Handling Tension

Once you start to study something, it’s amazing how you see the connections and draw insights everywhere. This morning while I was surfing, looking for an image, with no real topic in mind for this post, I found some awesome pictures of springs. I dug around a little deeper in the Flickr pools and found this one.

By this point, I’d already decided to use a spring and talk about some aspect of tension as it relates to conflict in writing when I stopped and read the page where the image was located. What caught my eye was the following sentence: Progressive springs are designed to become stiffer as they are compressed in the spring perch under increased loading. Combined with the idea that “your car reacts more quickly and precisely to steering inputs” and projected onto a couple of characters thrust into a conflict, the car analogy results in an intriguing insight for me.

The more backbone (not just in the figurative sense, but also backstory and goals and motivation) your characters have, the better you’ll be able to anticipate and accurately depict their reactions and the more likely they will come through their conflicts better off than at the beginning of your story.

Are you like me? Are you trying to write before you really know your characters and finding that they fall flat? Maybe you need to hang out with them a bit longer and see which shock absorbers they need to deal with what you want to throw at them. On the other hand, they could also be over-equipped to handle the path you’ve set them on — one that is more reminiscent of the open highway than a mountain road with hidden hairpin turns and switchbacks.