The Next Page—and the One After

What keeps readers turning pages, and why do you care? The first answer is complicated, the second simple. Without enthusiastic momentum, your reader—whether agent, publisher, or audience—is gone.

Happily, there’s more than one way to keep those fingers moving, because each reader turns pages for slightly different reasons. Here are some possibilities:

~ Suspense

This asset occurs frequently, because many readers and writers associate the novel with impassioned curiosity about what’s next. The supremacy of plot is somewhat genre dependent. Still, whatever your style or subject, don’t skimp on this expectation. Every genre needs some sort of tension on every page.

~ Characterization

Re-examine To Kill  Mockingbird, and its rather antiquated style might dismay you.  Why, then, do so many people list it as their most favorite ever? Few kids rival Scout’s gloriously naive sense of right and wrong. The same might be said of her extremely mature dad. Create characters one can’t forget, and readers will sigh when there are no more pages to turn.

~ Scenario

What do the Da Vinci Code and the Harry Potter series share in common? A wide range of people respond to mystery, underdogs, resourcefulness, and archetypes. Of course it rarely makes sense to replace the scenario that calls to you with a more marketable one. But it makes terrific sense to add heft, originality, danger. Can you make the Concept bigger? More enticing?

~ Emotions

Unless your characters experience them deeply, your readers won’t experience them at all. Yet belabor or “tell” about feelings, and readers still won’t respond. Emotions are concrete, dynamic responses to reality. Present them that way.

~ Secrets

Who doesn’t love them? But if we know too much or little, those whispers can irritate more than intrigue. It never hurts to map out how and when you dispense your novel’s secrets.

~ Humor 

Whether or not your novel is a comic one, exploit every opportunity for laughter, including the bleak irony of tragedy.

~ Poetry

Some novelists write so beautifully that we want more and more and more. At least occasionally, join them.

~ Intellectual curiosity

Those interested in classical music, RNA, or history can’t wait to see what Richard Powers will teach them on the next page of The Gold Bug Variations. What’s your audience curious about?

Whether drama, originality, voice, insight, or point of view, there’s more than one way to keep readers losing sleep and missing calls because they can’t put your book down.

Tip:  Know, internalize, and use your best tricks to keep the pages turning.

The Kingdom of the Narrator

When someone says, “Tell me a story,” is it “tell,” “show,” or both?  And who delivers that story to children aged one to one hundred? The narrator, of course. Who, of course, sometimes “tells.”

It matters only to novelists, but the combination of characters and narrator keeps readers satisfied. Yet narrators often lapse into “telling,” which is indeed a terrible thing.

What’s a novelist to do? Accept that like any good character, the narrator has flaws and assets. In this sense, omitting essential narration is like refusing to grow roses because they have thorns. Your clumsy movements won’t hurt you, but so much gets lost. So much. Because the narrator contributes everything that characters can’t provide, essentials like:

~ Straightforwardness.

            Characters rarely tell it like it is. They rely on the narrator to do it for them.

~ Segue way.

Fiction jumps around. Readers can’t follow unless someone offers transitions for time, place, and focus. That someone is the narrator.

~ Significance.

            How can characters interpret what’s happening as it happens? That’s the narrator’s job.

~ Setting.

Characters know where they are. But like real people, characters don’t necessarily assess the environment or its impact. Don’t make readers miss out on that.

~ Secrets.

            If characters don’t know what they don’t know, how can they hide it from readers?

~ Synthesis.

            Characters are too busy thwarting obstacles to note how those interweave.

~ Synchronicity.

            Characters rarely look for the kinds of patterns that make novels cohere.

~ Symbolism.

To the character, a stain might just be a stain. The narrator, though, can suggest the meaning of this stain, or Soldier’s Moon, or chewed fingernail.

Tip: Don't let the narrator "tell" any more than necessary. Do let the narrator mortar the bricks the characters build. Novel readers need a narrator.

Building the “Building” Where Your Characters Live

Writers often associate worldbuilding with science fiction, and bildungsroman with coming of age. But isn’t every novel world at least partially imaginary—composed of details about the environment that the author must somehow communicate? And doesn’t every protagonist with an arc advance from inadequacy to greater strength?

The building you have to build reveals what your protagonist faces and why. And if you want readers beyond your loved ones, exploring that building must be fun.

Tip: Secrets are the most fun when one discovers them one snippet at a time.

The secret to successful worldbuilding and backstory? Hint just enough to incite curiosity. Was it murder? Now hold back. Is the protagonist a coward? What must the protagonist unlearn to make it in the metropolis? Will the last human perish?

It’s all in the timing. At a writer’s conference, grinning merrily, Don Maass stunned his audience by saying, “Once you’re seventy percent of the way through your novel, go ahead and have all the backstory you want.”

He’s right, of course. Then how do you build the building until then? By taking a stroll in your reader’s shoes. Aside from the plot, what do you absolutely need to know?

If you’re thinking like a reader, that’s quite a question. Don’t shrug it off. Probe. Deeply and honestly. Want some additional tricks for suggesting and keeping secrets?

~ List at least ten things you intend to hide.

Plan where to insert them, insinuating early, then failing to dish the dirt till the last possible moment. This focuses a first draft or adds tension to a later one.

~ Compose an elaborate backstory.

Writing it out can restrain the impulse to dump all of it into your novel. Drizzle small details, always integrating the past with current conflict. Tease.

~ Explain the whole world.

Add everything. In the first few chapters. All at once. Now? Slash and burn. If you omit everything you possibly can, you might have just exactly enough.

Eventually readers should see the entire building—because you built it one secret, one brick, one shadow of a brick at a time. Getting to know this building? Really, really fun.