1) As a writer your only job is to make the reader turn the page
As a writer you have only one job: to make the reader turn the page. Of all the tools a writer uses to make a reader turn the page, the most essential is the plot. It doesn’t matter if the plot is emotional, intellectual, or physical — as long as it compels the reader to find out what happens next. If your reader doesn’t care what happens next — it doesn’t.
–Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman, How Not to Write a Novel (2008)
2) Every story contains an unanswered question that keeps the reader going
Every story contains an engine: the unanswered question that keeps the reader going. The engine is always a simple question, some version of What happens next? Think carefully about the stories around you and ask yourself: What’s the engine? It is not the story’s topic or its theme; it is the raw power that makes the story go. The engine of the movie Jaws is: Who ends us as a shark snack? You can choose any road, destination, or focus for your story, but the engine is intrinsic to it. Your job as a writer is to identify and understand the engine so you can harness it.
–Tom French, “Serial Narratives,” from Telling True Stories (2007)
3) Hold the reader’s attention by creating a state of “not-knowing”
In the mid-1990s, George Loewenstein came up with what he called the “information-gap” theory. It basically holds that whenever we perceive a gap “between what we know and what we want to know,” that gap has emotional consequences. “Such information gaps produce the feeling of deprivation labeled curiosity,” he wrote. “The curious individual is motivated to obtain the missing information to reduce or eliminate the feeling of deprivation.” In other words, not knowing is cognitively uncomfortable. Historically, this is the thinking behind Upworthy-style “what happens next” headlines: “Someone Gave Some Kids Some Scissors. Here’s What Happened Next” or “These Workers Just Want Money, And You Won’t Believe What They Did To Get Some.” You can make people even more curious, say social psychologists, by presenting them with something they know a little bit about, but not too much.
–Bryan Gardiner, “You’ll Be Outraged at How East It Was To Get You To Click on this Headline,” Wired, 12/18/15
4) Put the question “Why?” in the reader’s mind
On the other hand, since the writer controls the telling, he controls the need and desire to know. If at a certain point in the telling, a piece of exposition must be known or the audience wouldn’t be able to follow, create the desire to know by arousing curiosity. Put the question ‘Why?’ in the filmgoer’s mind. ‘Why is this character behaving this way? Why doesn’t this or that happen? Why?’ With a hunger for information, even the most complicated set of dramatized facts will pass smoothly into understanding.
–Robert McKee, Story (1997)
5) The tension of a story hinges on things being out of balance
If a story depends on things being out of balance, that absence of balance will be evident in a character who is capable of change, and so a story that begins with such a character will seek to discover how that person can achieve a sustainable balance. The setting of such a story also will reflect that imbalance. But it begins with ambition, lust, greed—some imbalance in a person that can be depicted in a plot.
–John Biguenet, Story in Literary Fiction interview (2009)
Share This
