Building Tension, Winding Down the Clock [Josh Potter]

Intermediate | If your stories tend to run out of steam a few pages in, the problem may be that they lack tension. Creating drama requires building tension and the simplest way to do that is to set a countdown that your characters are working against. We will read short stories that do this well from Annie Proulx, James Baldwin, Karen Russell and others. Then we will experiment with their concepts to give your stories velocity and drama.