One of the most common anxieties I encounter in my coaching sessions is the fear that a manuscript lacks sufficient action or tension. Writers often worry their story isn’t “exciting enough” to hold a reader’s attention.
This anxiety frequently leads to a counterproductive habit: stuffing the narrative with additional action that happens off-stage—reported to characters rather than experienced directly through them.
The Tension Trap
In a recent coaching session, a talented mystery writer shared her approach: “What I’m trying to do with this story is always keeping the action level up, and so introducing something new and exciting going on.”
Her instinct is understandable. We’ve all heard that tension drives narrative forward. But her solution—introducing a subplot where a secondary character is being mysteriously followed—wasn’t creating the tension she hoped for.
Why? Because the action was happening off-stage, reported to the protagonist rather than experienced by them.
The Problem with Off-Stage Action
When you rely on off-stage action to generate tension, several problems typically emerge:
- Diminished immediacy: Readers experience the tension at a remove, filtered through a character’s reaction to information rather than living through events themselves.
- Diluted emotional impact: Think about the difference between hearing about someone’s traumatic experience versus going through it yourself. The emotional impact is fundamentally different.
- Fragmented narrative: Off-stage subplots often feel disconnected from the main storyline, creating a sense of narrative scatter rather than escalating tension.
- Weak investment: Readers primarily care about what happens to viewpoint characters. Secondary character dramas simply don’t carry the same weight.
As I told my client: “Adding all this suspicious activity offstage, where a secondary character comes in and reports a suspicious guy who’s tailing him… it’s not serving the purpose that you need it to.”
Why On-Stage Action Works Better
Compare these two scenarios:
Scenario A (Off-Stage): Your protagonist receives a phone call from her brother. “Someone broke into my apartment last night,” he tells her, sounding shaken. “They went through all my files.”
Scenario B (On-Stage): Your protagonist is at her brother’s apartment when she hears glass breaking. She freezes, watching as a shadowy figure climbs through the window and begins rifling through her brother’s desk drawer.
The difference in tension is palpable—not because Scenario B involves more dramatic action, but because the reader experiences the events directly alongside the character they care about most.
On-stage action creates:
- Immediacy: Readers experience events in real-time.
- Sensory engagement: You can leverage all five senses when your viewpoint character witnesses events directly.
- Character revelation: How characters respond to immediate situations reveals more about them than how they respond to reported information.
- Authentic emotional reactions: On-the-spot reactions feel more genuine than processed responses to secondhand information.
Recognizing the Strength in Your Existing Scenes
Another pattern I often observe is writers not giving themselves enough credit for the tension they’ve already created. My client had written strong scenes where her protagonist follows a suspicious truck and interviews potential witnesses—genuine on-stage action that moved the story forward.
Yet she felt she needed to add more complications because she didn’t recognize the effectiveness of what she’d already built.
“I see your desire to keep the tension ramped up,” I told her. “Give yourself more credit for the work that you’re doing in scene in terms of accomplishing that.”
Sometimes the most powerful way to maintain tension isn’t adding new complications, but deepening the impact of existing situations.
Finding the Balance: The Three Cs Approach
To create genuine tension that advances your story rather than merely cluttering it, I recommend the Three Cs approach:
1. Center Your Protagonist
Keep your viewpoint character at the center of the action. As I advised my client: “If it’s real action, it should be to one of the main characters.”
Ask yourself: Is my protagonist actively experiencing this complication, or merely hearing about it?
2. Close Existing Loops
Instead of introducing new subplots when tension seems to lag, intensify or complicate existing storylines.
In my client’s manuscript, she had a tense interaction between two characters that needed resolution. Rather than adding an unrelated subplot, I suggested “closing that loop” in a way that deepened the existing conflict.
3. Condense the Timeline
Compress your narrative timeline to create natural urgency. Events that happen in quick succession generally create more tension than those spread across longer periods.
How to Transform Off-Stage Action to On-Stage
If you recognize your manuscript relies too heavily on reported action, try these revision strategies:
- Scene transformation: Identify instances where characters report significant events. Could your protagonist be present for any of these events instead?
- Viewpoint shifting: If you’re writing multiple viewpoints, consider whether an off-stage event could be shown through the eyes of a different viewpoint character.
- Timeline adjustment: Sometimes you can rearrange your timeline so your protagonist can witness events they originally only heard about.
- Consequence focus: If an event must happen off-stage, focus less on reporting the event itself and more on showing its direct consequences for your protagonist.
The Bottom Line
The most effective fiction doesn’t necessarily have the most action—it has the most meaningful action that directly impacts the characters readers care about.
By keeping your protagonist at the center of your story’s tensions rather than having them hear about others’ problems, you’ll create a more engaging, cohesive narrative that genuinely delivers the tension readers crave.
Remember: in fiction, it’s almost always better to show the car chase than to have someone describe it afterward.
Need help identifying where your manuscript might benefit from transforming off-stage action to on-stage? My manuscript evaluation service includes a tension mapping analysis that pinpoints exactly where and how to strengthen your narrative drive. Contact me to learn more.
