So many nights I’ve sat down to read a chapter or two of a book before bed, only to find myself still unable to put the book down at 2am or later. One of my goals as a writer is to write a book like that someday: a book someone is so into that he or she just can’t stop turning pages.
I’m still learning different techniques to do this, but here are some of the things I’ve tried so far – things I’ve gleaned from the books I can’t put down, and things that have worked in some of my own novels.
Reading is not a passive form of entertainment like watching television or movies. To get people to read your story, you have to connect with them on a number of levels. In marketing, we talk about engaging the customer.
Engagement can come from a variety of sources: a catchy headline, a beautiful picture, clever copy, or a memorable logo. Chances are, when a consumer is engaged by an ad it’s the result of several things working together.
Writing a creative piece — whether it’s a short story or a novel — challenges the writer to engage readers using only words. And, as in marketing, it’s not just one thing that engages readers.
It’s how well everything works together.
My family and I recently relocated to Virginia, and as a result, we’re working through a lot of necessary changes. One of those is the search for a local writing/critique group, so I don’t go crazy from lack of human contact.
(I work from home and easily lose track of time. So unless I have regularly scheduled events that take me outside, I’m going days without feeling the sun on my skin. It seems like this fact should bring me some level of shame, but honestly, it doesn’t. I am who I am.)
Anyway … as the search for local writers continues, I find myself dropping in on meetings and sitting in on critique groups to evaluate chapter 28 of some random person’s novel. This ongoing experience has really crystalized a couple things for me:
It probably goes without saying, but the search isn’t going well.
Getting people to keep reading is a tricky business. You can’t be there with them. You can’t tell them, “I know this part is slow, but wait till you see the payoff.” Instead, you have to imply there will be something important, not at the end, but just around the corner.
You’ve got to keep your reader wondering what is going to happen next. I believe in action scenes and reaction scenes. Your protagonist acts, it backfires horribly, and he spends the next scene trying to piece things back together. At the end of each of these scenes, I will always have a question that will be answered in the next scene. Hopefully, the reader gets the implied question and will keep reading to get the answer.
There are several ways to imply the question. There is foreshadowing, which most people reading this blog already know. You can’t be too heavy-handed with it, but foreshadowing can be a good way to increase suspense. The reader knows something is going to happen, they just don’t know when.
“I try to leave out the parts people skip.” ~ Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty, 3:10 to Yuma)
Writers all want readers to turn the page. The key is to have the reader so engrossed in the story that he or she doesn’t realize it’s the end of a scene — or a chapter — and plows ahead without stopping. Some writers excel at this, and while there’s no magic formula every writer looks for it.
This week, we’re asking the writers in the Confabulator Cafe what they do to keep the reader turning the page. Is it description, characters, some trick of style? Do they always end a chapter on a cliff-hanger?
We hope you learn something from this week’s writing advice from our authors.
And if you’d like some more great writing tips from authors who aren’t part of the Cafe (but certainly could be), check out this great post on BuzzFeed: 30 Indispensable Writing Tips From Famous Authors.
Until Next Week,
The Cafe Management
As writers, we break all kinds of laws. Or, our characters do, at least. Sometimes. The biggest laws most of us have broken are grammar laws. Luckily, we tend to be our own grammar police, so we only ever get busted by each other, or editors. Maybe we get all of our troublemaking out of our system by writing it instead? I’m sure all of us could spin you a good tale about the trouble we’ve been in…
Most school administrators didn’t like me very much and retaliated in interesting ways. Some of stories cannot be told, as some of them are still alive. Luckily, one is me.
Um, no. I’ve had a run-in or two but never had anything one would call trouble. A buddy of mine and I got busted for trespassing. The very nice police put us in separate cars (there were three that answered the call) and drove us back to mine. They worked us pretty hard while we were ostensibly ‘in custody’ and they did their best to scare us. When we were asked if we were drunk, my answer was: “No sir. We’re too young.” When we were asked if we were stoned, I answered: “No sir, can’t afford it.” That got a smirk from one officer. They checked my trunk for anything illegal and told me to return the overdue library books and let us go.
I suppose this is where I tell everyone about where the dead bodies are buried… oh, wait… this isn’t supposed to be fictional. Beyond a couple of noise complaints and a moving violation… the police and I haven’t had much interaction. I hate disappointing people, so that has a tendency to keep me out of trouble. Boring, I know. But that’s just how it is.
When I was a pre-teen, a friend of mine and I decided it would be fun to bombard cars on a nearby highway with snowballs. Third car I hit was a cop car. We ran like hell through back yards and hid out in the woods for about 20 minutes, spying on the policeman looking for us. The policeman drove slowly through our neighborhood ringing doorbells asking if anyone knew who we were. When we finally made it back to my house, our garage door closed _just_ as the police car drove past. Close one!
I’m a pretty straight arrow, so I’ve never been in trouble with any kind of authority that I can think of. For the most part, I’m a big believer in laws and rules. I think they are in place for a reason, and, most of the time, we should follow them. That being said, I may or may not have spent some time in my early 20s poking around Area 51 and flipping off a guard station located at the boundaries of that particular government-controlled playground.
I’m the type of person (girl) who cries whenever I get pulled over, so needless to say I fear getting in trouble with authority too much to do anything that’d put me in that kind of situation. I’ve gotten a couple traffic tickets, my sixth grade teacher chewed me out one day for having a bad attitude and one time I was in a car full of teenagers where we got pulled over and the driver got arrested, but short of that, I’ve kept my nose clean. Although that could all be a lie. I could be America’s Most Wanted. Is that show still around?
Last week I discussed how having a kid sort of disrupted my writing cycle, and this week I’m going to continue in a similar vein: how getting pregnant forced me to grow up a bit, and how growing up informed my writing.
Before my son was born, I sort of did this party thing. There was a lot of drinking and poor life choices and loud music and it was all a blast. I even, sometimes, miss it. But given the narrow focus of my hobbies (video games, alcohol, and sex), my writing sort of reflected my immaturity. I wrote a lot of what I thought was some really deep, vaguely self-righteous, adult stuff about relationships and life that’s shallow in retrospect. It’s no wonder it never went anywhere.
I’m not saying that kids don’t occasionally bust out wisdom and fantastic stories, but I, at least, was not one of them.
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I’ve mentioned a time or two that I spent some time writing and drawing my own comic books. Nothing big time. They were photocopied minicomics that I distributed by hand and through mail order ads in The Comics Buyer’s Guide.
This was still early days of the internet circa 1999 to 2001 and I didn’t have access to a scanner so I didn’t do a lot online. Believe it or not, a lot of things that younger people take for granted now were simply beyond my financial scope at the time.
The second to last comic I drew told a story about the birth of the main character’s child. It was pretty similar to what I experienced in the birth of my own child.
One of the last comics I drew had a much deeper effect on me though it was about an experience I shared with the entire country and many, many people around the world.
A number of years back I was poking around on LiveJournal and ran across the blog of a friend of mine who was describing this thing called National Novel Writing Month. Which sounded really interesting, and I decided I wanted to try it.
The only problem was that Nanowrimo runs from November 1 to 30 every year, and it was already the day after Thanksgiving.
I had just finished (? Was finishing?) grad school and I was looking for another all consuming obsession to fill the anticipated void. I had matured as a technical writer and writing term papers and giving in-class presentations was coming easy. Challenging, yes, because I still had to master the material, but the actual effort of repackaging [0] was running smoothly.
Writing fiction, however, was a nut I had yet to crack.
I remember that when I was a kid I had written a short play— the kind you act on a stage, not on a screen. I must have written that play three separate times because I was so in love with the story [1]. I never did get a chance to put it on, though, because as a shy, bookish, nerdy, introverted child I didn’t have enough friends to fill out the cast. Thank all the Muses that none of my schoolteachers ever found out about my playwriting— no doubt they would have considered producing said play the perfect social therapy for a shy, bookish, nerdy, introverted child. In the 1970s, the Geek had yet to inherit the Earth, and a girl who was smart rather than sociable was simply Not On.
Anyway, I had to wait eleven and a half months for my first Nanowrimo. By the time it finally rolled around I had already read No Plot, No Problem! and tried my hand at creating story out of the motion of pen over page. However, I looked forward to the discipline of having a series of deadlines as I experimented with long form fiction.
The book I eventually wrote was dreadful. But the experience was a revelation.
For some reason it has never been the online Nanowrimo community that caught my passion, which is actually pretty weird considering that I have been participating in online communities since approximately 1989 [2] and at the time lived and died by email. The greatest part of the Nanowrimo experience turned out to be sitting at a sticky table in some random coffee shop with a dozen perfect strangers, most of whom I would never see again, and bonding over writing absolute crap and bitching about it. Cheering those who caught up with their word count goals. Speculating about those mythical Nanowrimoers who supposedly hit the fifty-thousand word mark within the first week. Responding to challenges. Sagging in relief when your own fifty-thousandth word was completed on November 29 or thereabouts, and you could Have A Life once more. Applauding wildly those who met their own fifty-thousand word goal at the write-in.
A few years later some in my local Nanowrimo group started this thing they were calling the Lawrence Writers Group in order to continue that special energy of a Nanowrimo flash community throughout the rest of the year and for some reason the universal expectation was that of course I would be involved. I’m not sure why— fiction writing isn’t really My Thing, I don’t generally do recreational writing except in November, and I sure as hell have no intention of trying to get published. But Lawrence Writers turned into the Confabulators turned into the Cafe, and here we all are.
Like writing a Nanowrimo novel, I’m going to keep moving pen over page and see where it takes me.
[0] An actual term of art in library science meaning taking the stuff you learn for class and turning it into term papers and in-class presentations.
[1] I have absolutely no clue whatsoever what that story is now. But when I was 9, it was the stuff of brilliance.
[2] Yes, Virginia, that is three years before the formal invention date of the World Wide Web. Yes, I am older than e-dirt.
Five years ago on Halloween, one of my dogs (who, for people who know me, we treat as our surrogate children) was playing in our backyard when she suddenly started to get sick. If you own dogs, you know that stomach issues are not that uncommon, so we weren’t that worried. I took her to our local vet and asked for them to keep her overnight and give her lots of fluids.
An hour later they called and told us she’d suffered heart failure. Luckily, they were able to revive her, and we rushed her to Kansas City so the emergency unit could watch her overnight. Unfortunately, the next morning she passed away from unknown causes. We have no idea what happened. She was three years old, and perfectly healthy.
National Novel Writer’s Month didn’t start for me on November 1st that year. I think I actually started writing on…the fourth? Maybe the fifth. And for the remainder of the month, every word I typed was infused with the emotions of my traumatic event. Anger. Frustration. Hopelessness. My main character was wracked by guilt and the need to lash out at…something. Anything. Just like me.
It made for great writing. Channeling that energy led to one of the strongest manuscripts I’ve ever written. I wouldn’t wish that kind of tragedy on anyone, but it informed my writing that year in a very powerful way. I’ve always felt that sad writers are better writers than happy ones. Unfortunate truth to that, I think. When life is good, it’s much harder for me to write the tough scenes: I always tell people to push their characters down the stairs, but boy, that’s a dark place that’s difficult for me to visit sometimes.
Would I like to write like that all the time? Yup! Am I seeking out misery and despair around every corner? Uh…no. What am I, stupid?
Life’s good to me. I’ve got a great job, great wife, great dogs, great house. In the past year I visited France, Peru, and Ecuador. I got to visit Machu Picchu and the Galapagos Islands, and hike Quandary Peak with one of my dogs. I have nothing to complain about.
But happy life does not equal a happy writing career.
When life’s good, I really struggle to take my own advice: “When in doubt, throw your protagonist down the stairs.” Uh…nah. Things are good! I’ll take the elevator! Thanks, though!
Without personal tragedy, I struggle to provide adequate conflict and heartache in my stories. I’m aware of the issue, but it’s not something easily remedied. I’m not willing to torture myself in order to inform my writing. Ain’t gonna happen.
However, this year promises another sad note. Yay! (?) My spouse will be living in Washington D.C. for almost eleven months working for the Securities & Exchange Commission. We’ll both travel back and forth often, but it’s still going to be a long, lonely year. And already, my outline for this year’s story deals with long distance relationships, communicating and connecting across vast gulfs of space and time. I didn’t plan on that type of story, but clearly my subconscious mind has an agenda, and I know better than to argue.
So, embrace life’s tough moments and allow them to inform my writing. Silver lining and all that rot. We’ll see if it pans out. I’ll let you know in December.