2 Ways To Add Tension To Your Story's Intro
Part 1: The Mini-Mystery / Foreshadowing
My biggest qualm with novels I read is a lack of tension. In their eagerness to introduce readers to characters, setting, and plot set-up, so many writers forget that readers read mainly in order to answer the question, What will happen? Writers can explore all kinds of tension, even in quiet, character-driven novels. But of course, the easiest way to create tension is through highly dramatic suspense.
The first episode of The White Lotus, Season 2, provides the perfect set-up for a suspense story. The creator of the show, Mike White, attributes its success to the device he uses in both Season 1 and 2: he put “a dead body at the beginning,” as he explained on NPR. “You realize these kinds of hooks do actually get viewers.”
Season 1 starts with a nice couple at an airport speculating about a body bag they see being loaded onto a plane, and Season 2 starts with a beautiful woman swimming in a tranquil sea only to discover a dead body floating toward her. Viewers are eager to find out how each death came about—because the implication is that it’ll be wild story, perhaps even one involving murder.
A dead body catches an audience’s interest—but it isn’t enough to sustain interest for several episodes (or an entire novel). Let’s look at two ways the first episode of The White Lotus, Season 2 ratchets up the tension—one way that’s great for suspense novels and one that works even for quiet novels. (Next time, we’ll look at two more ways the same episode builds tension, which will conclude our two-part series.)
1. Foreshadowing
A luxury resort on a beautiful Italian beach is the last place you’d expect to find a dead body. Which is why viewers of the first episode of Season 2 want to know how this shocking juxtaposition could have come about. The answer comes only after seven episodes.
A similar framing device is used in many suspense novels, which require just as much patience from readers. The Secret History starts with this teasing line: “The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.” Readers will have to wait roughly three hundred pages to find out how Bunny is killed, and three hundred more to find out what becomes of his killers. Likewise, after encountering the ruinous remains of a mansion in Rebecca, readers must wait until the end to find out why the house now “lies like an empty shell amidst the tangle of the deep woods.”
In order to keep audiences from getting too antsy, writers must tease the answer to the big question posed at the beginning of the story. The White Lotus has a lot of fun with this. After the dead body is revealed, the story jumps back in time to the arrival of several guests anxious to start their picture-perfect vacation. But their good times are threaded with ominous foreshadowing.
In the first episode alone, we get these instances of foreshadowing:
A hotel employee tells two married couples a legend about a woman who murders her cheating husband. (Might the dead body at the beginning of the show belong to one of these husbands??)
A man and wife engage in an ominously-framed tickle-fight. (Are they harboring a hidden resentment for each other??)
A man makes a muffled phone call in which he seems to betray his unsuspecting wife. (Will his betrayal include murder??)
Likewise, every time the narrator of The Secret History details the tensions between Bunny and the other members of his study group, we’re on edge imagining the gruesome way these tensions will come to a head. And when the narrator of Rebecca finds all the ways her new husband’s late wife still haunts Manderley, we worry that no one will be safe from Maxim’s “premonition of disaster.”
These bits of foreshadowing not only remind us of the frame story—the dead body, the ruined house—but they’re also a lot of fun in their own right. More than that, they provide breadcrumbs that help us piece together the situation so that the final reveal doesn’t overwhelm us with too much new information.
2. The Mini-Mystery
When audiences have to wait a long time for a promised payoff, it’s nice to give them smaller payoffs along the way. The second season of The White Lotus moves from the discovery of a dead body to the arrival of the guests one week earlier, where we’re treated to a “mini-mystery.” Two young women, including a sex worker named Lucia, watch the guests approach on a boat and wonder which guest is Lucia’s secretive new client. The audience also wonders. Did the husband of one of these beautiful, rich women engage the services of sex worker? Or did the father (or grandfather??) of the nice college grad plan to meet up with the sex worker after breaking away from the rest of the family? We’re sure scandal is afoot, and we’re interested to see how it will play out.
By the end of the episode, we have the answer to this question, the solution to our mini-mystery. It’s a small payoff (for a small mystery), but the situation has created just enough tension to give the episode more momentum. And the answer to the mini-mystery lends us satisfaction without lessening the show’s overall tension (since we still don’t know whose dead body we saw in the ocean, or who was responsible for such a shocking death).
The mini-mystery works for any kind of story, even a low-stakes, character-driven story. Anne of Green Gables starts not with Anne’s arrival at her new home, or even with her adoptive aunt’s preparation for her arrival, but with a small mystery noticed by a neighbor, Rachel Lynde. Rachel sees Matthew Cuthbert, who “rarely went from home” driving out of Avonlea in “a white collar and his best suit of clothes.” Rachel is so at a loss to understand this sighting that she hurries to the Cuthbert house to question Matthew’s sister, only to find that Marilla has laid out three plates for tea. And yet, the plates are “every-day dishes,” meaning the Cuthberts can’t be expecting “any particular company” despite Matthew’s white collar. In the final pages of the first chapter, Rachel (and the reader) learns the solution to this mystery: the Cuthberts have decided to adopt an orphan, who arrives today by train. It’s only in the second chapter, after this tension has made us eager for Anne’s introduction, that we finally meet her.
The reason this delay works so well for Anne of Green Gables is that the story isn’t just about Anne. It’s about Anne’s new home, Avonlea—about the people who live there, about the stunningly beautiful landscape of Prince Edward Island, and most of all, about how Anne slowly comes to belong in Avonlea. Starting with Rachel Lynde’s mystery allows us a glimpse at the dynamics between the inhabits of Avonlea, as well an understanding of the town’s rural setting. And while The White Lotus isn’t all about Lucia, or sex workers in general, it is about sex, jealousy, lust, and betrayal—which makes its first episode mini-mystery a fitting introduction to the season.
Your Turn:
If you’re looking to add tension to the beginning of your story, ask yourself these questions:
What shocking event can I reference that will occur much later in the story?
How can I use foreshadowing to provide bits of information that will lend clarity to the eventual reveal of my shocking event?
What kind of mini-mystery will help introduce setting, theme, or character dynamics?
Wow, so much value in this post! Thank you!