It doesn’t have to be life or death. It has to be the stakes and how much you care. How much you’re emotionally invested.
It could be the tiniest thing – she finally takes his hand – and your heart could break for them.
I feel like there’s a whole generation of creators that never watched the movie Apollo 13. It’s based on history, we know they survive.
It was the most stressful, suspenseful movie I’d seen in YEARS. I spent the whole movie going “OMG, are they going to make it?!!”
You don’t have to kill anyone to keep your show/movie “interesting”. You just need to be a good writer.
“Apollo 13″ is a great example because everyone who walked into the theater the day it opened already knew the ending. And you still get this enormous sense of relief when that first crackle comes over the radio. When Ed Harris sits down, you sink into your chair in relief.
Because the characters don’t know the ending. And we care about the characters. We’re experiencing what they’re experiencing vicariously, through them. That’s the catharsis of good storytelling.
And the people who made the movie understood that and they were all good at their jobs.
You create tension by getting your audience to care about the characters (which, honestly, doesn’t take all that much, as humans can form an emotional attachment to a Roomba [literally] and will). Once your audience is invested, you can create tension a million ways.
It’s entirely possible to tell a story with life and death stakes that’s full of tension, of course, but if you have to have life or death stakes or there won’t be any dramatic tension, you’re not doing your job as a storyteller.
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“Because the characters don’t know the ending. And we care about the characters. We’re experiencing what they’re experiencing vicariously, through them. That’s the catharsis of good storytelling.”
