The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: turning the page

  • Getting It Out In View

    What you see is not necessarily what you get. The well-dressed man’s brain is filled with realistic though bizarre characters who will get under your skin. Image borrowed from here.

    I recently finished a book by the crime writer Jim Thompson. If his name is unfamiliar to you, you may have seen one of the films of one of his books: The Getaway, The Grifters or The Killer Inside Me. Or maybe you saw his scripts filmed by Stanley Kubrick: The Killing or Paths of Glory. Or maybe this is the first time you’re hearing about him.

    His stories are peopled with characters who are so twisted, so damaged that one cannot turn away from the story. It’s like each person he’s writing is such a train wreck that to not look is impossible. Pop. 1280 is the most twisted thing I’ve read since The Killer Inside Me. In Killer, you’re as involved as the main character in every depraved act that’s committed, complicit in the crimes. The same is true in 1280, but he adds a layer of racism that’s beyond uncomfortable and it’s even uncomfortable in the mind of the narrator.

    Each book, written in first person, puts the reader deep inside a main character’s insidious brain squirming with creeping tendrils of evil and malice disguised as rational thought. It’s unnerving, to say the least. I couldn’t stop reading. I had to know what was going to happen next.

    Dropping compelling characters into bizarre circumstances is certainly one way to keep me engaged in a story and Pop. 1280 is a master class in how to do it. Each chapter ends not just on a cliffhanger, but with the expectation that while that may be a nice place to stop you’d better not. If you do — well, let’s just say that no matter what you think might happen next it won’t hold a candle to what does happen. It’s not the shock value that kept me reading, it was that the darker the places his characters went the more it made sense. He drew me deeply into those parts of my psyche that I don’t often go. (more…)

  • Structural Integrity

    For what I do, one of the challenges it to prevent the reader from flipping though pages. If the reader is flipping pages, searching for an elusive bit of information, then my document structure has failed.

    You can tell a story different ways. If you are looking at a sequence or procedure, then you probably want to organize your document chronologically. But if I’m trying to describe a situation, I prefer an inverted pyramid structure. Start with the wider picture, then drill down into specific details. Each section can have an independent internal structure as well.

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  • One Good Turn

    Go for the unexpected.

    This week’s question is tough. Telling you what I do to keep readers turning the page assumes two things—first, that people do feel compelled to turn the pages of what I write, and second, that I actually do things intentionally to make that happen.

    I don’t have a big enough ego (yet) to be sure of either of those things. All I can tell you is what I try to do:

    • Go for the unexpected. If the story seems to be travelling in a straight line, swerve to the left or right and throw in something bizarre. In my books, this often translates to a lovesick satyr on the doorstep, a unicorn with a skin rash and no virgins around to treat the wounds, or a gremlin waylaying my heroine and dragging her off to break up a fight between his brothers in the tool shed.
    • Drop a bomb at the end of the chapter. Blow something up. Have someone unexpected show up and say something weird, threatening, or ominous. Toss the main character over the side of a ship into shark-infested waters. Have the ex-husband show up and bang on the restaurant window while the main character is on a date. (more…)

  • Just Write Awesomely

    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.

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  • Engage!

    LOGO advertisement
    Good headline, great design, clever copy and a bold logo make for an engaging advertisement.

    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.

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  • Implying the Question

    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.

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  • Page-Turning Prose (Week Ending August 25)

    “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