Writing 102: Tension and Pacing
Greetings and sputum! Well, as long as it is not on my face, I don’t really care, but I know some cultures take grave insult to it regardless. Anyway, lookie here, two Anne posts in a row? Divinum be praised! Take it from here Anne–what are you bringing our readers today?
(Anne:) Thanks, Vivian, for that glowing, warm, totally without-tension introduction! Well, okay, sputum has a little tension, and that’s what we’re looking at! (The tension, not the sputum!)
Introductory Definitions
Tension and pacing are closely linked and work hand in hand to create the rhythm of your story and keep the audience engaged. I’ve written about a bunch of other related topics, all of which come into play when looking at this important dynamic.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves! We still have to get to Vivian’s favorite part: definitions! (Vivian: YAY!) First, let’s look back at conflict - see my superb post for more! In it, I use Evan Skolnick’s definition that it’s when
“Someone wants or needs something, but someone or something stands in the way.”
Now, obviously that’s character-based, but change the first “someone” to include “something” and it fits everything. After all, it might be a person, a setting, or even the dramatic structure itself. And the thing standing in the way could even be something like lack of knowledge on the part of the character or the audience themselves (which creates mystery!).
Wait, what’s dramatic structure? Have you not read my magnum opus on dramatic structure? Where I cover just about every type of dramatic structure ever employed? Well, definitely check it out. I don’t actually define dramatic structure, so here goes:
Dramatic structure is a way of structuring a beginning, middle, and end in storytelling that’s heavily influenced by cultural values and traditions.
In Western structures (most of which are variations of the 3-Act Structure), the driving force in moving from beginning to middle to end is tension. Now we’re getting into today’s topic! See, I do get on topic eventually!
Tension is the anticipation, suspense, or emotional stress that the audience feels as a result of conflict.
Tension can be good, edge-of-your-seat anticipation, or terrified, huddled-in-your-seat strain, but it keeps the audience engaged. Traditionally, in Western structures, the tension starts low, then rises until it reaches a climax, then descends again. You can tell where in the dramatic structure you are by what the tension is doing. Some non-Western dramatic structures like kishōtenketsu aren’t driven by tension but instead audience engagement. Tension creates audience engagement, but audience engagement does not require tension.
Wondering why I careened off into dramatic structure again? I mean, other than that I love it? Because this is where we get into pacing!
Pacing is the use and spacing of different levels of tension through a story’s dramatic structure.
Now, don’t get me wrong, even stories without tension as the driving force have pacing. All stories have conflict, and as a result, all have tension. It just isn’t always the driving force.
The Plot Thickens
When you look at charts of dramatic structures like the 3-Act structure, you’ll see that tension is the y-axis, and time is the x-axis. (Note: this is not in-world time, this is, for example, the length of the film, the pages in the book, the minutes in the video game–the beginning of a dramatic structure is not always the chronological start of the events of the story). Most charts you find will have a smooth line tracing up and back down: beginning, rising tension, climax, and resolution.
This is usually done because it’s what all stories using the structure will have. Here, for instance, we start with low tension that gradually rises until the climax, then resolves quickly. Any story following the 3-Act structure will have this shape. This, you might say, is the archetype of the 3-Act Structure. Wait, I haven’t made my post on Archetypes yet! Well…
Archetypes are a general pattern that you can use as a model for individual instances.
So basically the smooth line is the pattern, but the individual instances? Every story will be different. The only guaranteed thing is that it will not be a smooth line.
Here’s an example that’s a little more true to life. As you can see, there are patterns of higher and lower tension that slowly create the overall shape of the dramatic structure. The ups and downs are known as tension spikes, where you move from a relatively low tension moment to a higher tension moment, then back down. Almost always, you want to keep the lows and highs slowly getting higher throughout Acts I and II and falling in Act III even as you alternate between them. When talking about tension spikes, you generally are referring to the height of the peak, since most stories are driven by tension so the height of the tension spike is going to propel you towards the end of the story. It’s also important to notice the lows, however, and it’s very important to pay attention to the length of the tension spike, and where in that space the actual spike comes. Is there a slow buildup and quick resolution? Or does something happen incredibly quickly and then slowly resolve? Each tension spike is a little 3-Act structure in and of itself, after all.
Your Structure
I know I was just talking about structure, but let’s talk about specific pacing at specific points. I mentioned Western stories versus kishōtenketsu, and while I would have to consume a lot more kishōtenketsu media to be able to say this for certain, I feel confident enough about this hypothesis that I’ll put it in the blog.
In stories driven by conflict where tension is the metric that drives the story forward, the height of each peak should increase for the majority of the story until reaches a high point and then decrease until the story ends. Yes, I just described the 3-Act Structure, but if you’ve read my post, you’ll know that virtually all Western structures are variations on it.
In stories not driven by conflict where the metric driving the story forward is audience engagement, the height of each peak does not need to rise or fall in any consistent pattern common to all stories of this type. Because the story isn’t dependent on rising tension to keep the audience hooked, stories of this sort can increase the intensity of a variety of other storytelling elements such as environment, character development, retrospection, etc. in order to increase audience engagement. Tension is one tool among many, not the main tool in the toolbox.
Sometimes it’s easy to think that high tension requires fast pacing and vice versa, and that’s often true, but at key points in the dramatic structure, reversing that can be quite powerful. Consider a scene at the climax of a film where a skyscraper is blown up with our hero in it, and they then have to jump out of the shattering window into an awaiting escape helicopter. I’m not referencing a specific movie here, though I’m almost positive something like this has been made.
This is the climax of the story, so you want to go out with a bang! Metaphorically and literally! But is a fast pace really what you want? Imagine: hero defeats big bad. Big bad grins. Closeup of them pressing a button. Hero’s eyes widen. Closeup of bomb they didn’t see until now. Bomb explodes. Hero sprints down hall towards window. Hero leaps out window, fire and explosion immediately behind them. Hero doesn’t make it in the chopper but grabs the rail. A friend pulls hero up.
Okay, works. Certainly the events work. But imagine all of that at what would be considered normal speed, aka the shot of them running down the hall is actually how fast people run, jumping is an actual jump, they’re pulled up immediately. Compare to this: hero defeats big bad. Big bad grins as the camera slowly pans to their hand as they press a button. Hero’s eyes dart from the button to offscreen and widen. Closeup of bomb they didn’t see until now. Bomb explodes. Hero sprints down hall towards window in slow motion, fire licking the hall behind them as each step seems to take forever and the fire threatens to catch up. Hero leaps out window, fire and explosion immediately behind them as they’re essentially hanging midair in a slowmo shot of the building. Wide shot of the building from a distance completely engulfed and beginning to crumple. Back to hero, who slips past their friend in the chopper, the two hands sliding by each other in slowmo, but grabs the rail. Another wide shot from above as the hero dangles back and forth and burning debris flies by as the building completely collapses. A hand appears. The hero grabs it and a friend pulls hero up.
What happened by adding all that slowmo and including longer shots and views of the entire area? Ironically enough, slowing things down often accentuates how quickly things move. If it’s just someone running down a hallway, there’s no time to appreciate the flames chasing them because it’s almost too fast to see. So the slowmo slows the pacing, but intensifies the tension. Higher peak, longer spike. Wide shots of the building don’t always add immediate tension and can be seen as a chance for a quick breath, and they enhance the scale of what’s happening. Quick shots or sentences and closeups of immediate action make things more tense, but that has the effect of reducing the scale in most situations. In this case, showing the building exploding decreases the tension, especially if it’s long explosion, but it creates a sense of awe that the hero managed to escape such a catastrophe.
All of that is to say that you can have a high intensity slow-paced climactic scene and it’s often way more powerful than a fast one. So when you look at your dramatic structure, don’t jump to conclusions about tension spike height and length. Instead, think about what will intensify the emotions you want to provoke.
Your Genre
Here’s where genre enters the picture. You see, some genres like lots of tension spikes in quick succession, while some prefer longer, drawn-out spikes. Some like a lot of height different within each spike, some prefer smaller dips. Almost all genres value variety and eschew having a bunch of similarly shaped spikes one after another, but there are some genres (mostly in children’s and young adult) that want that kind of regularity.
You need to know your genre promises when examining the pacing of your story. Luckily for you, Vivian and I wrote a whole post outlining every genre under the sun and the promises your audience expects for that genre. While we don’t discuss pacing and tension, you should know your chosen genre (or subgenre, or subsubgenre) enough to know what the audience expects.
Your Goals
Each individual story also has its own pattern, and your story’s pattern should trump everything else. It’s very possible to have a slow-paced action story, after all. In fact, let’s look at one: Seven Samurai, directed by Akira Kurasawa. Seeing as it’s one of the best films ever made, I’m hoping at least some of you have seen it.
Technically this is an action film. There’s a huge fight scene, after all. People die. But at least half of the movie is just the characters meeting each other and being developed as individuals. The pacing is incredibly slow - spread out spikes with low height slowly but steadily building, slowly but steadily getting closer together with a little more height, until we hit the battle and all hell breaks loose.
This sounds terrible, right? If I want to watch seven samurai fighting a huge battle, there’d better be mostly battle! But the mismatch in pacing actually improves the film because it deepens our understanding of each individual character and makes us feel connected to them. When we finally do get into the quick paced fighting, every single death hurts. A lot. We know these characters, and now they’re dying. That’s a far more emotionally satisfying (if sad) experience than simply watching some cool swordplay.
Basically, the pacing needs to serve your story. Yes dramatic structure, yes genre - do not ignore those. But if you need to break the rules to create a mood or theme or situation that’s vital to what you want to accomplish, do it.
Your Content
In addition to mood, theme, etc., you need to pay attention to the actual things happening in your story. There are some surface-level generalizations you can make that usually hold true: battles should be fast-paced, characters hanging out should be slow-paced, riding up to the big bad’s castle should slowly increase the speed of its pacing as you go. These are good enough guidelines, but not always true.
Say what you will about the last season of Game of Thrones (and I have), and say what you will about the problems with the Battle of Winterfell (and I have), the pacing is beautiful. Textbook. It’s actually textbook to the point that it’s predictable, but that’s a different problem. The episode alternates between quick action–tension spikes with big height and short spacing–and slow scenes–tension spikes spaced wider apart, though the heights are just as big. We get to enjoy cool special effects, intense violence, and encroaching fear as most of the characters fight interspersed with a quiet tension as Arya makes her way through the castle trying to stay unnoticed. And then there’s Bran just sitting there but we’ll pretend he doesn’t exist.
What to Remember
Some quick rules of thumb, because I know the above advice is extremely vague:
A fast pace will intensify the tension and create strong forward momentum.
A slow pace will lower the temperature and allow the audience to take a breath.
If you only have a fast pace, audiences will get burned out and stop caring.
If you only have a slow pace, audiences will get bored and stop caring.
The pacing you use needs to reflect your dramatic structure, genre, goals, and content.
Intensely Bad “Decisions”
(Vivian: And now we bring you Anne Ranting™)
Deep breath When it comes to pacing and handling tension, I always think of one film: Jurassic Park III. Now, I have to admit, I saw this way back when it was still in theaters and I was in high school. My recollection of this film may not be accurate and there’s no way in hell I’m going to waste more of my life on it. So if you read this and for some reason think, “Hey, I should watch that!” and my summary isn’t accurate? I’m not actually that sorry because even though I know I’ll get the details wrong, my general point is still true.
Fun fact: Jurassic Park III started filming without a finished script. That just always bodes well, doesn’t it? But luckily, they finished it in ti- oh, what’s that? THEY NEVER FINISHED THE SCRIPT?! …Do I even have to give more reasons why the pacing sucks so bad?
There’s going to be a future post on setups and payoffs, and trust that this movie will show up there too, but had the setup and payoff of each conflict been paced better, it might have worked. I mean, the actual stuff in the movie isn’t bad, it’s just the tension and pacing that makes it one of the most unwatchable disasters I’ve ever encountered.
Essentially, the story sets up a conflict and generally does it well. They’re not bad conflicts per se. The tension rises incredibly rapidly, and then the conflict is resolved. Completely. All tension gone. Then, miraculously, another conflict appears, tension skyrockets, aaaaand completely resolved two scenes later. A lot of reviews talk about it’s bullet pacing, and while I assume they mean it’s fast-paced, I’d say it’s more akin to a machine gun with isolated lightning fast bullets of conflict/tension/resolution as opposed to any sort of narrative structure.
For instance. The movie starts with a wealthy couple offering to fund Alan Grant’s research if he’ll take them on an aerial tour of one of the dinosaur-infested islands. Okay. But wait no there are also mercenaries with them and they’re landing? Now there’s some real tension! Grant, our hero, definitely doesn’t want to land! The wealthy couple and mercenaries definitely do. How will it possibly resolve??? Oh yeah they just knock Grant out and land. Couple other things like that, then, out of the blue, we learn the real reason they’re there is because the wealthy couple’s young kid crashlanded during a paragliding incident 8 weeks ago and they thought Grant could help them find him. This is not a bad plot twist exactly, except when do they find the boy? Like two scenes later, and he comes to them, not the other way around. Conflict resolved.
I could go on. You can read a plot summary if you want. It’s just a bunch of punctuated little conflicts with a little overlap between them. A bunch of links connected to each other in a chain that gets you from beginning to end but without any overall shape whatsoever.
There is, basically, no dramatic structure.
Because of that, the tension doesn’t serve to push the story forward. It’s tension for its own sake, and when we look at pacing, we have to understand it not as a way to build a story but simply as a way the story marks time. I think I can safely assume it’s not kishōtenketsu, seeing as it’s American-made, and also–importantly–I assume this because there’s nothing else creating escalating audience engagement. There is just literally no structure of any kind.
I’d have to watch it again (ha) to time the tension spikes, but they’re pretty regular, there’s not a lot of variation in levels of spikes, and it’s seriously like every 10 minutes or less that we get a spike–that’s fast to maintain over a full-length movie. No wonder reviews commented on its speed. It feels like sprinting down the beach with a spinosaurus on your tail, except that when you reach the end, you look back and there’s nothing there.
To sum: there is a LOT of tension at an incredibly fast pace, but it doesn’t have any variation or operate in service of a dramatic structure.
FAIL.
…and rant over.
(Vivian: And thus endeth the rant)
A New Mastery
So we had some good examples, some bad examples (well, okay, ONE bad example, but it counts as multiple just because), and some rules of thumb in there too. Huh, is this structured as a 3-Act Structure? Is there rising tension and a climax? Guess this is resolution, then. So let’s resolve any lingering tension and conflict this post created by taking our wonderful knowledge and applying it to one final example that highlights how you can use dialogue and exposition to create rich tension with strong pacing.
Probably the best example I can think of where dialogue and exposition are masterfully used to craft a story is “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway. The two characters never even say what they’re talking about, but you can feel the unspoken conflict, the slowly increasing tension, in the back-and-forth dialogue. Most of the tension comes from the emotional stress, both from witnessing this interaction and also from not knowing what the hell they’re talking about. The lack of knowledge creating tension is, as I said previously, mystery.
If you just look at the literal plot, nothing happens. The American and the girl, Jig, drink drinks and wait for the train and exchange mostly inane pleasantries. Dig a little deeper, though, and the conflict between the characters pops out in stark array, and when you get past the euphemisms and realize what they’re actually talking about, you realize that this interaction is actually pivotal in both of their lives.
The story is almost entirely dialogue with just a handful of lines of exposition, and the dialogue is short, snappy, and both incredibly vague and incredibly revealing. The tension spikes are short both in height and length–lots of little, almost imperceptible bumps in a slow, steady climb to the climax. There are a few jolts, though, that actually serve to signal when the story changes acts.
Tell me if you can spot where we move from Act I, the Setup, to Act II, Rising Tension:
"Should we have another drink?"
"All right."
The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table.
"The beer's nice and cool," the man said.
"It's lovely," the girl said.
"It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig," the man said. "It's not
really an operation at all."
The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.
"I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to
let the air in."
The girl did not say anything.
"I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time. They just let the air
in and then it's all perfectly natural."
That man, just dropping the operation into a perfectly good conversation about beer! What an American (which is his only identifying feature in the story). Act I has some tension–she says the hills look like white elephants, he objects, she objects to his objection, he objects to that objection, etc.–but Act II drops us in the meat of the story: this mystery operation. Which operation? Never stated, but heavily implied. I’m sure you’ll pick it up if you read it (which you should, it’s only 4 pages).
I won’t do a full analysis of the story, but one thing I will point out is that the dialogue serves to intensify the tension and drive the story forward, while the exposition generally allows the reader to pause, take in the sights, and ponder what this conversation is actually about. The exposition increases audience engagement through developing the setting, but the emotional strain of the conversation–the tension–is lessened. If the whole story were like the exposition, it might be kishōtenketsu, but because the dialogue is the story and the dialogue is dripping with slowburn tension at a snappy speed, it firmly falls in the 3-Act category. (...I could probably write a blogpost just on this short story…)
Basically, this story demonstrates how dialogue and exposition can work together to create tension that drives a story forward using excellent pacing. So when you’re creating your stories, don’t forget that dialogue plays an important role! And while exposition lowered the tension here, it can also intensify it. Dialogue and exposition are two more tools at your disposal, and you want to make good use of them to craft a properly paced story.
Summa Summarum
So that’s all the ways tension and pacing can be created and analyzed! Well, maybe not all, but it’s a lot of them. Huh, now that I look back at this post, I have to admit it’s more of a Hero’s Journey, and Jurassic Park III is the Dark Night of the Soul… Regardless, I hope this helps you build tension more deliberately, craft it into tension spikes and arrange those tension spikes in pacing that serves your dramatic structure, genre, goals, and content.
Happy crafting!
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Copyright ©️ 2026 Anne Winchell. Original ideas belong to the respective authors. Generic concepts such as tension, pacing, and dramatic structures are copyrighted under Creative Commons with attribution, and any derivatives must also be Creative Commons. However, specific ideas such as the examples given and all language or exact phrasing are individually copyrighted by the respective authors. Contact them for information on usage and questions if uncertain what falls under Creative Commons. We’re almost always happy to give permission. Please contact the authors through this website’s contact page.
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