Create Pressure to Release Pressure

This post is about how to create and build needed pressure in story. As keeps your writing practice going, it can also release unwanted pressure inside the writer. Maybe that’s your need this week, a little relief from the world pressing in? If so, read on.

I decided I wanted to learn to write fiction, many years ago. I was already a published writer but I had no idea what fiction required. I looked around and decided to take a correspondence course on “writing the novel,” from the University of Iowa.

Back then, “correspondence” courses were literally that: an instructor worked with written submissions. I mailed printed packets each week or two, the prof marked them up with suggestions, and I got them back in the mail a week later. It was slow but it worked for me.

I wanted to write a story about death. A young man keeps trying to contact his sister who has died in a car accident. I structured it as a series of letters, so it was an epistilary . I loved the characters, but truthfully, not much happened in the story except the brother’s grief and longing.

My instructor was very kind. I was a rank beginner, I didn’t really know much about plot or character except what I’d learned from a lifetime of voracious reading. He had to explain terms to me, like “narrative arc” and “plot points.”

The main thing I took away from that course, other than the realization that yes, I wanted desperately to learn to write fiction and no, this book would probably never see the light of day, was something he taught me the last week of our exchange. He said there were two levels to story. One was the inner level, which was very well depicted in my draft—how the characters worked inside their inner worlds of thoughts, feelings, memories, and the like. The other was the outer level, which is where outer things happen.

“You don’t have enough external pressure,” he told me. “The sister has already died. What else might happen to the brother, out here, that could drive your story forward?”

After I asked him to define “external pressure” and “drive a story forward,” I reread my manuscript. He told me to do this: underline any and all external action. Whatever I could find.

In other words, anything that happened right here, onstage, visible to the reader as outer action

Inside the character’s head or heart didn’t count.

What happens out here

So I set to work. I felt hopeful, in my naivete, as I began the assignment, yellow highlighter in hand. I printed the first three chapters, double-spaced, as he advised.

By chapter 2, I was stunned. There was no outer action at all. The entire story was taking place in memory, but in a “told” fashion rather than anything “shown” or acted onstage. Doing the exercise, so simple and so revealing, let me see how pre-digested the material was. I had already come to the conclusions, for the reader. There was nothing to wonder about or even engage with.

I sent my assignment back, very downcast. But my instructor, bless him, knew what the result would be and was prepared with steps to teach me how to bring in external pressure.

It was seriously hard, though, that first attempt to design something happening out here.

First I had to evaluate the level of tension and where it was slightly more heightened. For instance, when the brother was remembering something about his deceased sister, a road trip they had taken, and they’d run out of gas. In my current manuscript that memory was presented as summary, a condensing of what happened, without any of the scene elements that deliver pressure and tension.

Here’s what I wrote in that summarized memory.

We ran out of gas outside of Santa Fe, and it took us three hours before anyone came by to give me a lift to town. She was asleep in the backseat, the doors locked, when I got back right before dark.

My instructor said, “What if you made this into a scene, instead of condensing it into summary? Break it into steps. What was the ride like? Was the driver talkative? Was your narrator frightened a little, both to leave his sister and by the shadiness of the driver? Where did he finally find a gas station? How long did it take to get another ride back to his car?”

These were excellent questions. It took me weeks to answer them, but when I sent in the next assignment, I had written my very first fictional scene.

External pressure

I learned from that rather difficult passage through the correspondence course that scene both delivers and demands external pressure. And there are many tools to use to create this.

External pressure, of course, is something coming from outside the narrator. Something out of the narrator’s control. Sometimes called the ticking clock, it creates a feeling of mounting tension. Some examples:

• A non-negotiable deadline that must be met. The bomb will go off at this time unless this happens.

• Approaching weather. We have to get to town before the storm hits. “It was a dark and stormy night,” right?

• A secret will be revealed. Someone tells all, unless they are stopped in time.

• Revenge timing. Someone plans revenge to happen at a certain junction in a character’s life where it’ll have the most impact. (Think, The Count of Monte Cristo.)

• The trail of clues. Each must be found before it disappears.

My instructor suggested not using all of them—it would create too much external pressure, making the story too melodramatic, he said. Choose one and really use it. But make it aligned with the character’s internal pressure so it will make sense in the story.

Releasing and aligning pressure

I never realized fiction was so complicated! What did it mean to align the internal pressure of the character with whatever I chose?

He said to start with my narrator’s biggest fear. Leaving his sister with the car felt extremely dangerous to him. Why? It wasn’t just the sketchy ride, the hours away. It was something else that created huge tension inside this narrator.

I can’t believe, now looking back, that it took me so long to get. He was afraid of his sister dying. The whole story, as lame as it was, was about this—the longing to be with his sister again, now that she was dead, and the letters he wrote her. Maybe the road trip was the first hint of her leaving?

I decided to choose the weather, the approaching night, because it would make the narrator even more anxious. Building in that pressure to get back to her before dark actually worked very well. When he returns, at first he can’t find her. Then he sees her in the backseat, asleep, and he immediately thinks she’s dead.

I had fun playing with this. Fast forward about thirty years, fifteen books actually published, and I am convinced this small lesson about external pressure was a turning point in my writerly education. Maybe it’ll be in yours too?

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

Try the exercise my instructor gave me: comb through your manuscript, or just a chapter or scene, and highlight anything that happens out here, in the physical world, rather than in your character’s thoughts or feelings or memories. What did you learn about your external action?

Now ask yourself if you have any ticking clock. Choose one of the options listed above, or create your own. Play with a freewrite around this ticking clock element to see if you can compound the external pressure of your story.

What did you notice?