Katherine Reay is a national bestselling and award-winning author who has enjoyed a lifelong affair with books. She publishes both fiction and nonfiction, holds a BA and MS from Northwestern University, and currently lives outside Bozeman, MT, with her husband and too many dogs. Visit Katherine online at katherinereay.com, on Instagram @katherinereay, on X @katherine_reay, and on Facebook at KatherineReayBooks.

Tension and conflict propel novels. Every book, article, and podcast on writing attests to this. But what does it mean? Do writers need an explosion, a chase, a mystery, a fight, or at the very least a heated discussion or debate in every scene? Absolutely not. That would exhaust our readers and become as tedious as if we offered characters who sit in coffeeshops agreeing and nodding over their lattes for three hundred pages. So how do we create the taut sense of apprehension and unease that keeps the reader turning the pages late into night.

We bury it.

Yes, at some points in your novel, the strife will bubble to the surface and become external. A story’s climax should not be off-page or merely in the character’s head, as every plot point and subtle inflection of tension builds to that scene and it needs to be big. But even in that pinnacle moment, it is not the propulsive action that lands with the reader. It’s the internal conflict, the tension that you have buried within your characters all along — the gap between what your characters wanted and expected to what’s truly unfolding — that grabs and holds the reader’s interest. It is the ever-present feeling of discord running beneath your story’s surface like an underground river that packs the punch.

This is what we call micro-tension — the tension between what we humans want and what is, the tension of our lives in community, and the reality that no one truly understands what’s inside another’s heart or head. It may sound complicated, but we experience it each and every day and that’s what we must put on the page. It is the fuel that drives even your novel’s quietest moments forward and creates the biggest impact for your more propulsive ones.

Think of it this way — two people never truly see eye-to-eye on anything. I will never understand your full perspective because I have not been privy to every detail, every sight, sound, impression, emotion, and countless other elements that create your unique view of the world. The same holds true for each and every character you create. On the surface, we — and they — might agree that stealing someone’s watch is wrong. But none of us can truly know exactly why the other believes that. Sure there’s the obvious point that it’s someone else’s property, but there are nuances in perspective and experience that will influence my opinion and how strongly I feel about it. It is those emotions, the secondary and tertiary ones, you must mine within each and every scene and for each and every character. The obvious ones the reader will instinctively feel, but these more subtle ones will create the depth and intrigue that bring your characters and your story to life. Because in the end, we aren’t really talking about stealing a watch — that would be ludicrous and illegal — we’re talking about feelings of want and need, betrayal and loss, greed and envy, or perhaps a desire for status and acclaim, all embodied in that watch. We’re also examining the mystery of the other person sitting across the table, the one with whom we are having this debate. Those questions, those unknowns, buried deep within the characters create the tension. Not the watch.

So as you write your next scene, plot the tension and conflict out intentionally or simply write and then review your work for this underlying current afterwards. Either way you approach your writing, make sure there is a thrum of electricity, discord, misunderstanding, and internal conflict. If, when reviewing and editing, you sense this spirit of disquiet, wonder, and uncertainty about what happens next, or a feeling of questions asked yet left unanswered, you’ve captured the magic of micro-tension and you are on your way to creating an immersive experience that will keep your readers engaged from your opening sentence to your closing line. And, if you really master it, you’ll create what we all hope to accomplish — that fictional dream that doesn’t let the reader go after that last page ends, but compels them to talk about it for days, share it on social media, and pepper all their friends to go buy it and start reading immediately.

The Undercover Bookshop by Katherine Reay

After moving to the English Cotswolds, mystery-lover Gemma Brown hopes to build an idyllic new life while opening the village’s first bookstore. When she begins to suspect that her enigmatic neighbor Ursula may be a spy, Gemma follows the instincts and investigative skills she learned from fiction. Her curiosity soon pulls her into a dangerous web of international intrigue involving Lady Marchmont, MI5 and the KGB.

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