 | Create curiosity. Curiosity keeps your reader turning the pages. Make them
keep wondering what's going to happen. |
| Help your readers identify with the characters. Give the reader a reason
to like the character and to care what happens to him or her. A character that
has some characteristics that are like me is one that will interest me more
than one who seems totally unlike me. Once you have a reader concerned about
the character and afraid for him or her, that reader is hooked. |
| Your protagonist needs to have a goal that will keep the reader
interested. He or she wants something that they intend to accomplish by the
end of the book. It could be an adopted child who wants to find her real
mother, a man falsely accused who wants to find out who really committed the
crime, etc. You get the idea. Whatever the goal, state it early in the book.
This will keep the reader involved until the reader finds out if your
protagonist achieves his or her goal. Then set up short term goals in each
scene that carry this same interest throughout the book. |
| Dialog that faithfully reproduces normal social interaction will be
boring. In real life, a lot of our conversation begins with pleasantries that
have little meaning: "How are you today?" "Surely is a nice day today, don't
you think?" If you put these phrases into your dialog, you'll put readers to
sleep. So eliminate these pleasant redundancies and get right to the point.
The trick is to do this and still make your dialog sound natural. Keep every
word essential to the flow of the story and you'll keep your readers'
interest. |
| Keep momentum going in your manuscript by continuing to raise questions in
the mind of the reader and not answering them too soon. It's a balancing act.
Don't frustrate the reader by raising too many questions before they start
getting some answers. On the other hand, don't give away so much that you lose
the readers' interest. |
| Keep your point of view clear. In your work, you will need to choose a
point of view. If the story is told through the eyes of one of your
characters, your problem is solved. At any point in the book, your reader will
understand the point of view because it will always be the same. When you
write in the third person you can get into trouble. The best tip here
is to keep the point of view consistent in each scene. Don't jump from one
mind to another—that will make it difficult for the reader to become
emotionally attached to any one character. Stay with one point of view through the entire scene.
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