The Anxiety Knob
Authors - climb through the page to adjust tension for your readers: up and down.
I learnt most of my craft at the side of my father and my mother. I didn’t understand then; I do now. I see it more clearly living here in rural/remote Vermont. Most of my dearest friends here feed their families in local trade. In watching these families with their children, I see the interaction between me and my parents. Instead of a 10mm spanner, I learned story telling, writing, and how to wield English as deftly as others can diagnose an engine with an ear.
This month I am to sit on a panel with other writers [https://westportwriters.org/pitch-and-publish-2026/] to discuss the process of developing tension within a novel. The topic taunts me thus tickling a pleasure point in my brain. Cooking Chicken Tikka Masala yesterday, “tension” lounged around - occasionally coming to the fore. But then of course, the cumin, tomato-y, peppery, sweet smell of Birmingham’s (UK) hometown dish also tickles pleasure points in my brain.
For the length of a year, I have explore various koans about writing:
Can I write a thriller without jeopardy?
Can I write a mystery without a dead body?
Can I write a love story without say, love?
When we pull back all the layers, all the formula, the tropes, and extra noise in story telling, how small can we get? How small can I get? I am asking what is the minimum required to create tension.
I’ll return to parental lessons in a bit because during a week of deep thought about this topic, I do see my father’s hand at work in my current understanding of literary tension.
Before getting there, let’s explore a train wreck in Case #1. Cinematically, this is easy. I recently watched 2023 Idris Elba show about hijacking a train. Oddly, the second train hijacking movie/show I watched during the winter of 2025/2026. Why hijack a train? It isn’t like one can come to an intersection and ‘bang a Louey’ (‘take a left’, in Old Boston Slang). Trains don’t even have steering wheels. Trains go where the tracks go. If you want tension before a train wreck, the camera needs to show us that another train sits on the same set of rails; or the rails fail at the collapsed bridge; or there is propane delivery truck stuck on the rural at-grade crossing. Musical selections for the soundtrack augment the directorial decisions. Me? I might use Mendelssohn, pulling bit of a piece from The Fair Melusina where the percussion section pushes and volume increases. Or his Hebrides piece. A bit of pound-pound-pound enhances the viewer’s understanding of peril. We all know this trick.
For Case #2, you are the passenger in the fourth carriage back from the engine with your noise reduction headsets on listening to Mendelssohn or Andre 3k (closer related that you might expect). Your eyes are closed. Your jaw keeps going slack. You fear drooling down your chin. In the next frame, you shake alert in the midst of screams and darkness laying on your side with the window below you. The luggage from the opposite rack pins you down on the wall and window of the train.
In Case #2, there is no tension. Case #2 is not a thriller. Ok, fair enough, we now have tension as we ask how, what, and where’s the escape. That’s next. Sleeping on a train that goes bang fails all the tests for building tension.
Can you have tension when writing strictly from a first person point of view?
In Case #1, I can picture the spousal unit next to me rubbing hands together and leaning forward. In Case #2, that same spousal human would be actively engaged in sympathetic drooling with a soupçon of snores to complete vignette. Sleep comes easily over in that chair next to me.
Its Mendelssohn that brings me back to dear old dad. He often listened to classical music while writing (so do I which comes with a mix of shame and pride). He played symphonic music after his morning writing sessions (ugh, I f’n write in the mornings too). He used symphonies to teach me the structure of essays (a different topic on a different article).
Now forty years after last seeing him, while in my kitchen, I recognize that his lessons about music included “tension” and storytelling. He may never have known how to recognize a 10mm wrench by feel and sight; he may not have helped me discriminate the sounds an engine makes when starving for fuel, starving for air, or in need of an electric spark.
Of course, it is possible to develop tension from singular point of view. Less likely to have spousal-unit rubbing hands and leaning forward. But that’s ok. Not all tension must cause us to sit edge-of-seat.
For funsies, let’s remove the writer’s ability to shift timelines. For the minute, we’ll call that a cheat. Foreshadowing allows the narrator to peak ahead in the literal, or figurative with allegorical stories. A foreshadow is a time-jump. Think about that. Adjusting time provides a new point of view. Yeah, yeah, all you well-educated writers up on the hip terms: strip the term “point-of-view” back then stand on the literal understanding. Shifting time shifts the point of view. The view changed. As a trick, remove it. Gone. No time shifting for this minimalist example.
It is still possible to generate tension under these constraints.
Yes, of course it is.
It is done in music often. Without tension in music, it falls flat on our ears and fails to tell us a story. It is done in painting. It is done in poetry, in lyrics. It is done in literature too.
In each of us sits a knob, call it the Anxiety Knob. It isn’t a switch, a toggle, or a trigger. It isn’t binary. It rotates like a rheostat, a dial for adjusting volume, a dial for showing us the level of tension.
My job, as author, is to turn that knob up for you. It is also my job to turn it down. I want that knob in my domain.
In my effort to manipulate that Anxiety Knob, I have five senses to control because you, dear reader, have five senses that you routinely experience.
Before the first words are read, the knob ought to be down near zero. The reader has come to listen, or read, my work; to escape. Whatever else may be going on with screeching subway wheels on the tight turn into Harvard Station, the sight of rats at the Kenmore Station, the creeping sense of being late and ill prepared… those are in the domain of the reader. The readers starts with an exhale as they enter my domain. It is a blank page with some ink.
Exhale.
Exhale again. With each slow controlled exhale the Anxiety Knob drops lower and lower.
That last turn into Harvard Station is so very tight and has been since I was a kid, that sound and that curve tells me where I am better than any map. That’s normal. The rat on the track: normal. That distribution of humans on this train is normal because you know what the Red Line ridership looks like in Cambridge. Hello normal. Like, just know that the Blue Line looks and feels is entirely different. And the Green Line with its gradual parade down surface streets passing near the Symphony (BSO), Boston University, and Comm Ave’s arrow-like point toward the western suburbs.
That’s the trick. I need to know how the Blue Line and Red Line differ. I need to know and understand normal in each setting. In a story of Vermont, I want you to experience expertise in our forests.
Here in forest around me, I can (and do) navigate by understanding the neighborhoods. Most of the forests immediately adjacent is mixed hardwood deciduous with most trees younger than a century. During this ice storm, I clearly discriminate beech from ash from maple, from spruce, and white pine through the fog. I see boughs bending under the pressure of accumulating ice just similar to the birches in Frost’s poem.
Normal is the tree bough presenting in their most comfortable aspect. Boughs grow up and out so that the chlorophyll-y green bits can find sunlight. That’s not happening today. The urgent beep-beep-beep just rang from each of the uninterruptible power supplies in my office, and living room. That beep-beep-beep often foreshadows a power failure. That’s a progression: ice, ice on trees, power problems, and power failure.
It starts with the tree boughs accumulating ice.
It starts with one thing diverging from norm.
It takes one minor chord; one shift in the musical exploration of the theme. As composer, you do anything with the percussion section and you have signal intent. You signaled mood. That drum is suddenly louder, suddenly faster, or suddenly gone. Like an elastic band, a tiny pull changes its shape. Like a bough burdened by ice, the out-of-placeness signals “danger” and “risk” (if you’re in the know, else you’d think: pretty.)
The elastic band wants to be floppy, thick, and at ease.
Tree boughs want to wave freely in air.
I shift one thing from normal, and I’ve adjusted the Anxiety Knob. In the novel Stolen Mountain, I describe the classic Vermont mountain village:
You’ve seen that photo. In the olden days, it was a postcard you bought at that cute general store. You picked it from a rack standing between maple candy and Missus Fuzzy’s gingham-dressed raspberry jelly. In the modern days, it is the money shot on social media.
What you can’t tell from most selfies in our village is that the church spire is about five degrees off from the vertical and the spine of that roof has the sway of a twenty-year-old mare.
While not explored in that novel, there is the sign in front of the church proclaiming “All Welcome.” But I know that many people in those pews have rigid views on the definitions for “marriage”, “love”, “family”, and “faith” that is a bit less welcoming than they think (call back to a prior essay except here we only have extent church in town).
Presently, I am listening a harpsichord piece by Handel. Boring! Where are the dynamics? Oh, right, harpsichord. The rhythm remains static in this piece. I listen wanting the next piece to start now. There is no tension. For those not in the know about the humble harpsichord, it fell out of favor when we humans created metal frames strong enough to support the metal strings and rigidity needed for the piano-forte (Latin for: soft-strong). Piano-forte became the modern piano with dynamics changing pedals. With hands and feet, we can vary the intensity of the strike, sustain a chord, and/or adjust the timbre of a chord.
We need more knobs and twiddle-bits to make stuff work. I need to surprise you. I need to shock you once in a while. Think Haydn’s “Surprise Symphony” (don’t know it? Go listen to it loudly with headsets on and eyes closed, its fun.)
For our dozing train passenger in Case #2 above, we have her on the train. Now remove the headset. Decline the temptation of putting a book in her hand. Don’t engage in conversation. Listen, feel, experience the normal. Describe normal. Then shift one thing out of place. The trees and houses adjacent to the rail line slow down. Why are we slowing down so dramatically when there is no station near by? She is already late and now the train slows?
I just dialed “Anxiety” up a notch.
Walk yourself into a subway station in New York (or metro-Boston). It smells right for a June day. The stairs are disgusting, as they should be. The down escalator is broken, but the two going up move well except there is nobody on then right now. That’s ok, because people go up after a train stops. We all hate that moment appearing at the top of the stairs looking at a massive upward flowing crowd. You say to yourself, “heavy traffic” which ties to late trains/slow trains. It likely means a longer wait. As you walk down the stairs, you grumble to yourself that you’ve just missed a train. You saw the massive pulse of people hit the street then speed away. After questioning the empty escalator, you now see that the people in the station have their backs to the tracks. There are a lot of people there. Suddenly, you think: maybe no train came.
The attentive local would alert. The Spidey-senses tingle. You feel the Anxiety Knob click up. Most of us would return up the stairs. The smart and aware would turn around and get the street like hundreds of others who already fled. In narrative fiction, of course, we must proceed down the stair. FOMO baby.
Here’s the normal that I’ve defined for you. I’ve given you a rhythm and a theme to follow. You hear and sense a moment of stasis. Let me shift that for you. That’s the bedroom with the wardrobe door closed. But there is a wardrobe.
The better painter/composer/poet/novelist I am, the subtler I will be. Why is one set of eyes looking left and over my shoulder when I stand before this canvas. The others in the frame study the body and the knife in the belly. Yet, I see those eyes looking the wrong way. I want to turn. I need to look behind me because that guy is either really wrong (guilty, looking to run) or that guy is really right (spying the murder flee while all the others focus on the one thing they can’t fix).
Start by picking up one thing, move it out of place. Miss the beat. Hit a minor chord.
I would not enter a forest today, although I know dozen of my neighbors are out in their sugar bush. Its sugarin’ season in Vermont. If the temps cool, then more ice will accumulate on trees boughs. The boughs will break without warning. The fall will kill one human while also making another human a widow. If the temps warm, the ice will fracture then the ice will cascade to the snow and human heads below. That sound of clicking ice resembles that snicker and click of giant fantastical ants, bugs, and spiders in movies. That sound tells you that insect mandibles chomp, legs articulate. Hearing that sound in a movie reminds you that we humans are soft fleshy bags of meat. Not often do I think of myself as prey. That sound? Yes, I am defenseless. This is the sound of a southern Vermont forest on the 7th of March in 2026. While New England families gather sap today, I fear that someone may not move fast enough to avoid that chittering sound that instantly turns the Anxiety Knob to 7.
Once you (author) find this knob and play with it, you need to be deliberate and careful. Respectful. Don’t abuse your poor reader. Thrill them, chill them, tease them: but take them somewhere.
There is a little digression to close on. Hank Green has educated me that humans are fish. Just as my spouse informed me that a bowl of butternut squash with butter and maple syrup is soup. Similar digressions involve asking if a hot dog is a sandwich. That said, I might offer that all chase movies are one. A classic form of tension is the chase. Once you see this, then it is easy to declare that “Moby Dick” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” are the same story. Butch and Sundance play the role of the whale. Add “Duel” to that list. Add “Bullitt” to that list. There are rather a few 90+ minute movies that start with a chase.
Dear author: break the mould; use a light touch occasionally. Go ahead and use a heavy touch too. Like fingers and feet on a piano, know, understand, and control the dynamics and volume of your performance.
That’s it.
We have nearly infinite words in English, a wealthy language enriched daily as we all incorporate terms from other languages. But the development of plot and story line rests within a relatively limit set. Dear Old Dad said that there were only 20 plots (he might have been Harvard-educated, but his statistics lacked all rigor). Go on, break the mould, push the boundaries. Whilst many love the crash-bang-boom of a James-Bond-like ending, I get bored there. ‘Cuz I know we’ll find ole James Bond in a new movie after we see Bond fade way while having sex in some odd and exotic way. The beats are the beats, baby.
Change the beat on purpose, with a purpose. Have fun. Challenge yourself. We could take this to the opposite extreme: Can we write a chase seen with no tension? How far can I stretch the rules?
Ice storm update: I just heard a tree explode from my office.
I.M. Aiken
Author & narrator
“The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County” (2024)
“Stolen Mountain” (2025)
“Trowbridge Dispatch” - fictional short stories/podcast