Lesson video

Welcome back to our creative writing unit in which we're writing our own memoirs, writing inspired by our past experiences.

Now, as we know all good pieces of writing contain some degree of tension or excitement or conflict, and we love it when writers build suspense through their words, and that's what we're going to learn today.

I'm going to be giving you all the techniques you need to be able to create tension in your writing.

You're going to need a nice quiet space to work, a piece of paper and a pen.

So press pause, get everything you need together, and let's make a start.

Now, we've already written three chapters of our memoir.

We started off right at the beginning describing our surroundings and giving an impression of who we are through our location.

And then we wrote about a very early memory using imagery to make that come alive for the reader.

And last time we described somebody important in our life, using lots of imagery, some sensory language and varying our sentence structures.

Today, we're going to build on everything that we've learned so far, in describing a part of our life that was very tense.

And I'm going to be teaching you all the techniques you need to be able to add suspense to your writing.

So let's start by thinking about a time when not everything went to plan in your life.

Think back, when did something go wrong? Perhaps it was a time that you got lost.

Perhaps it's a time when you lost something important.

Perhaps it's at a time that you forgot something that you really needed to remember, that's definitely happened to me a few times.

Perhaps it's a time you got into trouble or you had a disagreement with somebody.

Choose your time now.

And that's what we're going to be bringing alive in our writing today.

Now, we know that we can describe the same event in different ways, and sometimes it's really boring and sometimes it's really exciting.

I'm going to show you two examples now of pieces of writing, and I want you to decide which one is the most tense.

It describes a time when somebody lost their wallet.

Let's read it.

I got to the counter to pay but suddenly I couldn't find my wallet.

It was really annoying because I'd been waiting in the queue for ages and now I couldn't pay.

I was holding up all the others.

I looked everywhere for my wallet but I couldn't find it.

It turned out I had left it at home.

So I had to ask my friend to pay for me.

Now, let's compare it to this one.

At the counter, having waited for what felt like hours, I reached for my wallet in my jeans pocket.

It was.

empty.

No wallet.

I took off my rucksack and looked inside.

Again, no wallet.

Just old school books and a few empty crisp packets.

My heart rate got faster and louder as I whipped around, surveying the floor, the counter, anywhere my wallet could be.

Absolutely nothing.

So which one for you is the most tense? Well, I think we're probably going to agree that the purple one has a lot more tension than the green one.

They're describing the same story but the purple one is much more tense and much more effective.

Let's see if we can spot the difference between them a little bit.

First of all, look at the paragraphing.

How many paragraphs is there in the green one? It's just one long paragraph, isn't it? But compare that to the purple one, we've got four paragraphs and they're all different lengths, and that adds to the tension.

Similarly, look at the sentence lengths.

In the green one, the sentences are all fairly similar, aren't they? But in the purple one, we've really changed the sentence length.

Some of them are long, some of them are short just as we've studied in previous lessons.

And finally, look at the ends of the extracts.

In the green one, we find out immediately where the wallet was and what happened in the end, but in the purple one the writer has decided to not tell us yet.

They've left us wanting to know more.

And we call this a cliffhanger.

So there's lots of different techniques that we can use to create tension.

And luckily for us, lots of these we've already studied.

First of all, we need to vary the paragraph lengths.

Then we need to use different sentence lengths, and we've learned already that often the most powerful ones are the shortest.

We need to use different types of punctuation.

It's great if we can include repetition and sensory language, and we learned about those in lessons one and two.

And fantastic if we can incorporate a cliffhanger, which leaves us, our readers just wanting to know more.

Let's check your understanding of the techniques we can use to create tension.

Here you've got your techniques but I've taken away some words, press pause, write them out and add in the missing words please, off you go.

And let us check your work, you can give yourself a tick for everyone you got right.

You should vary the paragraph lengths to create tension.

And you should use different sentences including very short ones.

You should use different types of punctuation.

You should include repetition, and sensory language.

And you should try to use a cliff hanger at some point in your writing.

Well, let's go back to our example.

Here it is.

And I've got my techniques in a colour there.

All I'd like you to do now is see if you can identify what techniques are used in each of those colours.

I'll give you a clue for the first one in green.

How many times is that phrase used? Press pause and identify the techniques, please.

Off you go.

And when you're ready, let's check your work.

So in green, what have we got there? Well, we've got repetition.

No wallet is repeated again later, no wallet.

In pink, we've got a really short sentence, nothing.

And you can see how that works brilliantly to create tension.

Then in black, we've got our sensory language.

My heart rate got faster and louder we're dealing there with what we can feel and what we can hear.

At the end, we've got the cliffhanger, we don't find out where the wallet is at this stage.

And in purple, we've got our punctuation, in this case, the dot dot dot, the ellipsis.

All of these work together to make this writing more tense.

Now, today we're going to be reading a very tense extract from this book.

It's called 'Lark' and it's by Anthony McGowan.

Now, it's not necessarily a memoir from Anthony McGowan because I don't know how much that is based on his past experiences, but he's certainly put his memories into it.

And so it's a really nice example to read when it comes to writing our own memoirs.

It's called 'Lark' by Anthony McGowan.

And in it, two brothers go to explore the Moors which is an area of rural landscape in the North of England.

But things very quickly go wrong in their adventure.

And the title has two meanings.

A lark, you might know is a bird, such as you can see on the book cover, but a lark is also something done for fun.

You go on a lark with your friends.

So it's quite a clever title I think to this novel.

Now, let's read an extract where the writer does use his language to create amazing tension.

It wasn't supposed to be like this.

It was meant to be a stroll, a lark.

We decided we'd go for a day up on the moors.

Dad helped us plan it all out.

"I know just the place to go," he said.

We found it on Google Maps, and dad printed it out.

But I think time was running out, so the map was faded and blurry.

We had to catch three buses to get there, changing at York and then at Thirsk.

I liked the idea of getting three buses.

It made it seem more like an adventure.

But now, I looked around.

It had stopped snowing, but the path had almost vanished.

I saw white fields and stone walls.

The black skeletons of trees climbing out of the frozen earth.

The sky was a sort of pale grey like a seagull's back.

In fact, the sky was the weirdest thing about it all.

You couldn't see any clouds, or any of the blue in between the clouds.

Just this solid grey nothing like cold porridge, going on forever.

I hit the ground and felt the snow under me, and under the snow the hardness of the frozen earth.

Then I realised just how much trouble we were in.

A very tense moment.

I'm sure you'll agree.

Let's check your understanding of what you've read.

Press pause and answer the four questions on your screen.

Let's go through the answers.

Where are the boys going? They're going to the moors.

And what season is it? It's winter.

And we know because we're shown it through the imagery of the snow and the grey skies.

What do you think has gone wrong? Well, I think it's fairly clear that the boys have got lost and the weather is getting worse.

And which word has two meanings? The word lark has two meanings.

It's both something done for fun and it's a bird.

Now, let's have a look at the techniques McGowan uses to create tension in a little bit more detail.

Now firstly, he starts with a really powerful opening line.

And I want us to be able to create equally powerful lines in our memoirs.

He also incorporates a flashback.

And now, a flashback is when you jump back in time to explain something that's happened earlier, and then you snap back to the present.

We're going to have a look at that in a bit more detail shortly.

He also uses powerful imagery and we've spent quite a lot of time in this unit exploring how we can build really powerful imagery.

And he uses a cliff hanger.

We don't know what happens next.

At the end, it adds to the tension.

Let's look at examples of all of these.

Our powerful opening line in this extract looks like this.

It wasn't supposed to be like this.

It was meant to be a stroll.

A lark.

Now, I think one of the things that adds to the tension here are the sentence structures.

We've got three short ones, but the third one is super short, just two words.

Really really good way to create a powerful opening.

Then we've got our flashback.

He jumps back in time to explain what they were doing when they were organising their trip to the moors.

And then he snaps back to the present using this phrase.

But now, I looked around.

Now, that flashback is brilliant in going back to explain something that happened before, and then snapping back to the tense moment right now.

Then we've got our imagery.

Now, my favourite bit from this extract is this one.

The black skeletons of trees climbing out the frozen earth.

It really helps me picture those wintry trees reaching out and how dangerous and threatening the boys' surroundings feel.

And then at the end we've got our cliffhanger.

Then I realised just how much trouble we were in.

We don't know what happens immediately.

We're left wanting to find out more.

Let's check our understanding of McGowan's techniques to create tension.

You've got four questions on the screen.

Now, I'd like you to press pause and choose the correct answer for each one.

And let's check your work.

For number one, what helps make the opening powerful? It's the different sentence lengths.

What do you call it when you jump back in time? A flashback.

What impression does McGowan's imagery create? Well, if you remember the skeletons of those trees it makes it seem dangerous.

And number four, what do you call an ending that doesn't tell you what's going to happen next? It's a cliffhanger.

I'd like us now to do a piece of writing that practises some of these techniques.

I'd like you to imagine that you're at the park and it's dark.

And you're going to create a really powerful opening line to start off.

Then you're going to continue by remembering that you were told to be at home by 5:00 PM.

And that is where your flashback is going to come in because you're going to go back in time when you remember being told about your curfew.

Then you're going to snap back to the present and you're going to begin to feel scared.

And I want you to use some powerful imagery to create that sense of fear.

And then you're going to finish by taking a wrong turn.

You're not going to tell us what happens next.

And so that's where you fit in your cliffhanger.

If you'd like to, you've got some high level of vocabulary and phrases on your screen that you can use if you'd like.

You're going to be writing for about 10 minutes.

I want you to make sure you've included all of those techniques.

So press pause and start writing now, Right, let's check your work.

Did you include your powerful opening line? Have you perhaps included a very short sentence within there? Have you got a flashback? Have you got some powerful imagery? And did you end with a very tense cliffhanger? Let's have a look at an example.

You might have written something like this.

I hadn't meant to stay so late.

I lost track of the time.

The park is pitch black.

Just a few hours ago, mom handed me a sandwich and told me to go and have fun but she warned me not to be back late.

She was worried about the park at dark.

Strange things are known to happen there.

And now, I can understand her concern.

All around me, trees loom like skeletons, reaching their bony fingers out towards the starless sky.

As mist falls, I can barely see the path underneath my feet.

The snap of a dog's bark feels far too close.

I grape for the exit and reach a barbed wire fence.

I must've taken a wrong turn.

Panic rises in me like a flood.

The dog barks again.

Now, perhaps your piece of writing looks a little bit like this.

With a powerful opening line, with that flashback, that then snaps back to the present with, and now that powerful imagery to create the picture of the fearful scene and ending on that cliffhanger.

Well done, if you managed to incorporate all of those techniques in yours.

Now, we've ended on a cliffhanger here but when we're writing our real memoirs we do want to add a little conclusion after the cliffhanger.

Because we're writing memoir, we don't want to just end, not telling what happens.

We want to build tension, but then eventually we want to tell the reader what happened next.

So if it was my story about getting lost at the park at night, I would add after my cliffhanger something like this.

After what felt like hours of stumbling around in the dark I found the main gate to the park.

It was locked, but after a careful run up and jump, I managed to climb over.

I was cold, wet and hungry as I arrived home, but this was the least of my worries.

Unsurprisingly, I was grounded for the next month.

Never would I lose track of time again.

So when we're writing our own memoirs, after our cliffhanger, we do want to tell the reader what happened at the end of the episode.

Okay, we're going to put everything that we've learned into practise now with our own piece of writing.

Go back to the idea that you had at the start of the lesson, which was a time in your life where something didn't go to plan or something went a little bit wrong.

We're going to describe it using all of these techniques to create tension.

And this is going to form chapter four of our memoir.

You might, for example, have decided to write about getting lost or losing something, forgetting something that was important to you, getting into trouble or having a disagreement.

And make sure that you include all of the techniques in the pink box.

You're going to be writing for about 15 minutes, so press pause and get started.

And that's chapter four written, very well done.

We've just got one lesson and one chapter left to write before we're putting all of our memoir together into one piece of writing.

Please do take the exit quiz so you can check your knowledge from today.

And I'll see you next time for our final lesson of this unit.