Tension Graph

What is a tension graph?

A tension graph is a bar chart of how tense a story is, chapter by chapter. Each bar is a rating from 1 (nothing at stake) to 10 (unbearable), and under it goes a short justification. It measures what the reader feels, not what the characters feel, which is what separates it from an emotion graph.

It is one of the few activities that puts children in the position of the writer rather than the audience. Once a class can see that tension was built, they start noticing the tools that built it.

What is the difference between tension and emotion?

Tension is about uncertainty and stakes - how worried you are about what happens next. Emotion is what a character feels. A chapter can be desperately sad and have almost no tension, because the bad thing has already happened and nothing is hanging in the balance any more.

Plotting both across the same chapters and looking at where they come apart is a strong lesson in its own right. Dramatic irony - where the reader knows something the character does not - shows up as reader tension climbing while the character stays perfectly calm.

What actually makes a chapter tense?

Children rate by how exciting something was; the point of the lesson is to move them to rating by how uncertain it was. These are the causes worth naming, and once they are on the wall the justifications improve immediately:

• Something valuable is at risk. The bigger the loss, the higher the bar.
• A ticking clock. A deadline raises tension without anything happening at all.
• The reader knows more than the character. Almost always the highest bars in the book.
• A promise not yet kept. Something set up in chapter two and unresolved in chapter nine keeps a low hum of tension under everything.
• A short sentence, or a chapter that stops mid-scene. Craft, rather than plot - a real find when a child spots it.

How do you run it?

Rate chapter one together and pitch it deliberately too high so they have to argue you down. Everyone writes a number privately before anyone speaks, you take the highest and the lowest rather than the average, and the justification gets written before the bar is drawn.

1. Rate chapter one together and put it deliberately too high, so they have to argue you down and give reasons.
2. Everyone writes a number privately before anyone speaks. Otherwise the first child said sets the whole class.
3. Take the highest and the lowest and let those two justify. Never take the average.
4. Write the justification before you draw the bar. The sentence is the work; the bar is the summary.
5. At the end, look at the shape and ask what the author was doing. This is the actual objective.

Which books have a good tension shape?

You want a book whose tension does something other than climb steadily. Four that produce a graph worth arguing about, and what the shape shows in each:

Book	What the graph shows
Kensuke's Kingdom	A very high opening, then a long low stretch, then a slow rise. Good for showing that tension is not the same as pace.
The Explorer (Katherine Rundell)	Repeated peaks rather than one climb - useful for showing episodic structure.
Holes	Two storylines with different tension shapes running at once. Ambitious, and excellent for a class ready to be stretched.
The Iron Man	An enormous first chapter that never gets beaten, which reliably starts an argument.

How do you make it harder or easier?

Use a scale of 1 to 5 rather than 1 to 10 while a class is finding its feet - ten points is more precision than they can justify, and unjustifiable precision produces guessing. Move to the full scale with a written reason for every bar. To stretch them, add a second colour for a character's emotion across the same chapters and talk about the gaps between the two lines.