Are Unconscious Biases Giving Your Book Bad Tension?
Bad tension happens when a reader develops strong questions about a book that the book doesn't answer. Page-turning energy plummets as the reader's mind tries to digest the content. Often, bad tension manifests when an author's unconscious biases surface in ways they didn't expect. This article describes the signs of bad tension and gives four techniques to transform it into productive tension and release.
Content warnings: Racism, sexism, homophobia, self-harm, the shaming and murder of a disabled person
—Annie Mydla, Managing Editor
Three hard manuscripts
I'm reading a manuscript: a mystery set in the world of construction. The main characters are white, with a female protagonist investigating the secrets and lies of the previous generation's patriarch. The inclusion of Mexican construction workers is meant to be sympathetic and progressive.
As I continue to read, though, I start realizing that the Mexican foreman was present for all of the events the protagonist is investigating.
Hold up. Why isn't the protagonist asking him anything? Why isn't anyone asking him anything? Why does the book end without anyone asking him anything? Why doesn't the book ever acknowledge that no one asked him anything? Are secrets and lies only important when white people know them?
Did the author do this on purpose?
The next manuscript I'm reading is a social drama set in southwestern Canada. The white female protagonist is trying to figure out whether she may have First Nations heritage, and the book is meant to be a respectful tribute to First Nations culture in the area.
However, I start noticing that the three main Indigenous Canadian characters are all "the most" of something: The kindest, the most intelligent, and the most evil, respectively.
Stop. Why are the white characters three-dimensional, while the Indigenous characters are one-dimensional? What does this actually demonstrate about the way the book views Indigenous Canadians? What will the author say when I point this out?
What would I be going along with if I didn't point it out?
The third manuscript I'm reading is a fictionalized memoir billed as an open-minded romp about the author's empowering experiences in the world of kink.
But as I read, I notice that the protagonist is portrayed as increasingly traumatized and numb, used by a toxic mentor in an abusive relationship she can't escape, because she believes she is a bad person who deserves sadness.
Uh-oh. Is this a book about BDSM empowerment, or kink as a form of self-harm? Is the author aware that the behavior of her character is indicative of mental illness and abuse? Why are the title, blurbs, and author all telling me it's supposed to be fun and sexy? How can a book's branding and content diverge so greatly?
Should I tell the author I disagree with her interpretation of her book's events...in other words, her own life?
I wanted to be pulled along in these narratives, but instead, I felt pulled every which way!
Understanding bad tension
Page-turning energy is a top goal in market-friendly fiction and creative nonfiction.
In virtually every book, a pattern of escalating tension and release draws readers forward to a climax. If that forward movement stalls, if the page-turning energy is interrupted, readers feel an intense discomfort that I'm calling "bad tension".
I've noticed that bad tension arises when...
- The reader's questions stem from confusion about what's happening and why: If Jose was there for all of the events that started the mystery and everyone knows it, why isn't anyone asking him about what happened?
- The book gives conflicting messages, making the reader unsure how they're supposed to feel about some of the content: The title, blurbs, and introduction say this book is supposed to be fun and sexy, but the content is about abuse and depression.
- The reader feels alienated, misrepresented, judged, or threatened by the material: It makes me feel angry to see Indigenous Canadians represented so one-dimensionally.
- The reader is not within the target audience. I'm wondering if this book would be more suited to readers who support MAGA, not a progressive like me.
Perhaps most discomfiting of all is the suspicion that my experience of the author's book is drastically different from the author's experience. A book is an intimate space! It hurts not to be on the same page as the author...even more when you're not sure what page the author is on, or why, or whether they're expecting you to be there with them.
The pain of bad tension can kill a book. Readers may not finish it. Agents and publishers don't want to touch it.
If you're thinking this doesn't apply to you, consider that bad tension isn't always about unconscious biases. It could be anything that causes readers to develop questions the author didn't intend. (As you read this article, keep in mind that all four of the strategies below can be applied to bad tension that's not bias-related.)
For example, I read a novel manuscript about the music industry that kept portraying an agent as evil for smoking, hanging out in clubs with young musicians, and trying to tempt artists away from their current agents: three things that don't strike me as particularly evil or even unusual for agents in the 1990s when the book is set. The discrepancy between my assumptions and the author's resulted in bad tension. Ouch!
With that said, when I find bad tension in a manuscript or North Street book, it most often is from a progressive author writing a progressive book who has an unconscious bias. The bad tension is caused by the juxtaposition of the well-meaning project and the biased content. That's why I'm focusing on unconscious bias in this article.
You might be wondering why I keep talking about unconscious bias. Don't we also get a lot of books with conscious bias? We certainly do. However, openly bigoted books don't raise bad tension for me, because I'm not confused about a) why the biased content is there or b) how to feel about it. (It's there because they're biased, and I'm upset!)
Another reason I'm addressing progressive writers and not openly bigoted ones is that I know progressive writers want to change. If, like many of my clients, you want more practice identifying and eliminating bad tension from unconscious bias, I hope this article can help. Most importantly, I hope to demonstrate how bad tension can be a wonderful gift for authors. It's like a gold mine for productive content. If you can find it and change it into productive content, your work will have advanced to the next level. Readers, agents, and publishers will feel the difference.
Unconscious biases
A bias is a preference for, or aversion to, something: often a person, group, identity, or idea. An unconscious bias, also called an implicit bias, is a bias you're not aware of.
Even people who strive not to be biased might still have biases they could try to overcome if they knew about them. Biases like...
White people's knowledge is more important than Mexican people's
White people are internally complex and nuanced, while Indigenous people's personalities are more simple and superlative (the most kind, the most evil)
White people grow, and Indigenous people stay the same
A story (a life?) is only worthwhile if sold as fun and sexy
Self-harm and mental illness are shameful and every effort should be made to put a positive face on them, even to oneself
When you see these biases written out in black and white, they seem obvious. Nevertheless, they weren't obvious to the authors who wrote the manuscripts.
Bias is like water under pressure: it will find its way through any crack and cranny. And just think of the nature of book-writing. It's such a personal, intense, and depth-plumbing activity that if an author has an unexamined personal bias, the question is not if, but when it will surface.
If you'd like to learn more, you can read about unconscious/implicit biases in this Georgetown module, "Bias and well-meaning people", and test yourself for biases at Harvard's Project Implicit.
You can detect bad tension
Bad tension is worth looking for, since it can lead to incredibly rich content once addressed.
You have the power to detect bad tension in your own drafts. It's like a combination of troubleshooting and mining.
Some authors are sensitive to the contradictory messages and unconscious biases that foment bad tension for readers. They focus on these things and engage with them. For others, the impulse isn't as automatic. They might have to consciously add "searching for unconscious biases" and "seeking bad tension" to their editing to-do list. That's okay. The important thing is that you want to find it and are actively looking as part of your process. As you read your draft page by page, it can help to ask things like:
Is the passage giving readers enough guidance on how to feel about these characters, situations, and themes?
Will this material leave readers with mixed messages or awkward questions?
I know how I feel about this content, but how will my target audience feel? How will it make the audience think I feel? How can I signal more clearly how I really feel and what I really think?
If part of my book feels off but I don't know why, is there an unconscious bias that distorts the storytelling?
These questions can be especially helpful when directed towards elements of race, gender, sexuality, class, level of education, neurodivergence, mental health, age, disability, and privilege. Some of the most common bias traps authors can fall into are listed in my previous article, "Exploitation versus representation".
Transforming bad tension, strategy 1: Purge the material that causes bad tension
You find bad tension. What now?
Sometimes when I point out potential bias in a critique, the author responds, "Whoops, there's no reason that needs to be there!" and takes the material out. That's probably the easiest way to deal with bad-tension-causing content. But when it comes to writing, easy isn't always best. Sometimes the hard way is better: digging in, interrogating, questioning, transforming. That's where the next three strategies come in.
Strategy 2: Literary judo—channeling reader curiosity with questions
Bad tension is when readers have uncomfortable questions the book doesn't answer, distracting them from the book's flow. Fortunately, questions are the root of both bad and good tension in a book. You can turn reader questions from distracting to productive by channeling them into the larger pattern that defines all market-friendly books: escalating tension and release.
I once critiqued a draft of a cancer memoir in which the protagonist flirts with attractive doctors, nurses, and techs while not mentioning his wife very often, even though she is busy in the background helping him. While reading, I found myself asking, "Is the marriage okay?" "Does the wife feel unappreciated?" and "Does the wife notice all this flirting, and how does she feel about it?"
These questions distracted me. Since the book never answered or even acknowledged them, I wondered whether the author was aware of his prioritization of younger and more unfamiliar women in the narrative over his wife, who was older and more familiar to him. "Does the author even realize the dynamic here?" Bad tension.
Channeling bad-tension questions into the book's larger pattern of escalating tension and release might have turned this bad tension into good tension and led to a stronger book. For example, with the question, "Is the marriage okay?" the book could engage in a pattern of demonstrating that it isn't okay (tension), then it actually is okay (release), then it takes a turn for the worse (tension), then something happens to reassure us (release). The story could raise the stakes for the question a bit each time until the climax, after which there's a partial or final release in the form of the falling action and resolution.
Tension and release don't always have to proceed in one-two order as long as the tension ultimately leads to release at some point. With the question, "Does the wife notice all this flirting, and how does she feel about it?" maybe the tension builds more before the resolution: she doesn't notice (tension), then she does (tension), then she feels bad about it (tension), then the husband tries to make up for it (release), then it happens again (tension), and so on until the climax.
Anticipating questions relating to bad tension can reveal new depths to the story. You might start out asking, "Is the marriage okay?" because of the flirting, but find that it can also raise good tension with other important stuff in the story, like the wife's fatigue from caregiving, the couple's frustration and sadness that things can't be like they were, and the fact that they love each other so much and are afraid of losing each other.
The same question can deliver relief on multiple fronts. Maybe we get release when we learn that the wife sees the flirting as harmless, or when a temporary remission sees the husband back at home with some return to normalcy, or in small moments of shared joy together: all things the original draft of the book didn't allude to.
In the context of a memoir about cancer treatment, the tension and release points related to the marriage would be a B plot supportive to the A plot of the treatment. But they would have been enough to eliminate the bad tension even in that limited capacity.
Channeling reader questions isn't one-size-fits-all. Different target audiences have different questions. I'm a 37-year-old woman in a non-medical profession. My questions might be shared by others in my demographic. A reader who shares this author's unconscious biases might simply wonder, "Were the nurses hot? What does the wife look like?" A readership of female medical professionals might ask, "Did the female doctors, nurses, and techs feel safe around the patient? Did the flirting make providing care more logistically difficult for the practitioner?"
While editing for bad tension, the questions of your target audience are the most important ones to anticipate. If the target audience is asking, "Is the marriage okay?" but the question you are answering is whether the doctors, techs, and nurses were hot, that's not going to alleviate bad tension for the target audience.
Anticipating reader questions improves reader investment. If I'm reading a book and my questions keep getting ratcheted up and then answered, it's like the author is reading my mind. I can't get enough!
Strategy 3: Tone matters
If a book is doing its job, readers can tell whether a book's attitudes are the same or different from the attitudes of the characters or story. That relationship between attitudes is called tone. In books that represent biases, it can be especially important to differentiate between the two so readers are clear on where the book itself stands.
More than half of the manuscripts I see with bad tension aren't using tone to its full potential. That's why I've come to see bad tension as an excellent opportunity to develop tone as a skill.
I once critiqued a novel that had been presented to me as pro-feminist. It was about a man's experience of his partner's growing involvement with second-wave feminism in the 1970s. In the story, the character attributes his partner's mistreatment of him to feminism...but her actual behavior in the novel seems more indicative of traditional domestic abuse. The main character is consistently angry about feminism and the book ends with him reconciling to the idea of a life alone.
It didn't seem very pro-feminist to me.
When my critique commented on the book's anti-feminism, and how it seemed to equate feminism with abuse, the author was surprised. He responded that his goal was to make readers understand the value of feminism and that his main character was meant to be seen as flawed.
I praised the goal but pointed out that the book had done little to develop tone, the contrast between the author's views and the character's views. For example, the third-person narration was full of reported thought and free indirect speech for the main male character alone, with no opportunities to view him, his behavior, or his beliefs from a different perspective. Similarly, the only way we experienced the newly-feminist partner was through his perceptions. A book is what is on the page, and in this instance, the only perspective on the page was the character's.
As you edit for bad tension, consider: You as an author already know what the book's stance on your subject matter is, but is it certain that the reader has been given all the information they need on the page itself? Could it be possible that reader interpretation might have been taken for granted, and more indications need to be planted in the text? Developing tone might be the magic ingredient to turn bad tension into good tension.
Strategy 4: Go big or go home
Sometimes the author simply doesn't know whether the potentially biased content is important to the book or not. The author might be hearing about the possibility of their bias for the first time ever when reading my critique. At that point, the author might still feel like the material in question is "just a part of life" or have a sense that it is key to their story in some way. It's hard for them to explain what it means to them or how they should respond to my criticism.
My advice is usually: take time to process. Then either go big or go home. Make the bad-tension material a feature so you can present it to the reader with all the guidance they need to understand it in the way you intend. If the content is meaningful and important to the story, foreground the contradictions. Question the bias and tease out the various threads of any discomfort you might feel. That's the good stuff.
I'd flip my lid for a book in which the Mexican construction foreman was a central part of the investigation, leading a significant part of the inquiry along with the white protagonist, as she is forced to confront her bias ("But they're our secrets!" meaning her white family, even though he was actually there at the time, and none of the surviving white family members were). I'd cherish the opportunity to read a fictionalized memoir about a woman who enters the BDSM community and slowly starts to realize that something is wrong, that she is using kink as a form of self-harm, and that her internalized bias against mental illness has been leading her to mask trauma and depression. Owning the internalized prejudice helps her to heal and find joy and power through kink (or walk away from the community).
On the other hand, if the content is not meaningful to you in that way, let it go. Or save it for a time when you feel more motivated to interrogate it. Sometimes authors need more time to process realizations about bias than they think. Digestion could be bubbling along under the surface for weeks, and then, wham: they're ready to confront it!
Overcoming the urge to self-justify
Emotionally and psychologically, deciding to go big (drill down into biased material) or go home (throw it out) might not be so simple. The urge to self-justify is strong.
I've noticed that authors who are surprised by a potential bias I found in their manuscript have a knee-jerk reaction to defend the content. They might email me back to try to change my mind, or, if we're in a Zoom call, address me directly.
Engaging with the self-justification has been instructive for me. I've learned there's a difference between complex topics that authors are sufficiently invested in and will commit to exploring more deeply, and biases that authors instinctively lean into when they sense the material will titillate readers.
I'm reminded of the only time I ever asked an author not to send me their future work.
Their manuscript had made me upset. Part of the story shames a character with a physical disability, using exaggerated descriptions of her difficulties with eating and communication to show how noble her non-disabled mother is for tolerating her.
Later, the inciting incident for the non-disabled main character's arc is when her friend, the mother, kills herself and her daughter by driving into a lake.
Let me be clear: the content itself was not an example of bad tension for me. First, the disabled character's disability is shamed to show a non-disabled character's patience and self-sacrifice. Second, she dies so that a second non-disabled character can have an arc of change. That's not bad tension, it's bigotry and exploitation. Nothing to be confused about.
The bad tension came from another direction: the context. The book had been presented to me as progressive. The majority of it was not about disability and actually did seem progressive on non-disability topics.
When I Zoomed with the non-disabled author, she was surprised and upset that I questioned the book's use of the disabled character as a plot device for elevating non-disabled characters. She doubled down: "Believe me, there's a bigger conversation to be had about whether it's kinder to simply end the suffering of people with certain disabilities." The look on her face a second later told me she was surprised to have heard herself say that. Good.
Following my normal strategy, I turned the conversation back to the book with these follow-up questions: Was the book as written actually having any kind of conversation about disability, or was the disabled character a smaller plot device in a story about non-disabled characters? Was the author the right person to be leading that conversation? Was it her story to tell?
The first answer was a flat no: including such a conversation would take too much of the author's time and energy. The second answer was also no, and the author explained that she "didn't have the authority to write that book".
Okay, so if exploring the idea would take too much of your time and energy, what does that say about the authenticity of your connection to the topic? Did you put it in your book because you are deeply invested? Or for another purpose...like getting a sensational reaction from readers? And if you don't have the authority to write a whole book about "whether it's kinder to simply end the suffering of people with certain disabilities," why do you have the authority to use it as a plot device?
I didn't expect the author to back down in the moment, and she didn't. To this day, I don't know what effect our conversation had on her. But the episode is a high-stakes illustration of a situation most authors find themselves in at some point: finding bad tension and hearing a voice saying it's fine as is.
Some authors simply give in to the reflexive defense reaction, saying things like:
"It's important to challenge the reader! That's what books are for, right?"
"Good readers will automatically know my real position on this."
"This content adds flavor, interest, and authenticity. It might be ugly, but it's authentic."
"This is a crucial issue. Society should be having this conversation."
That's a lot of mental labor to defend content that, most often, had just slipped into the draft without the author even noticing. In my experience, underlying these kinds of statements is a resistance to seeing ourselves as people who could harbor a bias without knowing. Recognizing the bias, sitting with the defensive reaction, and assessing whether you have a genuine commitment to the material, is a multi-step process that takes discipline and a willingness to grow through your writing practice. That work might be unwelcome to authors who are writing on a more superficial level. But many authors are willing to take on, even if they haven't done it before.
Authors who aren't sure how to proceed after finding bad tension might find use in the following questions:
Does the content in question have a larger conscious narrative purpose, guidance for readers' thoughts and feelings, and a tone that clearly separates the characters' opinions from the author's?
If not, would I hypothetically be willing to "go big" and drill all the way down into the topic in my book?
Would I even have the time and energy to do a mind map to start visualizing the topic's complexity in today's world?
Does even thinking about mind mapping on the topic make me tired and upset, and want to forget this ever happened?
If the answer to the first question is yes, you might already have thought hard about the best way to position the material. You may even have designed the experience so that readers will feel discomfort: all the better to bring home the messages you're trying to convey. Maybe you just need a few tweaks so your readers and I can feel it's intentional, too.
If your first answer is no but your second and third answers are yes, then congratulations. You may have hit upon a book idea the world really needs. You could be the one who's going to explore the questions, contradictions, and pain points, exposing hypocrisy and bias in a way that can change people and build a better world, doing the conceptual legwork only authors can do. In that case, it's time to zoom in, drill down, and start composing your many-faceted opus.
If, on the other hand, the four answers are three no's and a yes, it might mean that the content in question is evidence of a bias rather than a topic you're passionate about and deeply involved with. At that point, consider removing the material from your book until you know what to do with it. You might need to look deeper at the part of yourself that it came from.
The gifts of bad tension
Some authors may read this article and protest, "But books are supposed to make us uncomfortable!'
I agree. A key function of fiction and creative nonfiction is to make us uncomfortable. After all, an arc of conflict is the backbone of every market-friendly book. Without discomfort, there's no tension. And without tension, there's no release. The trick is to find the right tension.
The right tension makes readers ask questions they're excited to ask...with the knowledge that the book will meet their curiosity with answers. The right tension lets readers explore territory that's frightening and fraught, confident that the author has their journey planned out and is with them at every step.
Bad tension can take readers off that track. All of a sudden, their curiosity is not being met with answers. They're on their own with uncomfortable doubts, including: does the author even know this is here?
But when authors learn how to recognize bad tension in their own work, it can be a gift. It's like a big sign saying, "Dig here for amazing new ideas." Drill into the discomfort and discover a whole new layer to the story. You'll be swimming in the kinds of questions, contradictions, and worries that great books are made of. That stand out on reading lists and in submission pools. That readers (and agents) go wild for.
You'll also find a part of yourself you've never known: a level of authenticity and meaning that was hidden by an unconscious bias. And you can bring that same transformation to readers. Who would want to miss out on that?
Further resources on finding bad tension
Some books don't have bad tension, but in my experience, most do. And oftentimes, it's due to an unconscious bias warping the storytelling. There might be a big old liability sitting right out in plain sight. It's worth the effort to find it.
I work with many authors who identify as progressive. Their intentions are good. The thing is, progressivism isn't the same everywhere, and it changes over time. If progressivism didn't change, it wouldn't be progressive. It's our duty as progressives to stay current on new ideas about how to make our world a safer, more equitable place for those of us with less privilege. That goes double if we're writers: a class of people with a responsibility to think more deeply about just about everything.
There is personal work you can do to reveal unconscious biases in your writing:
Read up on recent changes in mainstream progressivism. Examples: the shift from racial "colorblindness" to antiracism; society's realization about the importance of owning our privilege.
Certain institutions track where progressive values are today. It can be valuable to visit them once or twice a year. Example: Hamilton College's directory of Inclusive Writing Practices.
Read own-voices fiction and nonfiction by members of your characters' demographic. Sites like Goodreads make it easy to find books by authors with a specific ethnicity, class, religion, gender, size, or ability level. As Jendi has pointed out to me, authors do an incredible amount of research for the sake of historical accuracy and worldbuilding. Why should social representation be any different? Browsing Goodreads tags could be a good place to start.
Bone up on tropes. Tropes you grew up on may have worn thin in 2026. Writers who grew up in the mid-1900s (but sometimes younger writers, too) are prone to using Man Friday English, Magical Person of Color, Slavic and Balkan Thugs, Tragic Queer Person, Girliness Upgrade, and more. The more tropes you know, the easier it becomes to find them in your own work. TVTropes.com is an excellent resource, including directories on particularly sensitive topics, race, women, queerness, gender, class, disability, and body size.
Research your target audience
If beta readers in your target audience report bad tension, but you disagree, you might need to do more research on who they are and what they want. Alongside unconscious biases, a difference of opinion, values, or experience can create its own bad tension.
Always edit with target audience questions in mind: What is my target audience likely to be distracted or confused by, or simply need more guidance on? Where do my values and experiences overlap with those of my target audience? Where might our values and experiences differ? Might I have overlooked differences in a way that is causing bad tension in my manuscript?
Many of my clients have never considered target audience, or considered it only lightly, and are astonished at how their writing prospers once they do. If you're one of the uninitiated, I recommend starting with Jane Friedman's article on describing your target audience to agents and publishers.
An online search for "your book is not for everyone" yields multiple excellent discussions about why and how to focus in on your target audience. Two of my favorites are from FriesenPress and Kathleen Schmidt.
Ask directly for feedback on bad tension
"None of my beta readers have ever said my book was racist!"
"My book coach has been nothing but supportive about the way I'm portraying queer people of color."
"My writer's group has never once criticized my portrayal of my disabled characters."
Authors often come back at me with statements like these if I bring up bad tension. It's my duty to counter with a painful truth: If you don't bring it up with your feedback reader, they won't, either.
Why would they? These issues are incredibly delicate and stem from the most fundamental and intimate parts of our worldviews. Your earliest readers may fear that bringing them up could endanger your personal or professional relationship.
If your family and friends are from the same social context you are, they might not recognize the bias, either. And sometimes, the silence is simply because they don't know how to talk about these issues.
If you want to root out bad tension in your manuscript, be bold. Seek out feedback on possible sources of bad tension, especially those related to unconscious biases. Ask your writer's group, beta readers, and book coach:
"I'm trying to find parts of my manuscript that might distract readers with questions I didn't intend. Does anything stick out to you? You won't hurt my feelings."
"Do you see anything potentially problematic in how this character's race, class, or gender is playing in the larger context of the novel? Be honest."
"Do you think that [character name's] story is mine to tell? Why or why not?"
"Is the way I wrote [character name] revealing any unconscious biases on my part? Go on, I can take it."
Of course, try only to say things like, "You won't hurt my feelings" if you're sure you can take it. If the idea of having a conversation like this in person sounds overwhelming, it can help to find a way to let your feedback-givers deliver their observations about bad tension in print or anonymously, or in a way that gives you the option not to respond right away.
If these issues are too sensitive to want to talk about with people you know, hire or find someone you don't know and ask them to read specifically for bad tension. I know from experience that editors highly value the chance to work with authors courageous enough to engage with their own biases.
Ask for feedback from writers and editors of the same demographic as your characters
Sometimes, authors write back to tell me there's no bad tension in their book, but there's clearly a little something between the lines as well:
"None of my [white] beta readers have ever said my book was racist!"
"My [white, heterosexual] book coach has been nothing but supportive about the way I'm portraying queer people of color."
"My writer's group [composed of fully abled or masking individuals] has never once criticized my portrayal of my disabled characters."
Sometimes our friends, family, writer's groups, and book coaches share the same unconscious bias we have. Thankfully, we don't have to limit our feedback to our immediate circle. Sensitivity readers, also called authenticity readers, are a fantastic resource for authors who want to root out bad tension related to character backgrounds. Some websites to help you learn more about them include Firefly Creative Writing, Writing Diversely, and McIntyre Editorial.
Categories: Advice for Writers, Annie in the Middle
