Just about a year ago (7/27/23), I wrote an article talking about putting your main character through a roller-coaster ride as a way of building his character.

Today, I’ll use the roller-coaster metaphor to illuminate how you can manipulate your readers’ reactions to your overall story.

This is somewhat genre-specific, but while I write long-form SFF, I read very widely, like all of us, and it’s more about that. Adjust as needed.

One of the things you control is the overall tension and release of the entire story. Now, I’m not talking about formal structural things like a 3-act or 4-act setup. I’m just discussing the overall principles of engagement — getting the reader’s attention for an interval and manipulating it.

You may have noticed… a roller-coaster ride only takes a few minutes, but reading a book takes hours or days. How do those differences of scale relate?

Here’s how I see it. Think of the entire narrative treatment (start to end) as a single ride. There’s always a steady pull-away from the entrance, where you realize there’s no turning back now, and you’re on this journey until it’s over. That has a defined shape, often a slow start and then a curve-and-climb until you realize you better check your seatbelt as the ground gets further and further away and you worry about what you may have gotten yourself into.

That’s followed by a swoop down and around that feels deliciously out of control, where you try to keep reminding yourself that all the readers (um, passengers) from last time made it to the end. It’s hard to predict how long that will last, though it can seem like forever. Sometimes there are slow moments and teases of all-under-control, but then your confidence is trashed again with another surprise move.

Finally, just when it seems like all will be well, the stakes are raised, the ground is further away than ever before, the speed is higher, and the curves more insistent, until — all too quickly — you can make out the ticket line below you once more and you want to do it all again. Maybe. As soon as your heartbeat recovers, anyway.

This is a physical and literal version of introduction, rising tension, misdirection, feints into all-will-be-well, the horror of misapprehension, the pleasure of survival.

What are the effects? Preparing the reader/passenger initially, slowly creating tension and suspense for a sense of peril but giving him enough time to see it inevitably approaching, shocking him with unexpected extensions and swerves, teasing him with moments of reduced fear, menacing him with unavoidable disaster, letting him laugh it off (after a fashion) when it’s all over.

How does one do that in a book? Well, what keeps you from closing a book when you meant to? You want to know what happens next, and you can feel the suspense in your body. You ask yourself, “Should I start this book tonight, or will it keep me up for hours? Will I be able to put it down and get some sleep?”

And every time you ask yourself that question, where are you? At the end of a chapter, or a section, or some other textual division. Pretty much nobody puts a book down in the middle of a random paragraph or page by choice.

You want to map the way your story breathes against this sort of overall journey – for the large chunks (entire chapters, acts/sections, or series entries) as well as the small scenes (a quiet moment to recover). All the simple ways that your text is chunked into parts by humble scenes/chapters/sections/etc. help the reader understand when part of the ride is past, and another part is approaching. He doesn’t have to think about it consciously — he understands how roller-coasters work.

Think of how some parts of the roller-coaster ride are longer than others, and how they hint that expectation to the attentive passenger. Map the rising/falling tension to his anticipations by helping him predict what’s coming a little bit just by length and proportion, if not in any detail. Keep the reader reading or let him sleep and digest the plot so far, and generate longer-term tension that way.

Remember — all good things must come to an end — if you pile on too many rise/fall sessions, you risk keeping the balls hanging so long in the air that the reader forgets the details, or can’t remember why he found the earlier parts so compelling.

And then, finally, don’t forget that long cool-out at the end as it closes — you want to fear hitting the wall at the end for the tension of it, but you want to be satisfied over-all with a there-and-back-again feeling (a satisfaction that the story has a proper ending, even if it’s a sad one). However extreme the roller-coaster ride, all the rails you traveled over were connected to each other — none of what you felt was technically impossible (in story-land). The reader should feel satisfied when he closes the cover.

Got any tips to share on how to keep your poor long-suffering readers up at night, or how it feels when you’re in that position yourself?