I’m going to break the fourth wall here for a minute: this week’s topic was hard for me, because it’s hard for me to think of the writing I do as having any sort of technique. I realize how pretentious that sounds. I don’t mean, like, Everything I do is pure a~rt~ or anything like that — nor do I mean it in the self-deprecating (my favorite) way of, nothing I write is any go~od T_T. It’s just that, um, I just write and think about all that other shit later.
Here I am, two days before my post is supposed to go up (and thus days late from the poor editors POV), with a cup of coffee, and I’m thinking: When I’m writing, how do I try to manipulate my reader?
And there it is: I want to mess with my reader’s feelings. I want to own my reader for about 30K to 70K words and never ever let them go. I want to make their whole brain go HOORAY or NO NOT AT ALL NOPE or OMG WHY or, maybe sometimes, HMMMMM. I even expect them do it in all caps. If life were Tumblr, I would expect them to need at least three reaction GIFs by the end of my story.
Now that I think of it that way, oh, of course. I use techniques. Duh.
It’s still taken me damn near two hours to figure out the rest of this post. The number of failed drafts would utterly boggle you.
I think there are three things I try to do well to keep a reader invested. (Sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously.)
- World Building
- Characters
- Structure
I don’t always do them well, or maybe I don’t always pay attention to what I’m doing, but generally speaking, this is how I do it.