That tension thing in popular adventure literature (and films) is also called “suspense”.
Suspense is based on two questions the reader asks:
- OMG what’s going to happen next?
- OMG what’s going on?
When a review says a story is “a page-turning roller coaster ride” generally
this is what they mean.
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Suspense layers:
- Big question and outcome uncertainty for the central story;
- Middle-sized questions and outcome uncertainties for sub-arcs;
- Tiny short-lived questions and outcome uncertainties from chapter to chapter.
Ideally the tiny building blocks of point 3 are an endless procession of questions and uncertainties, with the moment an answer and a resolution is provided to one, a second has already taken its place.
Also, ideally, the tiny building blocks of point 3 have a parallel second function of moving along the larger questions and uncertainties of point 2, which in turn, ideally, is made up of elements that move along the central question and uncertainty of point 1.
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Helpful tricks:
- Drawing out actions and introducing unexpected difficulties
- Providing glimpses, but not showing full picture
- The Countdown
- Foreshadowing
- Making character feel tension and fear the reader identifies with
- Drawing in opener at start of scene/chapter
- Cliffhanger at end of scene/chapter
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Once you’ve mastered the mechanics of suspense, you can turn any story into a “roller coaster page-turner” and really don’t need any other writerly skills beyond the generic “prose not falling apart” level, nor ideas beyond "not ripped off the latest Marvel flick" level, nor characters beyond "vintage TV serial fodder". Good suspense makes all that not matter. There is a writer for kids (R.L. Stine) and a writer for adults and kids (James Patterson) and a badass horror writer (Richard Laymon) who are so good at suspense they don’t need anything else.
Dean Koontz is also as good at suspense, if not slightly better, but he also likes descriptive writing. Any other writer would produce unreadable fluff with that amount of descriptions, but Koontz keeps inserting suspense elements, and people keep leafing through. Koontz also inserts little social rants, which he learned from John D Macdonald—he was the pioneer of using suspense mechanics to force readers to read his rants put into the mouths of characters or for the asides and musings of the narrator. Stephen King venerates John D Macdonald for pretty much the same reason—showing you can indeed muse and rumble and rant about whatever, or go on poetic descriptive tangents, as long as it’s all flanked by suspense elements that force the reader to keep reading.
With correctly inserted suspense elements, you can force the reader to read anything. He may hate himself afterwards for the “time wasted” but will have to admit that “he read the damn thing in a day”.
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Sometimes the best writers of thriller and horror, as in the ones whose prose is up there with Fitzgerald and Greene, and who have collected all the awards—have very weak suspense mechanics in the page-turning sense, so by themselves they rarely, if ever, achieve commercial success. Now, if, for example some master of suspense like Stephen King collaborates with some master of prose like Peter Straub, terrific things happen. However, Charles L Grant and Ramsey Campbell, for example, did
not find their Stephen Kings* to team up with, and end up with shelves full of awards and deep respect from their fifteen readers (me included).
Every sentence-by-sentence or plot-point-by-plot-point or character-shallowness critique of Dan Brown, for example, misses the point, which is his solid use of suspense page-turner mechanics combined with commercially functional central concepts.
Popularity-wise**, strong suspense will get you through times of weak prose better than strong prose will get you through times of weak suspense.
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* But if they had, oh if they had. If Charles L Grant had teamed up with F Paul Wilson or Bentley Little, and if Ramsey Campbell had teamed up with Graham Masterton or Shaun Hutson--wowza! Maybe in an alternative Earth this really happened.
** Not as a universal certainty, of course, but as a general rule of thumb