A few thoughts on Tension

After David Powers King posted on tension, he suggested I share a few thoughts of my own. Well, the night is late, but here are a few thoughts:

1. Tension depends ultimately on having something to lose. If you don't have a stake in losing something,  then there's no reason to be worried about much of anything. You have no reason to be anxious. With story, as David noted, that is created in part through conflict.
2. But conflict itself is only a matter of interest to us if we fear for one of the parties. I remember one of my early mentors saying that if you don't care about the characters, then starting with a battle is a difficult thing to do with a story.
3. Of course the benefit with starting a story right in the middle of conflict is that you automatically up the odds for your main characters. The trouble is, we don't know them yet, so you have to do something to bring us in.
4. Star Wars is a great example of this. The first thing we get is the spoiler explaining the situation. This prologue tells us very clearly that the empire is the bad guy, and the Princess Leia and her team are the good guys racing away from them. So even before the ships come into play, we know to root for her ship. Then we meet the comical yet daring droids, R2-D2 and C-3PO. How can you now like them? And of course, Princess Leia is courageous and beautiful, and we know she is supposed to be taking on the evil galactic bad guys. Underdogs like her just grab us without even thinking. We're hooked. Darth Vader could have looked like Harrison Ford and we still would have hated him. But it doesn't hurt that he's this villainous looking half robot full of frightingness and killing guys for the mere fun of it.
5. Which takes us back to what we have to lose. We know Princess Leia needs to survive--or at least get those stolen plans away--or there is no story. So when Vader captures her ship, and we know that the only hope in the galaxy are those plans, tension goes sky high. What will happen? We don't know.

It also helps if you can entice the reader or viewer quickly with a sense of romance, peril to that romance, and peril to the very lives of the people we now know we want to like. It's a pull on our emotions, but it's not a joke or playing on them. We fear that our expectations may not be met. And even when we think deep down that the good guys will somehow win--just like we do in a classic epic like Star Wars--we want it to be nearly impossible, that they could die, they could lose everything, because that is the very basis of tension and conflict.

OK, those are some thoughts. Let me know what you think.