Notes on Tension

Some stories have tension, some don't, and the question that I'd like to pose here is this: how do you create tension so it's strong enough in your story to compel readers to keep turning the pages?

Where does tension come from? What's the source of tension?

Let's look at the opening of Carolyn Coman's What Jamie Saw to determine how Coman introduced tension in the first paragraph of her story:

When Jamie saw him throw the baby, saw Van throw the little baby, saw Van throw his little sister Nin, when Jamie saw Van throw his baby sister Nin, then they moved. That very night--or was it early morning?--some time of day or night that felt like it had no hour at all, Jamie and his mother and Nin left the house where they'd been living with Van--Van's house--and they drove to Earl's apartment above Daggert's Sand 'n Gravel in Stark, New Hampshire, and from there they went on to the trailer. 

What's the source of tension here?

First, it's multi-layered, isn't it? It comes not only from the fear the reader feels when reading these words--fear that a vulnerable baby is being thrown--but also from the uncertainty of whether Jamie and his family can find a safe place away from danger.

But there's another source of tension, too, and I think it comes from the reader's concern for Jamie and how what he has just seen may injure him emotionally and psychologically.

To create the tension, Coman needed to do something that I find difficult to do as a writer. She needed to place one of the characters--a baby, an innocent baby--in danger,

And then she increased the tension by sharing the scene with the reader through the eyes of a third-grade boy, who might very well find himself in a similar position of danger if left alone with Van.

She also needed to create a villain, an antagonist, with such a strong streak of meanness that the reader is able to feel the same fear as the characters in the story.

So, we're given a tense moment, filled with tension, to begin the story, and it's nearly impossible to keep from turning the page to see what happens next. That is, can Jamie and the family find a place of safety to escape from the danger that Van presents in their lives?

Starting your story with a tense scene like this is one way to draw your reader into your story. But if you want to keep the reader turning pages, you'll need to offer tension in a rising ebb and flow throughout the story, as well.

In Graham Salisbury's Under the Blood Red Sun, you can find tense scenes throughout the coming-of-age story set in Hawaii when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor.

Here's a scene at the beginning of Chapter 12, halfway through the story:

     Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! "Open up in there!" Bam! Bam! Bam!
     The screen door rattled like it would fall off. I bolted up with a pounding heart, staring at the dark shadow of a man in the doorframe.
     "Whatchoo want?" I heard Grampa say. He was coming out of the kitchen. Mama following him.
     "Taro Nakaji... Does he live here?"
     Six thirty. Dark, wet morning. I staggered up as Grampa opened the door. "Please... come inside," Mama said, bowing in the Japanese way.
     "Taro Nakaji," the man said without coming into the house. He was tall. A khaki uniform showed under his rainslicker. Army. A pistol was strapped to his belt. Two policemen in olive-brown uniforms, also wearing slickers, stood behind him on the porch. One of them was looking around the yard. A Hawaiian guy. Gray clouds moved in the sky beyond, the wind pushing them toward the sea.
     "He fishing," Mama said.
     "Fishing?"
     "Three days ago, he went. Come home tomorrow, or next day after that.
     The army man glanced around the front room. "You have a radio?"
     Mama shook her head.
     Kimi sneaked up and peeked around Mama's legs.
     "You mind if we look around?" the man asked.
     "Please," Mama said. "Look the house... please..."
     Grampa stepped back and let them pass. He studied them closely. We waited in the front room while the three men searched the house in less than a minute. When they finished, the army guy went over to Grampa and said, "Someone reported that you kept messenger pigeons.... How long have you been sending messages to the enemy?"

The reader can feel the tension here, and it starts with a hammering sound--Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!--on the door of a Japanese family's house after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The banging sound is so loud, so frightening, that it sends shivers up the reader's spine, just as it makes the heart of the young narrator start to pound.

Then Salisbury gives the reader a voice ("Open up in there!"), followed by the first visual of the source of the tension: the dark shadow of a man standing outside the door, with a pistol strapped to his belt.

Not just any man. An Army man. And two policeman. With the power to search the house for evidence that these Japanese Americans might be traitors reporting to the Japanese in secret.

The searcher mentions pigeons--mistakenly thought to be messenger pigeons--which is all that the Army man and policemen might need to make an arrest.

So, fear is a source of tension here: fear of being falsely accused; fear of having what you love taken away from you; fear of losing your home; fear of being separated from those you love; fear of having your true identity stolen.

When you are an American of Japanese ancestry, and the Japanese have just bombed the United States, you come under suspicion--another source of tension--and are guilty until proven innocent (which is the opposite of what American justice demands). Will you or your family be persecuted unfairly? (More tension.) Will you suffer needlessly? (Yet more tension.)

In these examples from two of my favorite stories, we can see how tension is built around fear--fear of danger, fear of losing something valuable, fear of being misunderstood--but tension can also be built around the question "what will happen next?"

So, in Coman's story, the question of whether Jamie can flee to safety is a contributing source of tension.

In Salisbury's story, the question of whether the Army man or policemen will find any incriminating evidence during the search is a contributing source of tension in the story.

You know when a story has tension and when it doesn't. Sometimes you wait patiently, sometimes impatiently, to feel its presence.

A story without tension is like carbonated soda that's lost its fizz. Flat. No surge or charge.

But a story with tension, well, it's like popping the cork out of a bottle of champagne and feeling the spray and never wanting the story to end.

For more information about crafting scenes with tension, you might check out: 
http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/six-tips-for-crafting-scenes/
http://writerunboxed.com/2015/05/07/when-your-scene-is-dragging-5-ways-to-add-tension/
http://www.nownovel.com/blog/create-tension-writing/

My Writing Process Blog Tour

One of my favorite writers and illustrators, Michelle Edwards, was kind enough to invite me to join the My Writing Process Blog Tour. Michelle has written and illustrated numerous books for children, including the National Jewish Book Award winner, Chicken Man. If you enjoy knitting, you might like to pick up her book on knitting for adults, A Knitter's Home Companion, an illustrated collection of stories, knitting patterns, and recipes. To find out more about her work, visit her website: www.michelledwards.com. And if you want to check out her tour post, which appeared last week, click here: http://michelledwards.com/blog/2014/6/23/my-writing-process-blog-tour

You’ll find my answers to the tour’s four questions below, as well as links to the author who I’ve tagged and whose responses will appear on the blog tour next week.

1. What am I working on?

Pffffssssssssssssssttttttttttt. Do you hear that sound? It’s the sound of air escaping from the chamber of my heart where stories-in-progress are kept, leaving them limp and flat and earthbound. It’s the sound that I hear whenever I answer this question, a question that drains the enthusiasm and energy out of my pen, and leaves me stranded, empty-handed, wishing that I’d kept my mouth shut instead of answering the question.

The first time anyone asked me this question, I made the mistake of answering, and the story that I was working on turned to dust. The second time someone asked me the question, the same thing happened. In time I stopped responding to the question and politely switched the subject, which is, of course, what I’m doing now. I’ve learned not to respond to the question.

Writing, I’ve learned, requires silence in order for a story to grow. As soon as I open a door and start talking about a story, revealing its secret—even when I don’t yet know its secret—the story ends up deflated, much like a punctured balloon, and all my energy for that project rushes out the door, too. That’s why I don’t tell anyone what I’m working on. I need to keep it a secret, and that means not telling my wife, my brother, my critique partners, and certainly not strangers until the work is done or almost done.

But I can tell you what I’ve been working on for the past few years since the projects are almost ready to share: a YA novel about a high school runner who moves to Florida and discovers the kind of racial prejudice that he thought ended with the Civil War, and a book for adults about yoga that delves into the link between meditation and yoga. I’m working on a MG novel, as well, but that’s all I can say about it without puncturing the balloon and hearing that sound (Pffffsssssssttttt) again.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?


How does any writer’s work differ from another writer’s work? Each of us writes in our own unique, idiosyncratic way, making our work distinctly our own in the same way our fingerprints are our own, or in the same way that snowflakes possess unique qualities and characteristics that make them different from one another. Every writer uses the same twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Yet each of us manages to convey an entirely different world based on our perspectives, our backgrounds, our prejudices, our tics and habits and preferences.

Until I went to Vermont College (now Vermont College of Fine Arts) for an MFA, I used to write whatever an editor asked me to write. If an editor needed a book on a certain baseball player, I wrote it. If another editor asked for an adventure story, I wrote that, too. If an editor requested a nonfiction book about American explorers, I did the research and came up with a book. These were the first books that I published. They taught me a lot about writing for children. But they didn’t teach me how to write stories that came from my heart. I didn’t learn how to tap into my own emotional core until I studied with the amazing teachers at VCFA, including Jackie Woodson, Graham Salisbury, Norma Fox Mazer, and Marion Dane Bauer, who were the most supportive and nurturing mentors any writer could ask for.

Each of these teachers wrote about the world from a different perspective, yet they taught me the the same lesson: the importance of writing from the heart. Maybe that’s what distinguishes my work from the work of other writers, although I think that any writer, if he wants to reach a reader’s heart, has to open his heart, too. If I’ve done my job as a writer, then the stories that I write will reflect what's in my heart. My vision. My prejudices. My desires. My assumptions. My way of looking at the world. I guess that’s what makes my work different from another writer’s work. And it’s what makes another writer’s work different from mine.

3. Why do I write what I do?


I write what I’m compelled to write. Sometimes I hear a voice, or I wake up from a dream with a faint memory of an image, or I simply want to see where my pen will lead me. Sometimes the words lead to a young adult novel, sometimes to a short story, sometimes to a piece for adults about yoga or writing or meditation. Usually, when I start out, I don’t know in advance where the words will lead. I listen for a voice. And when I hear it, I try to capture it on paper, to get it from inside my head onto the page so that others can hear it on the page and enjoy reading what I hope will be a good story.

4. How does your writing process work?

Here’s how it works: I have my own rituals that I follow before sitting down at my desk at roughly the same time every morning. I’ll go for a walk before breakfast. I’ll make a pot of coffee. I’ll read the morning newspaper’s headlines and comics (Zits is my favorite). And then I’ll go into my office and open up my laptop and begin working.

Some days the writing comes smoothly, others it’s a stormy process. I can’t tell ahead of time what kind of day it will be until I sit down and start. Often, I’ll start the day reading a poem to help me re-enter the space where words come from. Or I’ll fold laundry and the action of using my hands to fold somehow gives my mind a chance to relax and work its way into a story. The same is true for washing the breakfast dishes. These daily, mundane chores help me think about stories without actually writing so that when I get to my desk in the morning I’m ready to begin.

I find it helps to have a number of projects to work on. One of my teachers at Vermont College—I think it was Sharon Darrow—suggested that writing is a lot like riding horses. If a horse falters in midstream, it's helpful to have another horse in reserve to jump onto so I can keep writing. It's also helpful to remember that I can always climb back on the horse that faltered and ride it again further downstream.

* * * * * 

I’ve asked Ann Angel, a writer who I met at Vermont College years ago and whose career has blossomed in many directions since we got our degrees, to share her writing process on the tour next week.

Ann Angel is the author of Janis Joplin, Rise Up Singing (Abrams 2010), winner of the American Library Associations' 2010 YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award. The book also made Booklist's 2011 Top Ten Biographies for Youth and the 2011 Top Ten Arts Books list. It is a 2011 CCBC Choice Book and received an SCBWI Crystal Kite Award and more. Ann has also written young adult fiction and nonfiction, including the critically acclaimed books Such A Pretty Face: Short Stories about Beauty (Abrams, 2007) and Robert Cormier: Writer of the Chocolate War (Enslow, 2007). In fall, 2013, Ann's biographies of famous adoptees, Adopted Like Me, My Book of Adopted Heroes, was released by Jessica Kingsley Publishers, and her upcoming anthology, Secret Selves, Short Stories About the Secrets We Keep and Share (Candlewick, 2015) will introduce readers to fifteen authors who reveal secrets their characters have tried to lock away. She posts on her blog http://annangelwriter.com/blog/ and contributes to another blog, The Pirate Tree http://www.thepiratetree.com . For more info, take a look at her website: http://annangelwriter.com/index.html

One Writer's Process: Graham Salisbury

Compassion, sensitivity, and grace are words that reviewers have used to describe Graham Salisbury's work, and many of Salisbury's friends might use the same words to describe the man himself.

A master craftsman, Salisbury has earned a place for his award-winning historical fiction, contemporary novels, and short story collections--Blue Skin of the Sea, Under the Blood-Red Sun, Shark Bait, Jungle Dogs, Lord of the Deep, Island Boyz, and Eyes of the Emperor--on the shelf alongside the work of legendary writers like Scott O'Dell . (Indeed, Under the Blood-Red Sun won the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction in 1995.)

Ever since his first book, Blue Skin of the Sea, was released in 1992, Salisbury has made a name for himself writing about boys and their adventures with a deep understanding of their lives and the emotional currents buffeting them as they make their way toward adulthood.

Much of his work, which is set in Hawaii where Salisbury grew up, addresses the challenging issues of what it means to be an American. But he explores with equal fervor themes of justice and racism, as well as what is required to live a life with integrity and honor.

For Salisbury, the answer to that question appears to be the same as years ago when he quoted La Rouchefoucauld in an epigraph to Blue Skin of the Sea: "When you cannot find peace in yourself, it is useless to look for it elsewhere."

Salisbury, whose newest book, House of the Red Fish, is a sequel to Under the Blood-Red Sun, was kind enough to take a few minutes from a busy schedule to share his thoughts on writing with Wordswimmer.

Wordswimmer: How do you get into the water each day

Salisbury: Well, the first thing I do is put my feet in the water … or on the floor. I do this at 4:45 a.m. Once my feet touch the carpet I know I can take it from there. I am an early bird. I do my best work in the morning and I know that. Plus, I love being out in the community before everyone else. I like the peace of it, especially in the winter when the mornings are tar black. I can’t work at home. I need to be out there among the working stiffs. I admire them and try to be a hard worker, too. I know myself and know what I have to do to get going, and one of those things is to have some “place,” some “ritualistic spot” to work. For me it’s a busy coffee shop, any one of several Starbucks locations in Lake Oswego, Oregon, where I live (I actually live in Portland, but work in Lake Oswego, a mile or so from my house). I park, get out and breathe a huge gulp of clean Oregon air, and go inside. By now it’s around six o’clock. I grab a 16-ounce Americano (fancy costly coffee) and set myself down with either a pad and pen, or my laptop. From that point I vanish into my project, which means that I essentially go to Hawaii (how cool is that?). I do first drafts in longhand and revisions on my Mac. For the next three hours I am totally focused on whatever book project I am working on. I’m in the water. Wordswimming.

Wordswimmer: What keeps you afloat … for short work? For longer work?

Salisbury: The same thing for both: honest interest, passion, and commitment to the project. If my concept doesn’t thrill me I bail and go on to something else. I do far more long work (novels) than I do short work. I like to dig deep and explore and see what I can come up with. I like to get to know my characters. I have long believed in the magic of writing. Something special happens when you sit down and start to work – I call that something magic – things come out that you never expect, and often those things surprise and delight me. That’s what keeps me afloat. The magic.

Wordswimmer: How do you keep swimming through dry spells?

Salisbury: I keep kicking, and I do that by not allowing dry spells, also known as “writer’s block.” I don’t get writer’s block. Actually, to me, it’s not a block at all, it’s procrastination, pure and simple. Anyone who really wants to work just plows right on through the problems that inevitably arise when writing. When I think I have “nothing” in me, then I just write garbage until is smells better. I can fix it later. Or dump it. I believe – no, I know from experience – that if I HAVE something on paper I can fix it. If I have nothing on paper, I have nothing to fix. So garbage can look pretty good when you think of it that way. This is one of the best writing lessons I’ve picked up over the years. I keep swimming by clinging to the knowledge that I can transform pig slop into diamonds. I can fix whatever crummy purple prose I write. Keep water in the pool – forbid dry spells.

Wordswimmer: What’s the hardest part of swimming?

Salisbury: For me, it’s swimming in a straight line. My right arm is stronger than my left, so I’m constantly drifting out of the lane. Translated into the writing process, this means I sometimes lose focus. It’s easy to go off on tangents, so I try to give myself the barest of outlines before I start. I don’t want anything close to a detailed outline, but I do want to know where I’m going. It’s important for me to know the ending early on. The ending is probably what I want to know most. Sometimes, after I have finished a book I look at it and frown. What the spit is this thing about? I did that with LORD OF THE DEEP. I just didn’t capture the story I’d imagined. So I did a really smart thing: I asked a particularly bright seventh-grade girl in my neighborhood to read the manuscript and tell me what it was about. “This is about integrity,” was her answer, essentially. With that in mind I went back and rewrote (fixed) the manuscript, tightening down the focus, and -- boing! -- LORD OF THE DEEP began to take shape. It ultimately won the Boston Globe/ Horn Book Award, and it only had a shot at that lofty accolade because I had the smarts to ask a pro to make sense of the mess I had made. The hardest part of swimming is staying in the dang lane.

Wordswimmer: How do you overcome obstacles, problems, when swimming alone?

Salisbury: I swim through them any way I can. Often, the key to swimming (writing) alone is more solitude. I have written passages on the treadmill, taking the dogs for a walk, in bed half-awake, and in the car while driving long distances. Take your problems with you. Plant them in your brain and forget about them. Your conscious mind will zone out and have a rest. But your subconscious mind can’t stand not knowing the solution to a problem, so it keeps on working until something comes up. When it finds a solution it might even let you know what it is. This is called an epiphany. Don’t underestimate the POWER of your quiet mind. Sometimes it may even help to go swimming with another writer and toss ideas about. But mostly, I deal with obstacles alone.

Wordswimmer: What’s the part of swimming you love the most?

Salisbury: Revision. Oh, man, do I love revision. Polishing. Deepening. Fine tuning. The equivalent in the swimming world would be body surfing a clean, glassy wave at White Sands Beach in Kailua-Kona about 30 years ago when the Kona Coast was still pristine (it was so stunningly beautiful that I wrote BLUE SKIN OF THE SEA, just so I would never forget it – that was the energy behind that book). I haven’t seen such beauty since. When you revise you can find beauty in your work. It’s possible.

Wordswimmer: Any other advice to share with writers?

Salisbury: My advice? Swim with delight and thank the universe for all the water (magic). Keep going, keep going, keep going. It is surely worth the effort. Oh, yeah.

For more information about Graham Salisbury and his work, check out his website:
http://www.grahamsalisbury.com/

Also, take a look at an interview that appears on The Alan Review: http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/winter97/w97-03-Benton.html

Riding the Waves

Graham Salisbury, winner of the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction for Under the Blood Red Sun, and author of numerous award-winning novels and short stories, grew up in Hawaii.

So, it should come as no surprise that, like a top-class surfer, he knows how to ride the waves, spinning a tale that rises and falls and rises again, each peak in the action a little taller than the one that came before it, each obstacle rising like a mighty wave higher and higher... culminating in the story's climax.

Salisbury's newest book, House of the Red Fish, is a masterful exploration of the nuances of prejudice, touching on many of the issues (honor, courage, friendship, and the bond between fathers and sons) that Salisbury has probed in his earlier work.

But what's fascinating to watch as one reads through this elegantly plotted tale is how Tomi, the main character, has to confront successive waves that keep coming at him, getting bigger and bigger... each wave another obstacle that stands between him and his heart's desire.

The attack on Pearl Harbor didn’t only steal Tomi’s father and grandfather from his life (they were arrested after the attack). It stole his dream of fishing with his father on his father’s boat, the Taiyo Maru, which is sitting now underwater, sunk by the Navy under suspicion that it and its owner might aid invading Japanese forces.

Tomi wants to bring the boat back to the surface and dry it out so that it’s ready to sail out to sea when his father returns home from prison. In the face of ongoing suspicion, he pursues his goal against all obstacles in the course of this story, refusing to give up.

The biggest obstacle in his efforts--aside from the daunting practical ones of figuring out a way to physically lift the boat off the bottom of the canal--is Keet Wilson, a former friend who has become Tomi’s enemy after the Japanese attack.

Keet makes Tomi’s life difficult in the days ahead. Not only does he (and his pals) disrupt Tomi's efforts, Tomi’s family lives in a house on the Wilson estate, and Tomi’s mother works as a maid for the Wilsons. So anything that Tomi does to make trouble with Keet can result in the loss of his mother’s job (the family’s sole source of income without the fishing boat) and their home.

Tomi wants to make his absent father proud... to carry on the Japanese tradition of sons honoring their fathers. To succeed in this, Tomi must persevere in the face of trouble just like the koi–the fish that symbolizes masculinity and strength because it can swim upstream against strong currents.

But it’s not easy for Tomi to remain loyal to his family’s Japanese heritage (or his father’s admonitions not to fight, not to shame the family), especially when the red paper koi that his mother raises on a bamboo pole above the roof to celebrate Tango-no-Sekku (Boy’s Festival) is destroyed by Keet, who insists no Japanese symbols be displayed on his family’s land.

Tomi’s relationships with his friends, a mix of haole (white), Portugese, Hawaiian, and Japanese boys, ring true to life as they fend off attacks by Keet and his white-only gang, and work together to raise Tomi’s father’s boat from the canal.

Indeed, the time that Tomi spends with his friends are like lulls between the waves... giving the reader (and Tomi) a chance to catch his breath before the next wave.

In the end, House of the Red Fish is a book about the joy and bonds of friendship, as well as what it truly means to look beneath a person’s skin color and speech patterns to understand what he’s truly made of.

It’s also a story about one boy’s struggle to live with integrity in the face of enormous prejudice, while offering eloquent testimony to the courage and loyalty that Japanese Americans displayed during a difficult time in American history.

But, most of all, House of the Red Fish is Salisbury’s passionate plea for readers to recognize in others the common humanity that each of us share.. as we swim together through the waves that life sends our way.

House of the Red Fish, scheduled for release July 25, 2006, is available from Wendy Lamb Books.

For more information about Graham Salisbury and his work, check out his website: http://www.grahamsalisbury.com

Tightening The Wire

The suspense in Graham Salisbury's new novel, Eyes of the Emperor, is strung as tightly as a high-tension wire.

It's an amazing, white-knuckle drama, with scene after scene revealing deeper, more complex problems for Eddy Okubo, a 16 year old Japanese-American who enlists in the U.S. Army to prove his loyalty as an American in the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, when anyone with "the eyes of the Emperor" is looked upon with suspicion.

Salisbury continues to explore themes that are at the heart of his earlier works (Under the Blood Red Sun, Shark Bait, Lord of the Deep). But in Eyes of the Emperor he develops these themes further, probing into the awkward relationship between fathers and sons; the difficulty of fitting into a crowd while still preserving one's dignity; and the struggle to earn one's self-respect.

His newest story is a testament to the courage and perseverance of the Japanese-American soldiers who served in a top-secret mission after Pearl Harbor. It was a mission that tested not only their resourcefulness and character but, ultimately, their allegiance to the oath that each soldier took when signing up to fight for America against their parents' homeland.

What makes the story so memorable is partly Salisbury's exquisite use of language, with sentences like this that feel like poetry: "Out to sea, the ocean breathed slow and soft, a body sleeping under silk."

But it's also the dramatic events that Salisbury portrays with typically powerful descriptions, such as this passage as Eddy and his pals race back to base as the Japanese bomb the harbor:

"Just then, sweeping in from the mountains, a single fighter came down on us with snaps of flame flickering in its gunports. Dusty puffs of red dirt and weeds jumped out of the ground in twin trails racing straight toward us. The SP hit the dirt by the left front tire. Jack gaped at the machine-gun tracks. Cobra and Chik piled over me, all of us diving to the floor and covering our heads with our arms as bullets ripped across the hood--thwack-thwack-thwack!"

And Salisbury has an uncanny ability to imagine himself in the shoes of a 16 year-old Japanese-American boy fighting against prejudice, as in this scene when the derogatory words come from the mouth of Eddy's commanding officer:

[Sweet] gazed up at the mainland guys and sucked his teeth, like some old Kaka'ako guy watching a card game.
"If the Japs land on this beach and you hesitate to shoot them, or if you even turn around and think about leaving your post, those men back there have orders to shoot you. You understand that? If the Nips come ashore and you take one step out of this hole, you're dead men, because I don't trust you. Am I making myself clear?"
Chik's jaw dropped. Slim wouldn't even look up. Blood boiled into my brain. We were soldiers in the United States Army! Americans! To say what he said was insane.
My fist opened and closed.
Wait, wait, wait, I told myself. Calm down. Do something stupid, you get court-martialed.

This deepening mistrust, and the struggle of the Japanese-American soldiers to earn the respect of their fellow soldiers, is the primary source of the story's unrelenting tension, with Eddy's heart at the core.

It's this tension, which rises incrementally from chapter to chapter (each chapter a gem of a story in itself), that drives the main narrative forward in an ever-tightening arc toward the conflict's climax.

How does Salisbury do this?

First off, Salisbury places Eddy between a "rock and a hard place."

When Eddy decides to enlist, even though he's underage, he does so against his father's wishes. By going against his father, he knows that he may have jeopardized his father's love and respect. But he doesn't see any other way to prove to Americans harboring anti-Japanese feelings that he and his friends are as loyal Americans as anyone else.

Then, Salisbury places Eddy in a situation where his loyalty as an American is questioned by the Army, the very organization that Eddy has joined as a way to defend his country and prove his point.

What does the Army do? It ships him and his pals across the country to undertake a mission that is based on the flawed and perverse premise that Japanese men have a different scent than white men. Eddy and his fellow Japanese-Americans are ordered to serve as "dog bait" to help train dogs to seek out and kill the enemy.

Each chapter raises the stakes for Eddy, threatening his self-esteem and feelings of self-worth until, ultimately, his life itself is endangered. With each successive turn of the screw, Salisbury tightens the wire until it nears its breaking point, placing Eddy in greater and greater physical --and emotional--danger.

The question that Salisbury plants in his reader's mind from the beginning is this: will Eddy survive these ordeals... and will he emerge with his dignity intact?

To surmount each obstacle, Eddy must discover his own inner resources--his faith in himself and in his ability; his loyalty to a cause greater than the poorly conceived mission; his oath of allegiance to the army; and, even more importantly, his desire to make his father proud and not shame his family.

It's only once he finds that place deep inside himself--the place where he can trust himself--that he can find the strength to persevere under the most trying conditions and earn the respect of his fellow soldiers, both white and Japanese-American.

In the end, Eddy can't eliminate his own fear of war or death. But he can work to prove that beneath the surface of a man's skin, regardless of color or physical appearance, each soldier is the same: an American, willing to risk his life for his country.

If you're wondering how to create tension and suspense in your story, take a look at Eddy's struggle across this tightly strung wire.

Few writers turn the screws better than Salisbury.

(For more information on Graham Salisbury and his work, check out his website at www.grahamsalisbury.com. An interesting interview with him that appeared a few years ago is at http://www.cynthialeitichsmith.com/auth-illGrahamSalisbury.htm.)

[Full disclosure: I must admit that I'm a biased fan of Graham Salisbury. I studied with him at Vermont College, where he was a member of the founding faculty of the MFA program in writing for children, and count myself lucky to have been one of his students. Not only is he an amazing writer, he's a remarkable teacher, as well.]