So tension is the act of being stretched tight. And the fundamental truth of tension is this, the longer you can withhold that tension without dissatisfying, your audience in other ways, the more engagement you'll have. Now, it doesn't matter if it's a presentation or a toast or a screenplay, you give the audience no choice but to pay attention to what you've manufactured, when you put tension into your story. And really pay attention to that second part without dissatisfying, your audience in other ways. What does that mean? Well, imagine the time span that I'm making a promise, like I did up top, I said, you know, if you give me an hour of your time, you will become a better storyteller for the rest of your life.

Now, that might be a compelling argument to make, and it's something I believe in. But imagine if I'd said if you give me five years of your time to become a better storyteller, you'd be like, ah, screw this guy. I don't have that kind of time. That's ridiculous. That's dissatisfying, my audience. It's not taking your time seriously.

No, we don't have enough time to sit through 40 hours of storytelling lessons. We don't have enough time to sift through all of the amazing things that are out there, which is part of the reason why I'm going so quickly. And how much time do I have, I need to keep talking, which is why I'm going so quickly through this, I want to be clear, but I also want to be really respectful of your time, make the audience work less, make people work less, make it really easy, and not just easy but impossible not to watch. Listen, read what you've made. Remember what I mentioned earlier in the example is if I opened the door, and I have a huge reaction on my face, and then we cut to commercial, when we come back from commercial, you might be willing to get away with a senior to from some other side character, but you can withhold just a little bit of time until you reveal who was finally at the door.

But if you give 10 scenes, 12 scenes, 15 scenes 20 scenes, depending on the type of story you're trying to tell, you might actually dissatisfy your audience who just like says screw this, it's not worth it. I don't even care who's at the door. So again, withhold tension as long as you can to create maximum engagement and paid off only when you need to, and really use your own medium, your own style and what you're writing for what Your goals are to really understand what is going to satisfy the audience. How soon do I need to really pay this off and work backwards from there. So how do we create tension? Now, if I just blurted it out to you right now I'd kill all opportunities for tension.

So, for the spirit of learning, I'm going to put this in other videos over the next couple chapters, you're going to learn exactly how to manufacture tension.