Narrative Tension and Meta-tension

June 2024 ‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒ 6 minute read

Narrative tension is a fundamental, all-encompassing force layered throughout the many different levels of a story.

Anyone who has read a novel knows something of its underlying mechanics. All stories have conflict. All conflict creates tension. Within a story, tension is created in not knowing how that conflict will be resolved.

In physics, tension is described as an action-reaction force acting on an object. In literature, narrative tension is an action-reaction force within the story acting upon the reader.

That is, narrative tension is the force which compels the reader to keep reading — this is because they want to know what happens next.

The first and most obvious layer of tension is created by the most direct form of this conflict: the story itself. That is, a plot, with characters, in a setting. The interplay of these three fundamental features is what generates drama, so from now on I'm going to refer to this first layer as dramatic tension.

Plot is the sequence of events which describe the story, detailing the conflict and how it is resolved. Characters are the vehicle which plot uses to portray this. Setting considers the world which story is set in, which by extension dictates the underlying rules of the plot and the cultural dynamics of the characters.

By introducing flawed, unfulfilled characters within the context of a mysterious or unresolved situation, this immediately sparks tension within the reader, which initially will be expressed by interrogative questions: What? Where? When? Who? Why? How?

In the course of the story, these interrogative questions are all eventually answered by the plot arc (what), the setting (where), the chronology of events (when), the characters (who), the character motivations (why) and the plot devices (how). Sometimes these answers will be elucidated by pure exposition, which involves directly telling the reader information; eg. writing explicitly that 'Ender Wiggins is a strategic genius'. Other times the answers will be more subtly incorporated within the story itself, which involves showing the audience instead of telling them; eg. putting Ender Wiggins in a battle scenerio where he uses strategically genius strategy.

While dramatic tension and its accompanying interrogative questions are inherent within all stories, most genres tend to focus particularly on one specific question type. Here is my rough approxiamation of this.

Genre	Question	Answer	Explanation
Thriller/Horror	When?	Plot Sequencing	The driving dramatic tension within a thriller or horror is suspense. Suspense is when the reader knows something is going to happen — they just don't know when. So the audience is constantly asking themselves when something will happen, and the plot sequencing addresses this.
Action/Adventure	What?	Plot Development	More than any other genre, the driver of action and adventure is the need to know what happens next? It doesn't actually matter much how or when or why something is happening, but the simple process of developing the plot with more action and happenings is all that's really needed to move the story along. Also tends to use a McGuffin to achieve this.
Mystery	How?	Plot Exploration	Rather than developing the plot further, mysteries document the deconstruction and exploration of a plot, for the sole reason of figuring out its inner mechanics, or in other words, how it occurred.
Romance/Drama	Who?	Character Development	The focus of a romance or a drama is never its plot, but rather its characters, and who they are. This includes their likes, their dislikes and most importantly, their dynamics with the other characters.
Modernist	Why?	Character Exploration	Modernist novels are usually presented through the lens of the innermost thoughts and machinations of the protagonist. In this way, the driver of modernist novels is the question of why the protagonist is thinking and doing the things they are. This is then answered through this exploration of their mind throughout the story.
Sci-Fi/Fantasy	Where?	Setting Exploration	The underlying basis of any sci-fi or fantasy is found purely in its world building. In fantasy this may look like a magic system; in sci-fi this may look like a technological system. Either way, it is the exploration of these features of the setting which form the bedrock from which the entire story is built upon.

Beyond the conflict of the drama itself, there should also reflect a conflict of themes. This is the second layer of tension within a story. Thematic conflict is a battle of ideas; more specifically, it occurs whenever the protagonist has contradicting views or motivations with another character, themself or even humanity as a whole.

Significantly, without thematic conflict a story will feel fairly meaningless. While dramatic tension engages the audience, thematic tension resonates with the audience. Because thematic tension adds another layer on top of dramatic tension, this provides the story with depth.

Thematic tension may be as basic as good vs evil (Harry Potter, Lord of The Rings), does the end justify the means (Enders Game, Earths Past) or justice vs injustice (To Kill a Mockingbird). In each of these examples, thematic conflict is not explicit to the story itself, but rather a invisible, holistic feature built into its very structure and make-up.

Its important that thematic tension remains in the background of the story — as soon as the audience feels as though the themes are being shoved down their throat, the drama, and therefore the story itself, collapses completely.

The third layer of tension is unique to phyical paper books, and is a kind of meta-tension.

Consider: there is something borderline sublime in holding a physical novel in your hands. To feel the pages beneath your fingers is much more than a mere sensation. In one hand you grip a continuous feedback loop of progress, progress which contains the weight of events, worlds and characters already built.

In the other hand you grip pure imaginative potential, the potential of every direction the story could go, every way the characters could develop and every element of prose which could be employed.

To hold a book in your hands is to hold both its past and its future, and to read is to experience its present.

The third layer of tension is unique to this kinaesthetic experience of reading a physical novel, and is created due to the urgency within the reader regarding the pages remaining in the story. When reading a physical book you always know, either consciously or subconsciously, approximately how long is left to resolve the story. While a reader may not know exactly how a conflict will be resolved, they do know that it must be resolved somehow within these remaining pages.

By putting a 'page limit' on the lack of closure, this creates a kind of meta-tension. With each page you draw closer to the end of the story, and with each page you are demanding for every loose end to be tied up, every character arc to be completed and every mystery to be clarified.

eBooks provide a similar, but subtly different experience. Though the actual content may remain the same, when reading an eBook your progress becomes somewhat obfuscated.

When reading a physical book you always know where you are in the novel, but when reading an eBook you must purposefully determine it. Because of this small difference, eBooks lose a layer of tension which is inherent in all physical books. However, within this very loss is the potential for an adjacently unique reading experience.

While eBooks do preserve the first and second layers of tension inherent within the story itself, because there is no continuous feedback loop of progress created by physical pages, eBooks lack this third meta-tension.¹Admittedly, meta-tension can be preserved by continually or intermittently tapping to see your progress. But this ends up inevitably distracting from the story itself, and especially so when you have reached the climax.

However, this raises some intriguing opportunities. By deliberately obscuring when a book may end, this provides authors the ability to play with the meta-tension created by their writing.

For example, an author could write a conclusion to a story to make it seem like the story had truly finished, when in actuality it hadn't. In order to achieve this effect the conclusion would have to be highly convincing, enough to release all tension left within the story.

Another similar possibility could be employed in postmodern works involving metafiction (stories nested within stories). For example, while it may seem as though a story is finished, that story could simply be a feature of an even grander narrative.

As far as I know, this technique hasn't been leveraged much, and maybe this is due to the fact that most eBooks began life on paper before they become available digitally. However, as eBooks become not just embedded, but actually taken for granted within the industry, the potential for this kind of specifically tailored story grows considerably.

For each of these three layers, the catharsis of a conclusion relies on the the tension to be resolved in each of them. Significantly, because by their very nature they are layered on top of each other, the resolution of a story simultaneously marks the resolution its plot, themes and physical pages.

← →