How do I add tension to a story, when the reader knows the MC survives?
To clarify:
There are two parts to the book (or I might split them into separate books), one with my main protagonist, and the second is a prequel, showing the protagonist's father's story.
Both storylines are high fantasy, with war being the major issue.
My problem is that, since the father is seen in the later part, we know he survived whatever happened before. He goes through moments when, from the character's perspective, he might not live, but the reader knows he does.
How do I make the readers feel the tension, even though they know the character lives?
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Tension is caused by reader's wanting to know "what happens next".
The MC survives in nearly every novel, in fact the MC dies so infrequently that people don't like those novels. They assume your MC will survive.
Tension is created by situations in which the reader isn't sure what is going to happen, the solution to whatever dilemma is happening on page 50 is not obvious. Say the house is on fire and the MC is trapped. It is only page 50, we know the MC will survive, we can even know that this situation will be resolved in the next 5 or 10 pages, we just aren't sure how the MC will survive, so we keep turning the pages.
If you watch the movie "Die Hard", you never doubt for a second that Bruce Willis is going to live through his ordeal and prevail. The same thing for "Taken", or 007: James Bond will never die in Bond flick. Neither will Harry Potter, or the MC of any detective series. Sherlock is not going to die.
Personal death isn't the only thing the MC has to fear; they can fear pain, imprisonment, torture (that doesn't have to leave any marks; e.g. most people don't know if you have broken an arm or leg in the distant past), injury like being shot or stabbed.
They can also fear the death of friends and loved ones, of children, of innocent strangers (all of which you can put in jeopardy, or even kill).
They can also fear failure, just because somebody lived doesn't mean they succeeded in their previous mission.
The audience can know the MC will live. The audience can know the MC will succeed (e.g. 007, Jason Bourne, nearly any detective series, every Romantic Comedy has a happy ending).
Obviously, that is not where the tension comes from. It comes from the audience not knowing what happens next, and always having an open question in their mind about how some situation is going to turn out. It shouldn't always be the same question throughout the novel, it can and should be a long series of steps in solving the main question, some of them with failures and setbacks along the way. Readers will become numb and bored by success if it seems guaranteed. A mix of failure and success keeps them guessing, and what they are guessing about is "how THIS situation" turns out or is overcome: There is your tension, even if the final results are known.
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Tension is, technically, the struggle between protagonist and antagonist when they both want the same thing.
Readers will experience a variety of emotions, vicarious and sympathetic, when they become invested in the outcome of a story and its world.
As JM Straczynski put it, not knowing what happens later is a minor aspect of the drama in any story. It matters less whether the main characters will live, or whether they will discover the bomb and disarm it before it explodes, than how exactly they respond to the dilemma — how it affects them.
It matters more, to the reader, whether they — the reader themself — get caught up in the story each time they read it.
If your characters are vivid, and if their interactions and choices seem genuine, then the reader will enjoy each reread as much, or more, than the first read.
You have the novelty versus treasury trade–off, of course, but any good author of a story knows that novelty is cheap — really, I wish that they weren't called “novels” any more. If you expect it to be the chief attraction of your story, then in a few years your story will end up out–of–print and scattered throughout secondhand bookstores in the ten–dollars–a–bag cabinets.
To simplify at the loss of some accuracy: most readers, except those who don't really care to read at all, care more about the story itself than they do about the outcome of the story.
Most of that concern is earned on an emotional level, yes, but it can be done intellectually and aesthetically too.
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Life and death is actually a pretty low-stakes conflict in my opinion. Yes, of course, it's the ultimate thing we all want to avoid, but when it comes down to it, how many of us have experienced being dead?
That's right: No-one. If you have, then get back into the grave, unholy zombie.
Amadeus brings up a good point about tension coming from the reader being curious about what comes next rather than the end result, but it's also worth noting that there are so many different kinds of stakes in a story involving warfare.
Instead of 'will MC survive', it could be 'will MC have to grieve her friends' deaths' (something more people have experience of), 'will MC lose their home', 'will MC ever psychologically recover from the cold hand of war', et cetera, et cetera. These are all things people have actually gone through and the consequences of which can be richly explored, far more than being dead ever could.
There are so many sources of tension; life or death is really just a go-to 'all or nothing' variant on it.
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The reader doesn't actually have to know that the father survives, not past a certain point anyway, if you don't specifically identify the MC's mother then the MC may already be on the way before we ever meet his father. You need not state this categorically, in fact better if you don't, but it can be strongly implied that the MC has been conceived before the father goes to war. Thus you need not necessarily remove his death as an option within the narrative.
Also as other's have aptly pointed out death need not be the highest stakes under the circumstances.
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