Adult Program                                                                                             Story by Jacqui Halpin

Jack Heath, well-known action writer and author of over 20 books for various ages, gave a lesson on writing tension. He’s more than qualified to talk about this subject if the pieces he read from his own books was anything to go by!

Jack taught us that escalation is the key to increasing your story tension. Don’t have all your tension at the start of a story. Build it up as the story goes.

Although it is important to start on a high with a certain amount of drama. Start your story in the right place which is not necessarily at the start of the story. If you start at the very beginning of a story you have nowhere to go but forward. If you start further in, you can go backwards or forwards.
Look at other people’s books. Could the story have started in a better spot with more tension?
 
Ways to build tension.
1. Let the reader know what is at stake if the hero fails. Even if it’s only the reader and not the main character that knows.
2. Suspense/Suspense/Surprise. Make the reader think something is going to happen, then make something completely different happen. Something they weren’t expecting. This is a good narrative device that works across all genres.
3. Character. The tension is always going to be higher if the reader likes and empathises with the character.
Tips for making a character likeable:

• Have them preform a selfless act
• Make them disadvantaged in some way
• Define them through their actions
• Write them with realistic details

 
You can also increase the tension in a story by using the right language and tone.
Pacing is important, too. Write the slow stuff fast and the fast stuff slow.
Equally important is keeping the reader’s attention. Humour is a good way to do this and can, at times, be used instead of tension to keep the reader interested.
This workshop was really informative and entertaining. Jack certainly had our attention right the way through.
 
Jacqui Halpin is author of Parmesan the Reluctant Racehorse, and other Australian stories.
Read more about Jacqui at jacquihalpin.com

School Program                                                                             Story by Maria Parenti-Baldey

 
Suspense… Danger… Comedy… Horror…
 Jack Heath, best selling author of 500 Minutes of Danger. He held his audience captive, until his final word was met with an uproarious applause. When Heath asked who had read his books, he received a resounding thumbs up. He acknowledged his readers and launched into inspiring our future writers. ‘Each story takes about 100 hours to write and 200 hours of editing. The editing is the most important bit. And you’ve got to be willing to write the kind of thing you want to read.’
 
Heath wrote short stories because it forced him to boil stories down to the most basic ingredients. Stories have two main components — suspense and surprise. Eg., A man was walking down the street… He doesn’t see the banana peel… He walks closer… and closer… to the banana peel — suspense. At the last second, he steps over the banana peel and falls down a manhole…Aaaahhh — surprise. With his horror story he used an extension of this technique — suspense, suspense, suspense and then surprise.
 
Heath liked to start stories with a check list. What were 10 horrible ways to die? He listed problems (P), solutions (S) and complications (C) - where things needed to go wrong unexpectedly.  Eg., plane to crash (P), parachute (S), rats had eaten holes in the parachute (C).
 
Heath said, the most entertaining way of telling a story was to start with the problem — Opening line from ‘300 Minutes of Danger’ —‘You’ve been poisoned’. Then he used a ‘broken version’ leading into this opening line. He told the students a series of boring… events… yawn… leading up to the same line. ‘If you start at the beginning of a story you have to work forwards, but if you start in the middle of a story you can work forward and backwards.’

Also, Heath enjoyed the power of similes which allowed readers to not only picture something, but to feel and react — The pill was about the size of a maggot. It was like standing on a giant birthday cake. To show the contrasting impact of smilies, students were asked to picture two scenes. 1. The man fell down the stairs and hit the ground very, very, very, very hard. 2. The man fell down the stairs and hit the ground like a dead rhinoceros. Add Heath’s dramatic resonance and you have 240 students leaving the auditorium laughing.
 
 
jackheath.com.au
 
Maria Parenti-Baldey, primary teacher, writer, amateur photographer and blogger.  www.bigsisterblogs.com