Writer’s Craft: Managing Tension With Peaks and Troughs by Rayne Hall

Pacing is essential to great fiction, and Rayne Hall coins a great term “peaks and troughs” (valleys to Americans) to explain one technique to manage pacing in thrillers.

Her novel Storm Dancer a great example of pacing, and a great model for indie writers learning their craft. (Her writers’ craft series is excellent too.)

To learn more about peaks and troughs make sure to read her post for #MysteryThrillersWeek.

Mystery Thriller Week

Tension is good. It makes the reader turn the pages. However,  constant high tension soon gets dull. The readers can’t sustain continuous scared excitement, and after a while, instead of roused, they become bored.

It’s like the waves on a stormy sea: the peaks are only high because of the troughs between them. If there were only continuous peaks without any troughs, the sea would be flat.

Your job as writer is to create not just the peaks, but the troughs which make the peaks look high.

View original post 415 more words