In the story “Loser” I wanted to rely on sentences that seemed to contradict themselves midway. For example, “The box looks red, only it’s blue.” Or, “Sally reaches for a stick, except it’s a dead snake.” By repeatedly using the words “but,” “only,” and “except” I can create a sense of rhythm and the absurd, constantly stating and contradicting my statements in the same sentence.

  So if you were my student, I’d urge you to cut your narrative like a film editor cuts film. To do this, you can use a repeating chorus: “The first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about…” Or, “Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.” Thus cuing the reader with a sort-of touchstone that indicates: We’re about to jump to something different.

  Or you can keep the action flowing and increase the momentum of the energy by using a regular series of unlikely conjunctions.

  If you were my student I’d tell you to listen to a child. Listen to someone who’s terrified of being interrupted and has developed tricks for hogging a listener’s attention nonstop. Granted, their stories might be boring, but you can learn some natural tricks for rolling your own fiction on and on and on.

  Tension: Recycle Your Objects

  If you were my student, I’d tell you to recycle your objects. This means introducing and concealing the same object throughout the story. Each time it reappears, the object carries a new, stronger meaning. Each reappearance marks an evolution in the characters.

  Perhaps the best definition is by example:

  Think of the diamond ring in Nora Ephron’s novel Heartburn. We first see it while the narrator’s riding the subway in New York, en route to her group therapy session. A stranger winks at her. She worries he’s a mugger so she twists the ring around so it looks like a plain gold band. She slips it off her finger and drops it into her bra. At the therapy session she finds the mugger has followed her. Brandishing a gun, he robs everyone in the group, finally pointing the gun at her chest and demanding the ring. The police take a report, and the ring is forgotten.

  The ring reappears in flashback. When she gave birth to their first child, her husband gave it to her. During the labor, their newborn almost died, and now they’re a family with the ring symbolizing the greatest moment of their love. Here the ring is described fullest, as a huge snowflake, something of incredible brilliance and value.

  Much later in the novel, after endless events, after we’ve forgotten the ring, the police call to say they’ve caught the thief and recovered it. The narrator claims it and finds a stone is loose—an omen, she remarks. She takes it to the jeweler who first sold it to her husband, and he marvels over its beauty. Offhand, he says he’d always buy it back at a good price. Impulsively, she sells it for fifteen thousand dollars. That’s the amount of money she needs to walk out on her failed marriage. Again, the ring appears, disappears, appears, disappears, appears, and disappears, each time to serve a new purpose in the plot.

  That’s what I call recycling an object in a story. The reader is thrilled to recognize something that seemed lost. And because the object is not a character and can’t have an emotional reaction, the reader is forced to express any related emotion.

  Another fine example is the ring in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It appears as something worthless, a child’s toy buried in a box of Cracker Jack. The protagonist’s former husband gives it to her future suitor, and the ring disappears. Once the suitor is dating Miss Holly Golightly, the ring reappears as an object they can have engraved at Tiffany’s. It disappears into the jeweler’s hand, and only reappears at the moment of greatest crisis. Then the suitor produces it—now engraved—and presents it. It fits. In the film, they fall in love. In the novel, Golightly accepts the ring but is lost.

  Also consider the gold cigarette case in Cabaret. It’s offered by the rich man to the poor man, is rejected and disappears. It reappears, falling out of the rich man’s pants, and is hesitantly accepted. Note: Anytime an object falls out of a man’s pants, guess what that implies? Of course, the poor man is seduced by the rich man. The last time we see the cigarette case the poor man is compliantly lighting the rich one’s cigarette. Note: In parallel action, the rich man has given a fur coat to a woman, and the coat is sold to pay for an abortion. It’s a shame that the cigarette lighter remains unresolved in a similar important use.

  Now consider the dog, Sorrow, in The Hotel New Hampshire. It dies. It’s stuffed by a taxidermist. It falls from an exploding jetliner. Washes up on a beach. Is found and dried with a hair dryer. Wrecks a sexual tryst. Hidden away, it’s eventually found and prompts a heart attack.

  The dog’s name alone prompts a major chorus in the book: “Sorrow floats.”

  Lastly, consider the green velvet draperies in Gone with the Wind. Miss Ellen’s portieres are a symbol of status and of the matriarch herself. After the family has fallen on hard times and Miss Ellen is dead, her daughter pulls down the drapes and sacrifices them to make a gown she hopes will prevent the family from losing their greatest source of power, their land. One symbol evolves to become another.

  An aside: In a forensic unpacking of the era, green was a popular color, deep green, because rooms decorated in emerald green seldom harbored houseflies or fleas, spiders or any other pests. For some miraculous reason you could leave windows open and green drapes seemed to repel mosquitoes. Families such as the O’Haras could lounge in their deep-green sanctuaries, unbothered by yellow-fever-carrying insects. Unknown at the time, emerald green or “Paris Green” dyes contained heavy amounts of arsenic. The deeper the color, the more poisonous the fabric. Up to half the velvet’s weight could be arsenic, thus six pounds of Scarlett O’Hara’s dress might contain three pounds of dissolved arsenic.

  Green draperies, wallpapers, upholstery, and carpets killed any bug that came near them. Those people who dwelled in those rooms developed the wan, pale appearance the Victorians prized as a status indicator. Now picture Scarlett sashaying off to seduce Rhett, her dress steeped in poison, her face becoming more pale by the minute. After she’s rejected, she charms Frank Kennedy and gets caught in an Atlanta rain shower. Soaking wet and coated in arsenic, Scarlett’s least worry should’ve been paying the taxes on Tara. She’s not unscrupulous, she’s a walking victim of sick building syndrome. Such causal connections occur as little payoffs, providing your reader with joy and relief.

  This takes morphing an object—the curtains, the dress, the shroud of mind-warping poison—in a postmodern or meta-fictional direction, but if you can get away with it, do so.

  In my own lesser way, the liposuction fat in Fight Club becomes soap to be sold for money to finance the movement. Then it becomes nitroglycerin to be used by the characters to topple buildings.

  So, my student, today’s lesson is to recycle your objects. Introduce them, then hide them. Rediscover them, then hide them. Each time you bring them back, make them carry greater importance and emotion. Recycle them. In the end, resolve them beautifully.

  Tension: Avoiding Tennis-Match Dialogue

  If you were my student I’d tell you to be clever on someone else’s dime. You’re not Noel Coward. Cleverness is a brand of hiding. It will never make your reader cry. It seldom makes readers genuinely belly laugh and never breaks anyone’s heart.

  So avoid tennis-match dialogue. That’s where one character says something, and another responds with the perfect quip. Think of situation comedy dialogue. Snappy comebacks. Perfect rejoinders. Setup and spike. Instant gratification.

  Tension is created and instantly resolved. So it never accumulates. The energy remains flat. For example: Wendy snuck a glance at him. “Do you have herpes?”

  Brandon looked away. Gradually, his gaze came back to hers. “Yes. I do.”

  Question answered. Conflict settled. Energy returns to a big, boring zero.

  Instead, if you were my student I’d tell you to never resolve an issue until you introduce a bigger one.

  For example: Wendy snuck a glance at him. “Do you have herpes?”

  Brandon looked away. Gradually, his gaze came back to meet hers. “I bought those place cards you wanted.”

  Or, “Wendy, honey, you know I’d never hurt you.”

  Or, “Geez! If you could just hear yourself!”

  Or, “That Megan Whitney is a liar.”

  To which Wendy replies, “Who’s Megan Whitney?”

  To which Brandon responds, “I bought those place cards you wanted.”

  Always keep in mind our tendency to avoid conflict (we’re writers) and to cheat and use dialogue to further plot (a cardinal sin). So to do the first and avoid the second, use evasive dialogue or miscommunications to always increase the tension. Avoid volleys of dialogue that resolve tension too quickly.

  Again, it’s not just me telling you this. Sitting on the floor in a quiet corner of an auditorium at Portland State University, Ursula Le Guin once gave me some advice. We were both speaking at an event for the Ooligan small press program. I’d told a story about taking a woman—an interviewer from Italian Vogue—to an amusement park. First I’d brought the reporter a huge bunch of Mylar balloons. Once inside the park she let them loose and they drifted away. An explosion boomed. The park’s rides slowly ground to a halt, leaving screaming kids trapped high in the air. It was chaos as sparks rained down and firefighters brought ladders to rescue the stranded.

  The Mylar balloons had wrapped themselves around the main transmission line that delivered power to the area. High above us, the Mylar sputtered and melted, dripping flaming gunk. The park employees were cursing because they were out of work for the day, and all the concession food was spoiling. No one knew we’d brought the balloons. The reporter and I had slunk out, undiscovered. That was it. The story just fizzled on that vague note.

  After I left the stage Ursula sought me out. We’d never met, but she wanted to help me brainstorm a better ending. Doing so she told me, “Never resolve a threat until you raise a larger one.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Tension: Do Not Use Dialogue to Further the Plot

  Think of those low-budget television movies where the lieutenant rushes into the war room and says, “The Martians have breached our force field and begun destroying New York with a heat ray!”

  Feel cheated? I know I do. Even if the lieutenant’s uniform is scorched from a deadly heat ray and his face is a charred mask of exposed bone, and he screams his announcement and falls dead…I first want to see some scale models of Manhattan being bashed and torched.

  If a plot point is worth including, it’s worth depicting in a scene. Don’t deliver it in dialogue. You’re not Shakespeare limited to the stage at the Globe Theatre and the endurance of the groundlings’ legs. You have the budget and the time.

  Even in an otherwise good movie like Chinatown, where the discovery process is patiently and meticulously allowed to demonstrate how water is being stolen for Los Angeles, the biggest plot reveal is done through dialogue. Evelyn Mulwray’s daughter is a child of incest. Yes, it would be tons creepier if we used a discovery process to unpack that reveal—first speculating about the child’s father, then tracking down a birth certificate, hearing rumors from former servants, exploring why Evelyn has no mother—ask yourself, which would be more dramatic? The history of water distribution in Southern California? Or the emotionally engaging discovery of father/daughter sex and the threat of grandfather/granddaughter molestation?

  It sounds harsh, but I forbid you from furthering your plot with dialogue. To do so is cheap and lazy.

  Years ago Tom began a workshop session by describing a public reading he’d done days before. He’d been asked to read with a very young writer, practically a teenager, who was in the process of writing a novel called After Nirvana. The novel depicted adolescent hustlers soliciting sex in order to buy drugs. Tom talked in awe about how the writer, Lee Williams, unpacked a sex scene in a pornographic bookstore. Tom said he was amazed, wondering, Is he really going to go there? Is this guy actually going to describe a kid giving an old man a blow job?

  And Williams did. He didn’t redirect to something safer, for example having the narrator distract himself with the comforting childhood memory of eating a nice hot dog on July 4. Nor did he jump ahead to a future scene and recount the sex using dialogue or tasteful snippets of memory. Nope, the writer unpacked the details and read them in public to a crowd. Tom admired him for having the courage to write the tough stuff. And to read it. And if you were my student I’d tell you that that is your job.

  To quote Joy Williams, “You don’t write to make friends.”

  Joy Williams

  It doesn’t make me look like anyone’s bright, shining god when I stand up and read the “Guts” story. In many ways it’s an act of public suicide. But good writing is not about making the writer look good.

  So unpack the big stuff. Do not deliver important information via dialogue.

  Tension: No Thesis Statements

  Imagine a stripper walking out onstage, shucking his or her pants, and saying, “This is my junk. Any questions?”

  Whether it was Channing Tatum or Jenna Jameson, you’d feel cheated. As readers or exotic dance enthusiasts, we want tension. We want a gradual discovery process. The outcome is more or less predictable: genitals. So we want sustained arousal and engagement.

  It’s a common mistake to give away everything in the opening sentence:

  Lilla arrived at the barn dance a few minutes late, but just in time to see Reynolds kissing on Dawn Taylor.

  Sure, there’s a smidgen of tension. Who does what next? But everything is so summarized the reader hasn’t had the pleasure of discovering anything. The payoff is in the first sentence. We don’t know what the barn looks like, or smells like. We’ve no idea how Lilla feels, if her shoes hurt, or if she’s been waiting tables all day. We’re just—blam—dropped into the action.

  This summary might work in comedy, where constantly negating drama creates humor. But even the best jokes rely on creating tension and then resolving it very quickly. Sometimes it’s a long buildup full of power reversals, for instance:

  A businessman arrives at his hotel and checks into his room. He opens the minibar and pours himself a Scotch, then dials the number of an escort service. When a voice says, “Hello,” he interrupts. Fast, before he can lose his nerve, he demands, “Listen. I need you to send over the biggest, blackest stud you have and the skinniest, whitest nerd you have. I want to watch the black guy fuck the white guy, and then to watch the white guy fuck the black guy. And then I want to fuck them both. You got that? Can you make that happen?” At the pause, a polite voice, a familiar voice says, “Sir, you’ve reached Reception. You’ll need to dial nine for an outside line…”

  A long setup. The plot broken down into simple actions. The man in power asks for a display of power. Then he asks for a reversal of that power. Then he plans to overpower everyone. Finally, he’s humiliated and left without power. So even humor needs to create tension for its strongest effect.

  Consider that each sentence should raise a small question. As the smaller questions are resolved, they should raise ever-larger questions. A dancer removes her white gloves. He removes his necktie. She begins to unzip the back of her dress. He shucks his dinner jacket.

  An opening creates a question and promises it will be answered, but not too quickly. Consider the first line of Gone with the Wind. “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized that when caught in her charm…”

  It instantly makes you wonder, Why? You’re hooked.

  Tension: No Dreams

  As Tom explained this, Gordon Lish forbid depicting dreams in fiction. His thinking, as I understood it, was that dream sequences are a cheat. Reality can be just as surreal. Look at anything by Nathanael West.

  Arbitrary as it might sound, nobody wants to hear about your dream from last night. Not even Carl Jung, unless you’re paying him $150 an hour, and even then he’s faking his interest. Dreams are fake, and fake stuff creates no tension. Fiction is already fake stuff so you don’t need to water it down with faker stuff.

  Remember, you came to me. You asked my advice on writing, and I’m telling you what I was taught: no dreams.

  Tension: Avoiding Forms of Is and Have and Thought Verbs

  According to another article clipped from Scientific American and sent to me by a reader, a study demonstrated that people respond differently to different types of verbs.

  When they read an active, physical verb like “step” or “kick” or “grabbed,” the verb activates the part of their brain responsible for that movement. Your brain responds as if you’re actually swimming a stroke or sneezing.

  But when you read any form of the verb “is” or “has,” no corresponding brain activity occurs. Likewise with abstract verbs such as “believe” or “love” or “remember.” No sympathetic cognitive mirroring, or whatever, takes place.

  Thus a passage like, “Arlene was at the door. She had long, brown hair, her face had a look of shocked surprise. She was taller than he remembered…” is less engaging than, “Arlene stepped into view, framed by the open doorway. With one gloved hand she brushed her long, brown hair away from her face. Her penciled eyebrows arched in surprise…”

  With that in mind, I’d tell you to avoid “is” and “has” in any form. And avoid abstract verbs in favor of creating the circumstances that allow your reader to do the remembering, the believing, and the loving. You may not dictate emotion. Your job is to create the situation that generates the desired emotion in your reader.