Quotes About Tension

breath. "You're welcome," he said tersely. "That man, Sims," she continued, worried. "The day you fired him, John said that he had a mean temper and that he carried a loaded rifle everywhere with him. You…you be careful, okay?" She heard the soft expulsion of breath. He moved a step closer, his lean hands lifting her oval face to his. She could see the soft glitter of his blue eyes in the faint

She stared at the King. The King stared back. It was a disaster.

Honestly, David, sometimes when they all start I don't know whether to scream or just walk out into the sunset. [...] - Why don't you do both? Walk into the sunset screaming?

any space tends to look serene when it's not full of angry dinosaurs

Gawd, he thought furiously, he hadn't expected it to be like this. Just a lousy walk down the yard to give a carrot to the gangly chestnut. Guilt and fear and treachery. They bypassed his sneering mind and erupted through his nerves instead.

We yell and scold as a way of paying homage to each other's views. This is the burden of friendship between extremely high-strung individuals.

Fee-uck, man. This game is still on. I get that sixty-two yet. I get his ass and whip it into shape. Damnright. I get that shitpiss sixty-two and beat his black ass into the ground. He's white, I said. I know he's white. They're all white. Everybody's white. Black fucks.

She saw the normative life of the planet, business people crossing streets beneath glass towers, the life of sitting on buses that take you logically to destinations, the unnerved surface of rolling plausibly along.

He immersed a piece of steak in the gravy that sat in the volcanic depression, then put it in his mouth. But he did not begin chewing until he'd scooped some potatoes from the lower slopes and added it to the meat. A tension seemed to be building around the question of whether he could finish the gravy before the potatoes collapsed.

Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.

Essays, like poems and stories and novels, marry heaven and hell. Contradiction is the cellular structure of life. Sometimes north dominates, sometimes south—but if the essay doesn't include contraries, however small they be, the essay fails.

His characters may be cardboard, but each has a clear, uncomplicated purpose. Every moment of the story contributes to building conflict.

The heart responds to the conflict within a story.

I didn't want to get well, because if I got well, nobody would come and save me anymore. And I didn't want to get well, because while I could not control my happiness, I could control my misery, and I would rather have had control than live in the tension of what if. A chance of hope is no pacifier against a sure tragedy.

Good Story Loves Contrast

What's at stake? If nothing can be gained or lost, nobody cares. Will the hero disarm the bomb, or will people be killed? Will the guy get the girl, or will he be lonely and filled with self-doubt? These are the kinds of questions in the minds of a story-hungry audience.

in a story, there are three levels of problems that work together to capture a reader's or a moviegoer's imagination.

And stories are all about conflict.

Every word, every image, and every beat in a movie is heading toward a specific scene. Sometimes called the climactic scene or the obligatory scene, this all-important scene happens at the end of the movie and it's the scene that resolves all the conflict.

I didn't want to get well, because if I got well, nobody would come and save me anymore. And I didn't want to get well, because while I could not control my happiness, I could control my misery, and I would rather have had control than live in the tension of what if. A chance of hope is no pacifier against a sure tragedy.

The problem is the hook. If a story doesn't have a problem, the story never gets started.

The reason stories have dramatic tension is because LIFE has dramatic tension.

This is the Failure section. Stories love tension. A story without stakes is no story at all. For example, let me tell you a story and you try to figure out how we can make the story a little better:

A story that fails to get started always has the same problem: there is no conflict!