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November 2022
Winter is upon us, with all its stress-inducing activities. Julie and Deb invite you to kick back with a nog of your choice, maybe some cookies (or fruitcake, which is Deb’s preferred indulgence), and let us entertain, amuse, and bemuse you.
JULIE WRAY HERMAN
I’ve been trying to think of a great example of a recent read that was tense, like so super tense that I nearly ripped the pages turning them. I thought of THE HAZEL WOOD, by Melissa Albert. I thought of THE BLACK GOD’s DRUMS, by P. Djèlí Clark. Jamaican Dirigible Pirates, need I say more?
Then I thought about Colleen Hoover. Now, I’ve been living under a rock in a hole in the ground for the past three years, between COVID and grad school, so it came as a bit of a surprise that there was a woman out there outselling the big guys and her name wasn’t Mary Higgins Clark. I figured I’d best catch up. I hopped onto LIBBY to see if I could get one from the library, and the answer was NOPE. I was 342nd in line for one, 465th in line for another, and whew, only 97th in line for the third one I tried. This lady has some serious fans.
My working theory here is that fandom and tension must be sisters. Hoover’s reviews have her mastery of tension at a hefty 99.999999% If the writer gets you hooked, then keeps the line taut through scene tension—will the heroine accomplish their goal?—then they can drag you right on through chapter after chapter without you stopping to check to see if another book is nearby, or a movie, or dinner, laundry, a spouse, or anything else that might need attention.
Over the course of a novel, this can be done through turns, or reversing the reader’s expectations, in the storyline. Something you thought you had all figured out was not what you assumed. This slight of hand can be super tricky, and my favorite way to accomplish it is to use a wee bit of subtext — have say, Mary, say something that can be interpreted (sometimes by another character in the scene) in one way, when Mary really meant something much more interesting. The biggest trick is to have the reader give a satisfied, “OOOOhhhh!” at the end, not a head-scratching, “Huh?”
So here’s to the Alberts and Clarks and Hoovers of the publishing world. Keep us on our toes and we’ll be happy readers.
Until next month,
Julie
- One Good Thing:
Y’all! There is a new Knives Out movie in theaters now (or soon, I get confused) If it’s anything like the first one, it will offer turns aplenty to keep you hooked right on through to the dénouement. And then there’s Daniel Craig sporting a suspicious southern accent. Sorry, must go fan myself a bit.
Julie Wray Herman and her husband live outside of Austin. She is rapidly approaching that time when the wip will fly on its own, and garner rejections and hopefully the yes it needs to find a true home. Visit her website at juliewherman.com or follow her on social media: @juliewrayh for FB, Twitter and juliewherman.com
DEBORAH-ZENHA ADAMS
In a mystery novel, if your protagonist moves in next door to a guy named Hannibal Lecter, you’ve got tension. In a romance, you can create tension by putting the new girlfriend and the ex-wife at the same table. But hey….
Poems need tension, too. How’s that supposed to work?
First of all, let’s be clear about the tension involved. I don’t mean the source of an Excedrin headache, of course. It’s about tension in literary works, which comes down to a balance between two opposing forces. It’s like a game of Tug of War in which each team is equal in terms of strength and strategy.
Allen Tate gets credit for nailing down the concept of poetic tension, a term he derived by dropping the prefixes from intention (denotative) and extension (connotative). Tate wasn’t suggesting that we put an ominous, shadowy figure in our poems, though. He was insisting that a well-written poem must have a surface level meaning and a deeper meaning, and that both those meanings should be equally balanced.
This isn’t a thesis, so I won’t go any deeper into Tate’s mind than that. (If you just can’t get enough of this topic, check out Tate’s essay “Tension in Poetry” in The Man of Letters in the Modern World, Selected Essays and Beth Ann Fennelly’s essay “Everything But.”)
At its heart, poetic tension recognizes that a poem comes to life when both these forces are present and playing nicely together with a number of other elements, including but not limited to:~Line breaks (enjambment is your friend!)~Caesura~Meter~Unexpected imagery and/or juxtapositions
I’ll add something else to the list:~Ending it
Tate is long dead, so he can’t contradict me on this. Malcolm Glass (one of Tate’s students, as it happens) taught me that poems often die in the last line. We go on too long, we yammer, we explain, we pontificate, we tell you whether it was the lady or the tiger, we release all the tension in one big burst. Like that.
So ’bye, and go write something.
One Thing to Share:
I removed the original last line from this poem and sent it off. One/Jacar Press accepted it, and suggested that I remove the remaining last line, which I did, and they were right about that.
Deborah-Zenha Adams is an award-winning author of novels, short fiction, CNF, and poetry. You’re invited to visit her website, where everything’s free and you can dress as you please.
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