So, I have a sci-fi/horror plot I'm toying around with, but I can't think of an ending for the life of me. None of them are satisfying right now. At the moment it's hard to diagnose, but I mainly think it's a very slow burn that ramps up too fast near the end and just reaches its flash point too quickly to realistically maintain the inertia. You kind of don't want an ending to be too satisfying in horror, but what I have now is a total nothingburger. I'm in the process of frogging the whole thing, so I'm not ready for any direct feedback just yet, but that did make me wonder if anyone has navigated a similar thing. How do you keep the tension constant in your work? Is it more patience and not tipping your hand too fast, or are there any atmospheric tricks you like to use? Have you successfully added a relief/hope spot? I'm a bit too insecure about my own abilities and afraid of grinding things to a halt to attempt one, but the concept sounds pretty good. If you remember some works that manage tension particularly well, I'd love some recommendations!
I do like a bit of tension-zeroing comic relief. It's also useful then to threaten to let things go back to easy, but you must deny the characters that relief at the eleventh hour. But don't frog it off. Let it marinate. Equally don't rush or force it. Let the right answer reveal itself to you.
I just came up with a new ending for my story, that's been in development for a long time now, even as I was writing parts of it. I consider it all early forays, subject to change as I come to understand the overall idea and the characters better. Now the ideas seem to be emergeing from the unconscious, and they're better than I was coming up with before. This isn't suggestions on tricks, but on an approach. It's important though that this story is deeply important to me, and I'm willing to let it keep changing like this if necessary. If I wasn't so invested in it I wouldn't care enough to do all that.
A lot of the tension thing is realized/failed in the words themselves. Very often at the sentence and syntax level. Obviously some situations are inherently more tense than others, but you can make shopping for cereal read tenser than a torture scene if the words are chosen properly. And like everything else in writing, that often is based more on the words you don't write as opposed to the ones you do. There's no better way to murder tension than to overwrite a tense scene, filling it with with unnecessary description and interior monologue. Interior monologue is a very sneaky killer there because it alters the reader's interpretation of the scene in subtle, insidious ways. And if you think about how tension works in real life, you often don't have time to think and feel about the situation because you're dealing with the immediate situation, often doing anything possible to relief the tension. Not sure if this means you're still in the planning phase or not, but you haven't written it yet, there's really no tension to diagnose/fix/applaud yet. The tension or lack thereof is a direct byproduct of the words on the page. The idea itself might appear to lean one way or the other, but until it's there, there's nothing in that department to evaluate yet in my opinion.
I too have struggled with keeping the tension. As I always want to show the action right away, thinking that would keep the reader interested. Through more study, I've developed a way to keep the tension through foreshadowing perceived threats. At the end of a chapter, I reveal more of the perceived threat to satisfy the reader to move to the next chapter in their quest to find out what's going on. In the opening chapter, I still utilize a hook that I acquired from my screenwriting classes. I have toned down the hook in my last book, thinking the hook may be too much and does not reflect the body of the work. I;m sure you've seen the horror films where you couldn't speak are the wind would start rustling the trees and you would be dead. Those movies gave the perception of the monster, but did not truly define or reveal it. There were a few films like those.
