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On Scene-level Microtension and the Greatest Prologue Ever Written
What Is Microtension?
I’ve written about microtension with frequency. The word helps describe a simple aspect of storytelling that is crucial to a narrative but often remains in the shadows. What is it?
Microtension is getting tension on every page of a story on a line-by-line basis.
C.S. Lakin does an incredible job of detailing this process in their article here.
For the purposes of this post, I wanted to go out a level, though. Because, while tension at the line level is really crucial, it’s also important to see it at the scene level.
Armadale
One of my best friends and I have recently gotten into reading older books and delighting in their chaos. For some reason, in our youths, we were told that classics like The Three Musketeers, Dracula, and The Woman in White were “literary” and “highfalutin” material that must be examined with distance and respect.
However, I cannot describe the joy of revisiting these works and seeing that they are all a little batsh*t crazy.
The Woman in White has Count Fosco, one of the most bizarre and hilarious characters in literature. Dracula blew up Tumblr with all the bizarre and hilarious moments in…
