Link to Janet Reid on Building Tension

Janet Reid is a literary agent whose blog I often find worth reading. This is in part because she approaches topics of writing, marketing, publishing, the world of books, from a different angle than the one familiar to me as a writer.

Here she set out to analyze one of her favorite movies (Heat, with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro) using a timer to look at the relative length of scenes. The more dramatic the scene, the longer it lasted.

She writes, "The reason this is important for you, as a writer of novels not screenplays is the principal transfers: the big action scenes are LONG, not short. Tension increases with longer scenes. I've heard editors say this over and over, but until I saw the movie (complete with a digital counter on my screen) it hadn't quite sunk in."

I think of the "weight" of scenes as if they are structural materials. The higher the stakes, the more urgent and unsure the outcome, the more details and time that scene can support. These are the places to "play it out," not the times the characters are strolling through a park, admiring the flowers.

Janet Reid, Literary Agent: Building tension