JPC Allen Writes

Welcome to my writing pages!  The main focus of this website is to offer writing tips, prompts, and inspiration to writers, no matter what their genre or skill level. You’ll also find information on my published works and the ones in progress. My schedule for posting is:

Monday Sparks: Writing prompts to fan your creative flame.

Thursdays – Writing tips based on a monthly theme

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How to Build Scene Tension in Any Novel

How to write scenes in a novel

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the only thing that keeps readers turning page after page of a novel is tension. Tension must be relieved eventually, and the only ways readers can relieve it is to keep reading or close the book. As important as tension is, it’s difficult to teach to new writers. So below are some tips on how to build scene tension in any novel.

Develop characters who add tension.

Creating characters who have conflicting qualities or personalities that don’t mesh is the easiest way to inject tension in a scene. Analyze your cast of characters. Is everyone of them kind, thoughtful, and unselfish? Are they all introverts or extroverts? Are they all neat or slobs? Are they same age or come from the same socio-economic, racial, or ethnic backgrounds? Differences automatically create tension.

If you find that too many of your characters act and talk the same, dig into how to make them different from each other. The mellow mom and her uptight daughter would conflict in certain situations. The outgoing brother and his reserve brother. The friend who’s a rule-follower and the friend who sees rules as suggestions. These characters with opposite qualities are the raw material from which to mine tension.

Develop internal conflict within your protagonists.

Let’s say I’m writing a teen novel. My main character is a seventeen-year-old girl in her senior year of high school. She dreams of going to college, but she takes care of her home and younger siblings since her mom was disabled in a car accident. She doesn’t want to ditch her family, but she doesn’t want to ditch college either.

When a protagonist has two desires that appear mutually exclusive, you have gold for adding tension to your novel.

Develop conflict with the setting.

Any setting or situation that is outside the comfort zone of the protagonist holds a lot of potential for creating tension in a scene. I write about using uncomfortable settings here.

Remember that not all tension is the same.

There’s a major difference in tension between a middle-aged woman losing patience with her elderly mother who keeps chatting with people on a shopping trip, and a cop who is furious at his rule-following superior because he believes the superior is allowing a criminal to escape justice.

Use a variety of tensions to keep readers hooked. I find this easy to do when I write mysteries. Some suspects my amateur sleuth talks to will be happy to share information. Other will be secretive–but is it because they are guilty or is something else going on in their lives? Some suspects will be plain hostile. Those differences in characters create different levels of tension, keeping the storytelling interesting.

Here are more tips on writing with tension.

What are some of the best tense scenes you’ve read?

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Book Recs for Finding Names for Characters

How to name characters in novels

One of my favorite things about writing, and the least stressful, is naming characters. While you can google names all you want, I prefer consulting books, and recently, I discovered two books I’d recccomend for finding names for characters.

The Best Gender-Neutral Baby Name Book: The Ultimate Collection of Unique Unisex Names by Melanie Mannarino

I stumbled across this book at the library and loved how it got me to broaden my view of names. Many of the names don’t seem gender-neutral to me, but the books provides many lists of unusual names for authors who want their characters to stand out from the crowd.

First Name Reverse Dictionary by Yvonne Navarro

Another library find. This book was published in 1993, (the link is for an updated edition) but well worth tracking down if you want a different way of finding names. The title says it all. The meanings of names are listed in alphabetical order. For example, the definition “warrior” is listed under “W”. The definition “peaceful” is listed under “P”. Under the entry for “warrior”, the author lists many names from various languages that all mean “warrior”.

You could use this book for a fantasy novel in which everyone’s name reflects something about their personalities. Or you could create a family within in any genre that has an unusual naming tradition. Such as in a cozy mystery, the main suspects are a family in which the mother named her children based on the mood she was in when she delivered them. You could create some very memorable names from that kind of set up.

I’ve reviewed a newer reverse name dictionary here. And I highly recommend getting a copy of The Character Naming Sourcebook.

Writers, what books do you like to use for finding names for characters?

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Can’t Visualize Your Novel’s Settings? Use Floor Plans and Maps

How to write settings for novels

Writers often talk about characters that are problems. But what about settings? When I use a setting multiple times in a novel, or thoughout a series, remembering all the details can become a headache. The geography of a setting, the layout of a room, or a room’s furnishings may be critical to my plot or character development, and I can’t have doors or whole mountain ranges moving. If you can’t visualize your novel’s settings, use floor plans and maps.

Borrow floor plans or draw your own.

My Rae Riley Mysteries series started with a short story, “A Rose from the Ashes”. When I sat down to write the first novel, I knew the farmhouse where Rae’s newly-found father and his family lived would be a major setting I would use during the course of the series. I had to imagine it as clearly as I see my own home. So I dug out a pad of graph paper and got to work.

That floor plan has saved me a lot of time and embarrassment. When I write a scene around the fireplace, I have a map of where the couch, recliner, and easy chair are positioned and how close they are to the dinner table. Also, I never want a reader to write to me with, “I thought the kitchen looked into the dining room. Where’d the wall come from?”

If drawing a floor plan sounds too complicated, give it a try before you discard the idea. Remember your drawing doesn’t have to be structurally sound. It’s just a guide for your imagination. You can also use floor plan books or look online for plans. The photo above is my collection of floor plan books I have acquired over the years.

These sites are helpful for finding floor plans for residential homes in a myriad of styles: Architectural Designs and Houseplans.net

Draw maps for geographic locations.

Again, you don’t have to be a cartographer to draw a map of your novel’s farm, village, or city. Use graph paper to draw a map with the details you need make your setting seem real. Wellesville, the county seat where Rae Riley works, is based on my hometown, but I’ve changed details to suit my series. While writing my fourth Rae Riley novel, I realized I had to go back through my previous novels and reread how I described Main Street because I’d never drawn a map of it. From those descriptions, I finally put together a map, and now I have a valuable reference tool for the rest of my series.

Here are more tips on writing settings in novels.

Writers, how do you keep the details of your settings straight?

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