Tenterhooks
Hang Your Audience on Them
A tenterhook, if you didn’t know—I didn’t—is a hook used to fasten fabric to a tenter. A tenter is a frame used to stretch wet fabric while it dries, to prevent the cloth from shrinking. When you do this activity with your knitting it’s called blocking but I don’t know what it’s called when you do it with a tenter and tenterhooks. That’s where we get the phrase “on tenterhooks,” meaning someone is waiting anxiously for something to happen. The idea is the person is tense like fabric stretched in all directions. Thanks, Merriam Webster.
I knew it was tenterhooks and not tenderhooks, a common misspelling, but even so I misguessed the origin of the word and I thought a tenterhook was another word for a meat hook, one of those scary hooks you see in butcher shops and slaughterhouses for hanging big slabs of meat from the ceiling. I have no sense of where, when, or how I got this idea. I’ve just always assumed that’s what a tenterhook was, for no particular reason. Now we know (or, at least, I do).
Another word I misunderstood like that for a long time was bellwether. Again, though I knew how to spell it (with no “a”), I assumed it was something like a weathervane—a pastoral device to show you which way the wind is blowing. A bellwether is actually the animal in a herd that the other animals naturally follow. In a sheep herd, there will always be one sheep the other sheep follow. The sheep choose their own leader, shepherds don’t get to tell the sheep which sheep to follow. It may be a democratic process or more of a hereditary monarchy; I don’t know. A castrated male sheep is a wether. If you want to know where your flock is, you put a bell on the leader sheep—that’s the only one you need to locate to find all the rest. Hence, bellwether. The sheep in your flock that shows you where the rest are headed. In bovines this animal is your bell cow.
I think I’m the most knowledgeable person I know when it comes to words but when I tried to impress my brother with the bellwether thing he already knew, because he follows football, where this term (and bell cow) are sometimes used to describe the team’s lead running back, a player whose direction the others follow. Anyway I’m full of misconceptions, is what I’m going on about.
Today’s Shelf Life is not about misconceptions, it’s about dramatic tension, which is what flogs a reader onward through a story. I’ve talked about dramatic tension in Shelf Life before but I can’t recall when so there’s no cross reference for you. We’ll just pretend it’s a fresh, new topic.
There are a lot of reasons for someone to choose a book, start reading that book, keep reading that book, finish that book, choose another book by the same author, and so on. However: Each of those points mentioned in the previous sentence is an opportunity for the reader to peel off and abandon the author. Maybe they pick up the book in a store (or look at the record on Amazon) but decide not to buy; maybe they buy but don’t read; maybe they begin reading but don’t finish; maybe they finish but don’t go on to the next book in the series or another of the same author’s titles.
It’s me, I’m readers. I peel off at all those points. I consider more books than I buy, buy more books than I read, and start more books and series than I finish. My time is limited and I have ADHD. I can’t read as much as I want to. If I start reading something and it isn’t compelling from the get-go, I will put it down and move on to something else.
Now: There’s nothing necessarily wrong with books that engage the reader more slowly. There are lots of books like this and historically plenty of them have had readership. I often think of Anna Karenina as a book that takes a while to get going, doesn’t really go that much, then ends. But people have been reading it for more than one hundred years. People like it. Personally I don’t like it, but lots of people do.
That said: I believe a book that leads with dramatic tension can engage any reader while a book that leads with something else and has slow or low dramatic tension will only engage readers with patience reserves prepared for the task. Like, sometimes I can read the low-and-slow book. I’ve read Anna Karenina. But I have to go into that kind of book with the will to power through the early boring parts. It’s like watching Bojack Horseman, where you have to get through the first two snoozer episodes to get to a really good one (“Prickly-Muffin”) that sells you on the rest of the series.
There are lots of things that keep readers turning pages. Some readers will turn pages for characters they like or prose styling that speaks to them or loyalty to the author. Most readers will turn pages for dramatic tension.
Dramatic tension is the state of not-knowing that a book reader (or television, movie, or stage play watcher) experiences at any point in consuming a story and its companion state of wanting-to-find-out that compels the reader to continue reading the story. Dramatic tension is the state of a reader to has a question about the story that has not yet been answered.
By the end of a story, you want all the tension released. Not necessarily by the end of a book—by the end of a story! The story might span many books. In that case you want to maintain some dramatic tension between books that keeps the reader picking up the next one. But by the end of the story, series, saga, or what have you, you want that tension to be resolved. That is what leaves the reader feeling satisfied; all the questions they generated in the course of reading have been answered.
The sooner you create dramatic tension in the reader, the better. It’s a great idea to start right in the first sentence. For instance:
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. (Nineteen Eighty-Four)
Clocks—ones that strike, anyway—only go to twelve. Immediately you want to know why the clocks in this setting go to thirteen.
You better not never tell nobody but God. (The Color Purple)
Tell nobody but God what?! What’s the secret that’s so damning they better not tell anyone but God?
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
First, what do you mean discover ice, you can’t discover ice, ice has done been discovered, and also why are they executing Colonel Buendía?
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader)
What horrible thing did this boy do to almost deserve this horrible name?
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. (Their Eyes Were Watching God)
What?
Dramatic tension, however, requires the author perform a delicate balancing act. You can’t answer the question too quickly, if it is what’s causing the reader to keep reading. However, you don’t want to hold the answer back too long or the reader may lose interest in getting the answer or despair that they’re never going to get it.
Here’s—in my opinion—a too quick example. Again referencing Anna Karenina.
Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house.
Oh no, why is everything in confusion?
The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him.
Welp, there’s the answer. My curiosity is resolved in this next sentence and the author does not give me a replacement question to continue holding my interest. This second sentence answers my question completely and does not propose another one. The whole of the first chapter introduces no new questions. The husband is a jerk and an idiot and having an affair with the nanny. Tale as old as time.
Compare this with the first line of Frankenstein:
To Mrs. Saville, England.
St. Petersburgh, Dec. 11th, 17—.
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
Okay I already want to know what this enterprise is that Mrs Saville (to whom the first letter in this epistolary novel is written) has regarded with evil forebodings. And who is Mrs Saville? And who is writing to Mrs Saville?
Second sentence:
I arrived here yesterday, and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.
Okay, well, now I guess I know Mrs Saville is the letter-writer’s dear sister but I still don’t know, and want to know,
Who is writing the letter?
Why has the letter-writer traveled to St Petersburg (presumably from England)?
And was this travel the enterprise the sister objected to? If so, why?
Or is the enterprise of the evil forebodings something yet to be revealed?
I think this is masterful because the author immediately gave me a sense of what’s going on—the writer of this letter has arrived at the end destination of a journey and writing to let someone know they’ve arrives safely—and trickled out some information to answer my initial question (“Who is Mrs Saville?”) while prompting me to ask several more questions that compel me to keep reading further.
You have to read a bit further into the first letter to learn that the letter-writer is on a scientific expedition to the north pole. By then I have an even bigger question that will compel me through several more letters, which is: What does any of this have to do with the Frankenstein story I know?
But in seriousness, let’s say you’re an avid reader and it’s January 1818 and you just got your hands on this new hotness and “Frankenstein” is no cultural shorthand for you, it doesn’t mean anything yet. This first letter has introduced a bigger question that will propel you forward, which is: “Will letter-writer R. Walton survive this dangerous expedition to the north pole?” You don’t have to know that a manufactured monster man with a heart of gold is going to be involved (spoiler alert); the premise of Walton undertaking this dangerous north pole expedition is plot enough to start with.
Frankenstein is an example of excellent pacing of questions and answers to create dramatic tension. Start the reader off asking questions, answer some of them, introduce more—but don’t answer enough of them, fast enough, to leave the reader with a sense of satiety feeling all their questions are answered. Satiety is a signal of being finished with something.
The other extreme is a story that asks too many questions without providing any (or enough) answers, quickly enough, for the reader to get their bearings and feel oriented. I have encountered books like this (usually science fiction or fantasy titles), where I feel like I can’t get a foothold fast enough to orient myself in the setting and start understanding the story. Where I have too many questions and not enough answers. I don’t want to cite any specific titles because I can’t think of any that are old enough for the author to be dead and I don’t want to be critical of an author who might be developing or who might be someone else’s cup of tea but not mine.
Because this threshold will be different for different readers. Some readers will have more tolerance for disorientation and dramatic tension, and some will have less. You can’t please all the people all the time.
In my opinion, the most satisfying stories, the books I end up enjoying the most and look back on with the most fondness, and even want to read again, are those that walk right on that tightrope, where they are just within my tolerance for disorientation and I think if I had even one more unanswered question at the end of chapter one I’d put it down. In some cases, I have put the book down and given up on it, only to come back later and try again and really enjoy the book.
So there’s no winning formula for all readers. How much dramatic tension? Probably at least some—definitely not none—but also not too much. The important thing is that you know how to create it: Cause the reader to ask questions, answer some of those questions, but leave them with net positive unanswered questions until the end.
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