Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

Craig here again. I wrote a pretty popular post about suspense a month or so ago. It seems to me that you guys like craft posts, so I’m piggybacking that success with a post about tension.

People, just like you and I, live pretty normal lives. Sure, we deal with tension, and in my case hypertension, but it’s all pretty mundane. We read to escape the normal world. I write across science fiction, fantasy, and paranormal genres, but I’m not talking that kind of escapism. (Not today, at least.) When we read, we want to get a bigger picture, something where the stakes matter.

Many authors fall in love with their fictional characters. Because of this, nothing ever happens to stress them out. This is not the kind of escape people want to read about. They want to know that someone faced bigger odds than they ever have and succeeded…