Paraphrasing the hosts of the podcast Writing Excuses, someplace in season 19: When I say a narrative needs risk, it almost always needs a relationship. How does the failure affect the community around the character? People feel tension about things they can relate to, especially about things they can relate to being taken away from characters.

Now, as the present crumbles away into a future that evolves more quickly than most of us can track, it seems impossible to write about contemporary life without writing science fiction. But the secret to doing it well doesn’t lie in suspenseful chase scenes, weighty messages, or mind-blowing existential puzzles. That stuff can be fun, but it can also feel pretty thin without something that’s supposed to be a specialty of literary novelists: the fullest appreciation of humanity in its infinite variety and intricacy. Do justice to that, and the wonders will take care of themselves. 

Laura Miller

The goal of writing should be to produce something that feels like a spontaneous joyful outpouring but that is, on closer inspection, too finely made to be (merely) that—the story as fossil evidence of a deep process of exploration that, in our reading experience of it, is as fast and natural as a pop song.

George Saunders

If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

–Toni Morrison

A novel takes a while to write. This one [A Wizard of Earthsea] went pretty quickly and easily, though I didn’t have a plot outlined out when I started, but I knew what the story was. I knew who my Sparrowhawk was, and in a general way I knew where he was going—where he had to go, not only to learn to be a wizard, but to learn to be Ged. Then, as I wrote his story, what he did and said, where he went and the people he met, showed me and told me what he had to do and where he had to go next.

Ursala K. LeGuin

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . .

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

It’s a nice big fat philosophical question . . . how do you get through? Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances. It’s that, that makes it elegant. Good is just more interesting, more complex, more demanding. Evil is silly, it may be horrible, but at the same time it’s not a compelling idea. It’s predictable. It needs a tuxedo, it needs a headline, it needs blood, it needs fingernails. It needs all that costume in order to get anybody’s attention. But the opposite, which is survival, blossoming, endurance, those things are just more compelling intellectually if not spiritually, and they certainly are spiritually. This is a more fascinating job. We are already born, we are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between.

–Toni Morrison

I like to mess around with my stories. I’d rather tinker with a story after writing it, and then tinker some more, changing this, changing that, than have to write the story in the first place. That initial writing just seems to me the hard place I have to get to in order to go on and have fun with the story. Rewriting for me is not a chore–it’s something I like to do. I think by nature I’m more deliberate and careful than I am spontaneous, and maybe that explains something. . . . Maybe I revise because it gradually takes me into the heart of what the story is about. I have to keep trying to see if I can find that out.

–Raymond Carver

Here is a quotation collage from Peter Ho Davies’s The Art of Revision:

[I]t might help to modify our terms and to consider our initial sense of a story as a hypothesis, and what we know about it as provisional—theory, in essence…. [A] draft might be seen as an experiment designed to test that hypothesis…. Fiction indeed might be understood as a kind of thought experiment. What is a lie in search of the truth, after all–Picasso’s definition of art—if not a form of provisional knowledge?… New hypotheses can be tested with each draft—what if I cut this? what if I expand that? what if I shifted the time frame? or the point of view?… Without a flawed hypothesis, we can’t find our way to a true one.

Nothing could be done about the fact that he was only a homeschooled kid, no matter what he said, and she was a recently graduated senior taking on the cross of womanhood before her time. . . . Speaking in a calm and sensible manner, he completely failed to persuade his mother that he knew what he was doing.

From The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich, these are two excellent examples of sentence-level tension.