So we've created our treatment, our logline, and made notes on what isn't working with the plot and character lines. Now we have our novel in miniature (treatment), complete with mission statement (logline) and a note on all the ways and places it isn't fulfilling said mission statement. But we're not done, yet. Remember when I said we'd get to pacing and drama? Well, yes.

Tension is how you tell the reader something is important, how you draw them in to caring about this particular moment more than what's come before. It's not just a matter of making the monster bigger or the reward greater, it's in the writing itself - the rhythm of sentences, the character and narrator focus, the sound and the impression of words. You can make a scene about someone tying their shoes inordinately tense, if you want to. Controlling tension through your novel is a lot of work, but absolutely essential.

Tension, pacing, drama - whatever you'd like to call it - is essential to a novel, but it's not like chocolate topping. You can't just pour some over and make things tasty. Tension in the wrong place is perhaps worse than no tension at all. The good thing is, if you've been using that little excel spreadsheet as I suggested, it's now really really easy to see where your tension's off:

1. Make graphs out of all those meta-story things that we wrote down when making the treatment.
2. Look at said graphs.

Peaks and valleys

Tension needs to rise and fall within a novel - even if you're writing a thriller, you need moments of rest for the reader as well as the characters. But these peaks and valleys have to be appropriately timed. Compare your tension-graph with your act structure - they should be more or less identical. The big dramatic turning points in your novel should feel big and dramatic. The quiet points of reflection should not feel like they're at gunpoint.

It's important to remember that you shouldn't mark a scene as dramatic just because a lot of stuff happens - again, that's not how tension works. Reread the chapter, if you're not sure. Note your own reactions - are you leaning forward? Breathing faster, gripping the book and turning the page so fast it singes? Or laid back in the chair, idly drumming your foot and checking your clock now and again?

Tension in the wrong place can kill a whole novel. It's something that can be fixed in line-edits, but it's much more productive if we make a note of what needs to be tense and why in the development stage. It helps crystalise what direction to take the novel and what best serves the story's interests, and it helps us mark out areas where we need to avoid extraneous text or actions.

Ulterior motives

Look at the theme development too - the shape of this is less important, but you want to make sure that you don't have too many. One is, honestly, enough for a novel. Two is okay, if they're related. Three is really pushing it - you won't be able to do them justice unless the whole novel is dedicated to that concept. Five half-develoepd ones won't do - it'll feel messy to the reader, like things don't quite tie together, or aren't really related to the story. Pick one that supports your logline (alright, you can have two if they're related and both support the logline) and focus on developing it, and trimming the others.

It probably would have been helpful at this juncture if we'd noted exactly what it was that produced this theme, but hopefully you can glean it from the treatment. If you can't, then it's either too subtle to bother with, or it's a "literary" theme (read: to do with the writing and style, not the story) which is handled in a line-edit, not a development-edit. In the chapters that have the themes you're not developing, make a note to trim whatever's supporting those themes, and to support the themes you are developing. This doesn't mean you have to cut scenes, just tweak the emphasis, perhaps. We're still not looking for solutions, here - no need to go rewriting the scenes just yet. Just make a note of what the problems are.

Make sure each chapter supports the theme in some way - it doesn't have to be in a big way, either. As I said, the shape of this graph is unimportant, provided the development is fairly steady. What you don't want is nothing for six chapters and then a THEMEY CHAPTER OF DOOM. Keep it roughly even, keep it in the background. Your theme does not take centrestage, ever. It's just there to provide a nice background hum to your orchestra.

Characters

Look at the development of your characters - the graphs you made out of their leaps in their arcs. On the whole, your character arcs should shadow your arc structure. You don't need to be too dogmatic with this - after all, not all characters may be present for all things, and sometimes you may want a small, quiet moment of reflection to be big, character-wise. But it's important to make sure you don't have something that looks like a heart monitor, or a flatline.

Often, personal change builds upon itself. We usually see very minute, gradual changes at first, and larger developments at the end, with a tapering off as the arc is completed by the end of the story. (Characters usually aren't making major changes after the denouemont - though they may be realising previous changes) If your character's arc is more like a straight line or a set of stairs, you might have a problem.

As an addendum: sometimes characters have to 'undevelop' in order to develop. If you see hockey sticks in your graphs, don't worry. Just make sure they're actually helping the book.

Timing

Ah, I knew I forgot something in the treatment - word counts. Thankfully, this is the easiest thing to put back in afterwards, assuming you're using a sensible kind of word processor that allows you to zoom out, highlight a chapter and click 'word count'. Go do that, for each chapter. Shouldn't take more than five minutes. Put it in excel, make a graph.

It really doesn't matter that much how long or short your chapters are - though they should be roughly similar lengths, to give your reader a sense of rhythm over the book. What you do need to look at, however, is how much 'stuff' you're cramming into those words - or how much you're padding them out.

Take a look at the list of 'things that happen' in your chapter, all the stuff that's going on, and how relevant it is. Now look at your word count. The 'relevant to the plot' number might be a good indicator here, as well. You can come up with a nice mathematical way to display it if you like (or not, if you prefer working with intuition instead) However you do it: what you're looking to find is whether you've spent too many words on something irrelevant, uninteresting or unimportant, and stuffed five major occurances into too few words.

This'll lead back into your tension, though not necessarily as much as you'd expect (remember, tension is more about how something is written than what is written). Make a note next to each chapter whether something needs fewer words or more words - and ignore the 'keep chapter lengths similar' here. You want to know if this bit of story that you're writing needs more words (or fewer) words to do it justice.

And again, don't try to fix it, just find the problems. We'll be doing the fixing next post.

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