Guest Post by Jack Smith

Fiction depends on tension.  Tension—a felt response to conflict—must be heightened as well as diminished in a literary work.  Where this is accomplished depends on the nature of the plot and the character arc.  While tension is created by practically every story element, pacing is largely a result of style and narrative technique.  The pacing of a work affects the tension but also creates mood and tone.   In every fictional work you write, you must decide on both tension and pacing.  While much of this may be a matter of intuition and feel, you can also plan out matters of tension and pacing as you write and revise your work.   This amounts to a six-stage process.

I. Decide on the nature of the tension in your story or novel. Basically there are three major types of fictional works according to tension.
A. The five-stage plot structure, where tension must be gradually (though not continuously) increased to the story’s crisis and climax, followed by falling action and denouement.
B. The epiphany story where tension gradually builds toward a final, rather sudden, clarifying vision, on the part of the protagonist.
C. The story where tension builds at times, is released, or partly released, but does not build toward a climax at the end—but rather closes with the protagonist’s psychological distillation of several bumps along the way, no one bump necessarily involving more tension than the others.
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