How to Create Drama in Fiction


Drama is a vital ingredient for all good stories, it’s those tense, nail biting moments that eventually build to a crescendo, or they make us sit on the edge of our seats in anticipation. It’s what keeps us turning page after page.
But how do writers create drama? How do they make it work within the narrative for it to be effective?
All drama derives from circumstance – in other words, we can generally create drama in any given situation, depending upon certain factors, and most frequently than not, drama occurs in tense scenes or scenes of conflict, and the catalyst almost always tends to be lots of emotion.
There are lots of situations in any story that can cause drama – bitter sibling rivalry, a burning hatred of being wronged, the need for revenge, being misunderstood, or a desire to be accepted and so on. The list of dramatic situations is endless, but the one thing that drives all drama is conflict and emotion.
Conflict – disagreements, fights, struggles and friction etc – drives any story.  It could be external conflict, internal conflict or a main central conflict. Whenever we create different conflicts, we also create different dramatic situations. This is how we make good drama. 
Think about the best soaps on TV – they rely on drama; they thrive on conflict and emotion. Characters often clash, disagree or fight. Then there are the more conniving or devious characters that conspire, backstab and deceive. The main characters generally end up in some usual or difficult situations and we wonder just how they will escape such predicaments.
Behind these conflicting situations there is always an underlying emotion – jealousy, fear, hate, desire, deceit, betrayal etc. Emotions bring your characters into sharp focus; they are vulnerabilities that the reader will understand. When you unveil such vulnerabilities within your characters and push them into near impossible positions – what will happen? How will they manage to get out of it? Because of these ‘what if’ scenarios, and the apprehension of not knowing the outcome, you create drama and tension.
Writers also love to mislead their main characters. They like to force them to make bad decisions or make terrible mistakes, usually with awful consequences. This creates drama, of course, not only because of the heightened emotion that is created, but also because the reader knows what the right decision should have been. The burden and emotion of wrong decisions is something the reader will recognise and empathise with, so this creates a certain amount of tension, emotion and therefore the end result is a dramatic situation or scenario. The reader is left wondering just how the character will get out of such a situation - they will keep turning the page to find out. You’ll see this used very effectively in lots of TV soaps, TV dramas and movies.
The other thing writers do is create all manner of complications. That’s because the protagonist’s journey should never be an easy one, otherwise there would be hardly any drama to keep a reader awake. Instead we make our main character’s suffer, we complicate things, we escalate danger, we heighten conflicts, we raise the stakes and we push them to the brink. We force them to make bad choices and decisions.
How do you create drama? At key points in the story, mix conflict and emotions, mislead your characters, have them make bad decisions and always introduce complications. All these elements will produce dramatic situations and scenarios to keep your reader enthralled.
Next week: Story archetypes

Comments

  1. Victoria Marie Lees18 July 2017 at 19:50

    Good information here, AJ. Thanks for sharing this with your followers. I found your blog through Raimey Gallant’s blogging award post in which you and I are both nominated for the Liebster blogging award. I love your blog set-up.
    This is my first time here, so I've followed your blog. I've shared this post online and will continue to connect with you online. Again, nice to “meet” you, AJ.
    http://victoriamarielees.blogspot.com

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