Tension - By Max Harms
TL;DR
Tension is the engine of writing — Max Harms calls it the second most important aspect of writing after quality: you promise the reader something they want, delay it just enough, then pay it off while planting the next hunger.
'Show, don’t tell' is too crude to be useful on its own — his key example is the 1977 Star Wars opening crawl, which is pure exposition but still works because it teases rebel spaceships, the Empire, and the Death Star before the audience has ever seen a space battle.
Good tension depends on trust through constant payoff — in Lost’s 2004 pilot, the first 30 seconds keep answering questions in a steady drip (closed eye, open eye, jungle, injured man in a suit) while creating bigger ones, teaching the audience that the story will reward attention.
Action is not the same thing as tension — Harms argues that stories get boring when scenes are too action-dense and don’t leave room for the reader to orient, compare it to a thunderstorm looming overhead, and points to Alfred Hitchcock as a master of low-action suspense.
Non-fiction needs tension too — if you’re writing, say, about voting systems, you should surface the stakes early, make readers hungry for the insight, and deliver conclusions at the moment they’re ready for them rather than dumping answers too early or too late.
Sometimes great writing sacrifices tension for texture and meaning — he uses The Fellowship of the Ring as the counterexample, arguing Tolkien often deflates suspense on purpose with birthdays, landscape, songs, and Elvish atmosphere so Middle-earth feels worth saving.
The Breakdown
Why the usual writing advice feels slippery
Max opens by poking at the standard craft commandments — “show, don’t tell,” “omit needless words,” “don’t waste your readers’ time” — and basically asks: what are writers actually supposed to do with that? His point is that these rules feel maddeningly vague, especially in fiction, where the entire project is arguably “wasting time” in an invented world.
The Star Wars crawl and the real job of exposition
He lands on the opening crawl of Star Wars as a perfect “rule-breaking” example that absolutely works. The crawl tells us about civil war, rebel spaceships, the Empire, and the Death Star, but what it really does is dangle the possibility of spectacle in front of a 1977 audience that had never seen anything like a modern space battle.
Tension as controlled hunger
This is the essay’s core thesis: tension means promising the reader something they want, making them ache for it, then delivering the release while quietly setting up the next craving. Max jokes that “all of writing is BDSM,” and while he laughs at the phrasing, he clearly means it — master writers edge the audience, payoff after payoff, until they look up and realize they lost an entire weekend.
Quality still outranks suspense
He makes an important correction before going further: tension is only the second most important thing in writing; the first is quality. A story can be highly bingeable and still feel like junk food afterward, so tension is best understood as a concrete, high-leverage subskill — useful precisely because it’s one of the easiest ways for writers to noticeably improve.
Why Lost’s pilot works in seconds
Max then does a close reading of Lost’s 2004 pilot: first a closed eye, then three seconds later a sting and the eye snaps open, then jungle canopy, then the reveal of an injured businessman in a suit. Each beat answers just enough to earn trust while raising better questions — who is he, why is he scared, why is he in the jungle — and Max’s rule of thumb is great: nearly every sentence after the first should function as some kind of payoff.
Tension needs breathing room, not nonstop action
One of his sharpest points is that action mostly answers questions; it doesn’t automatically create them. The lingering overhead shot in Lost works because it gives the audience time to process, and he says many battle scenes fail for exactly the opposite reason: the author understands the action, but the reader never gets enough stillness to orient.
Empathy is the hidden mechanism
The reason the Lost scene tightens its grip, he says, is empathy. We care about the man because he’s confused in the same way we are, and that overlap turns simple curiosity into actual tension; more broadly, protagonists become magnetic when they embody traits the audience wants for itself.
Non-fiction, Tolkien, and the trade-off
Max insists non-fiction follows the same pattern: set up stakes, make the reader hungry, then release the answer at the exact moment they’re ready, whether the subject is voting systems or anything else. He closes with Tolkien as a deliberate counterexample — The Fellowship of the Ring often weakens tension with long detours into birthdays, geography, and Elvish atmosphere, but those “boring” passages make Middle-earth feel lived-in, which is exactly why the later danger matters so much.