, but there's the unexpected, the darkness of that manhole. It might have a very silly octopus in it. It might have a very ferocious octopus in it. I don't know.
[DongWon] I talk a lot about pattern recognition when it comes to fiction. Right? I think tension is a thing that is very consciously playing on pattern recognition. It taps into something I think of as narrative inevitability. Once you start setting up a certain pattern, people will expect that to conclude in a certain way. They'll expect a resolution of that. Right? The example I was talking about earlier of heroine opens the door to a dark basement, you're like, "Oh, she's going to go down there and something bad's going to happen." You expect that resolution. That's where the tension, that's where the dread, that's where the energy in that scene is coming from. As you're talking about, Howard, it was a release in comedy instead of in horror by her closing the door in a very funny way. But it was the refusal to resolve that tension as opposed to giving into it, I think, is a thing to think about as you're building it. So, how do you actively use the patterns of storytelling to manipulate your audience's emotional state?
[Mary Robinette]. It's something that we talked about in a previous episode… Previous season, when we did a dive into tension. We talked about anticipation and the patterns that the listener… Or the reader, recognizes. As we're talking about Ring Shout, one of the things that I want to point out is that you'll hear us using different terms than we used previously. That's because the terms of art for tension, there are so many different ways to apply it, that all of the things that we're talking about are basically us attempting to apply a lens or some sort of words to "this makes me feel some feels."
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Yeah. Tension's about emotion is the main thing to think about here.
[Erin] I'm feeling some kind of way [garbled]
[chuckles]
[Erin] Expressions. I also think it just occurred to me that, like, thinking about the manhole. There was a recent question put out in the writing world, of whether or not twists make sense. Because the theory is if the twist is actually completely unexpected, it actually feels like a trick. Like, if you could not anticipate it at all, it feels like the author being clever at your expense. But I think one way you can actually get around that, if you want to have the truly surprising twist, is by making the emotions carry through even if the facts don't. So if you're walking down the street and there's a manhole cover, the, like, open hole in front of you. But you step on it, it turns out it's an optical illusion. It was just a sidewalk artist doing it. So the audience is, like, "Aha. You fooled me." Then the person takes another step and gets hit by a truck.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] The hitting by a truck makes no sense, maybe, but you were still in that moment of tension, right at the moment that something happened. So it feels more earned.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Even though the truck came out of nowhere.
[DongWon] Yeah. The example I always think of is the red writing from the Game of Thrones. Right? It's like this moment that is such a famously twist moment, of, like, "Oh, my God, nobody anticipated that," but it made so much logical sense and emotional sense where the characters were at, that you could see how it was inevitable in retrospect. Right? So tension can also be… I'm talking about narrative patterns, and you know something is going to happen, but it's fun to hold that back, of understanding exactly what the event will be that will release the tension. Right? So it's another way to think about that.
[Howard] One of the things that I want to point out before we wrap up is that as part of the close reading series, we want you to read the book before you listen to the episodes. When you are doing this… Read the book. Do a close reading of the book. Think about why the book is making you tense. Think about choice of language, the choice of point of view, what decisions are being made. By all means, enjoy the book. But read it closely and try to learn from it. That's… At the beginning of the episode, why did we pick Ring Shout. Because we can learn from it. We can learn a lot from it.
[DongWon] That dovetails very beautifully with my homework. Which is, I basically want you to do what Howard described to a book that you love or a movie that you love. Take a suspenseful story that you really enjoyed, that you feel the kind of feelings that were talking about. Either anticipation or dread or that kind of emotional tension. What I want you to do is write an outline for that work. Create that outline. Note where that tension was coming in for you and how it was resolved. Right? From that, you'll have a little bit of a map and a little bit of a key to begin to understand some of the stuff we're going to talk about in the coming episodes.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
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