There are probably thousands of blog posts on this topic, and whole chapters devoted to it in countless writing craft books, but I am writing my own post about it all the same.

I write about it not because I am the master about to impart some wisdom, but because it is something that I struggle with as well. How do you add enough tension to your novel to make it interesting?

First off, a writer needs to accept the fact that tension is essential. Necessary, even. There's a reason why romance novels don't continue once we reach the "Happily Ever After" part. There's a reason that, after Harry Potter defeats Voldemort in the 7th book, there aren't another 7 books following Harry on his happy journey through life (although as a huge Harry Potter fan, I would love another 7 books about Harry). The reason is because just like conflict is necessary, books need tension to move from conflict to conflict without losing the reader's interest.

Think about your life. Think about when you meet up with your friends at the bar/coffee shop after work on Fridays. What do you talk about? The highlights of your week, sure, but also the low points. The triumphs and conflicts. And the events or feeling that occurs between those moments. That feeling that carries between and surrounds conflicts is tension.

You don't tell your friend all about how you went to work with no troubles, went about your day with no troubles, talked to your boss with no troubles, and went home to watch some unexceptional TV with--you guessed it--no troubles.

You would tell your friend that you had a good day, or an average day, or a boring day, and then skip ahead to something more exciting.

And when we write, that "more exciting" means conflict. Trouble. Danger. And the tension that comes with that.

But if you're a writer you know that stories need conflict. Anyone who has taken a high school (maybe even middle school) English class knows that stories consist of beginnings, conflicts, and resolutions (often shown by that triangle/mountain graphic. And the journey from conflict to conflict is full of tension.

I'm feeling my own tension now, with my book release tomorrow, and the poor people in my life who have to hear about the worry mixed with excitement surrounding that release ad nauseam probably wish that I would focus on the boring parts of life. But that isn't how story telling works, even in "real life." Conflict and tension. They drive the story just as much as your characters.

Which brings me to the role of characters in creating tension. Throw problems at your characters. Make life hard for them. And then, for the sake of all that is good in the world, make sure they feel the tension. In my serial novel The Bodyguard, Lakshmi lives a sort of double life. This creates problems. Conflicts. But she doesn't move seamlessly from conflict to conflict without a care in the world. She worries. She feels stress. Her emotions are on edge due to her secrets and feelings. She doesn't just face her conflicts and move on, she carries tension from one to the other.

And as a reader, we hope that Lakshmi finds some release from the tension.

As a writer who loves Lakshmi, I don't like turning her life into a tangled mess. I don't want bad things to happen to her. I want her to live in Happily Ever After world. But I don't let her, because that would be boring. So I throw in conflict, and I make sure she knows it. And that causes tension.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good 1st person narrative now and then. I am currently reading When My Name Was Keoko by Linda Sue Park, told from two different 1st person perspectives (Sun-hee and her older brother Tae-yul), and I'm loving the story. First person in this case gives it an intimacy that wouldn't have been possible had that book been written in 3rd person (my own personal favorite), so I totally understand the draw of a good 1st person narrative.

The key word there is "good."

Has anyone else noticed that the market is currently saturated with 1st person narratives? Almost all YA novels are 1st person now. A ton of romance (at least indie romance) is, too. Did it start with Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey? Is that where authors are getting their writing and style inspiration now?

I teach high school English, and I have a student who can't connect with any writing that isn't done in the 1st person. If a book or story isn't written in the 1st person, she isn't interested. When did that happen?

And it wouldn't be so bad, really, if the people writing in 1st person were doing it well, but 1st person is tricky. I've tried it. There's a fine line between

"It's only a rumor," Abuji said as I cleared the table. "They'll never carry it out." My father wasn't talking to me, of course. He was talking to Uncle and my brother, Tae-yul, as they sat around the low table after dinner, drinking tea." (Park 1)

and someone writing along the lines of

​I shuffled across the room in my beat up bunny slippers with one of the ears barely hanging on and reluctantly went to open the door. I could hear my mother's voice telling me that I should never answer the door in my pajamas, but she wasn't here to see, so I figured it wouldn't matter this once. My straight brown hair was up in a ponytail, not hanging limply around my face, and I'm lucky enough to have the kind of skin that doesn't require much makeup to look good, so aside from the clothes, I probably looked the way I always do. Average. Not particularly good looking, but not bad enough to scare guys away. When I opened the door and saw the tall, unbelievably hot guy who had knocked, my jaw hung open. I might have been drooling. The sound I made was more of a grunt than a greeting.

The first example is by Linda Sue Park, and does a great job of introducing Sun-hee and her family as well as introducing some tension. The second I made up, but based it loosely off of some of the 1st person I've read recently.

Now I'm not saying that the writing would necessarily be better if the second example that I came up with was written in 3rd person. I deliberately made it bad, and I'm owning up to that now. But if I wasn't writing in the first person, I wouldn't have had my main character awkwardly examine her own appearance while going to answer the door (that awkward self-examination happens often in 1st person books, especially romances), and that is one of the biggest problems I'm having with the overly-saturated 1st person market.

If I'm going to be reading "I, I, I," it doesn't need to be a character that I actually want to be like or even relate to that much, but awkward passages just seem so much more awkward when I'm the one supposedly going through that.

Does anyone else agree that the 1st person market is over-saturated and authors need to start considering what is best for the story, not just what is popular at the moment, or is this rant just a reflection of an anti-1st-person prejudice of mine and 1st person is not really a problem in the industry?

I genuinely want to know.