How to Write A Page-Turner That Keeps Your Reader Past Her Bedtime

We can do a lot to captivate our readers — here are ten things…

I got a nice email from a reader the other day. The question was honest and thoughtful. The person was a newer writer. She wanted to maker stories more engaging — to keep readers interested.

Engagement is something all writers need.

It’s our duty to keep readers coming back for the next page, all the way to the end. If we haven’t engaged them, we’ve failed as a writer. I hear many writers blame the quality of the reader. Sure, readers come in all shapes and sizes, but if a writer can’t keep a reader-reading, it’s her responsibility. And hers only.

So, what do we do?

We use the tools that engage us everywhere in life.

I’ve developed a list of ten things I use to keep readers engaged, whether I write fiction or non. I don’t pretend to be some amazing writer, but I try to get better. A little every day. You can too.

Writing is an agreement with the reader — we agree to write something worth reading and the reader agrees to keep turning the pages until we’ve screwed-up the agreement.

Engagement is tough.

There are many moving parts.

We can’t engage every reader the same way.

But there are a handful of strategies we can incorporate to keep those pages turning all the way to a five-star review.

10 ways to keep those pages turning

1. Steal a story from reality and change the names to protect the innocent. Look at the click-bait from the six-o’clock news. Every night you’ll have a library of writing fodder. Use all the major parts of a story that captivated you. Change the location and characters, but keep the beats.
2. Post unanswered questions throughout the story. Start you work with unanswered questions. Slowly release the thread and ask another open question. Our brains hate open loops. We want them closed. The answers must be found. This is why you get so annoyed when you can’t remember what’s-his-name, and it bothers you all day until you get it.
3. Use big and small cliffhangers. End each chapter with one finger on the proverbial cliff. We’ve got to turn the page to uncover what happens next. If we end a chapter nice and tidy, it’s easy to close the book and go to bed. We want to make our readers late to work, skip their appointments, and get two hours of sleep each night.
4. Listen to reality. Steal great dialogue from conversations you hear while you’re out and about. I keep a rolling list in my phone. Any time I hear a great one-liner, something that makes me stop and laugh, I capture it for later use. If this worked for Quentin Tarantino it works for me. Much of our communication is non-verbal. Cut your dialogue to the bone if you want to keep us reading. Different relationships use different words too. Someone close to you might ask, “you OK?” But if the person has more formal relationship with us we might ask, “Rico, are you feeling alright?”
5. Light the wick, but don’t shoot the cannon yet. Release the story’s thread slowly. If you shoot the whole thing in the first few chapters, what are we supposed to do with the rest of the book? Keep that wick lit and burning slow — all the way to the top of the cannon. Make us wait until we can’t hold our bladders anymore.
6. Don’t write your first idea. Write the tenth. I find I think of the most-cliche ideas first. If I keep asking myself “what else,” all the way to the tenth idea for a scene — that’s the place where the magic happens. If you wrote something the reader can predict, you didn’t write hard enough.
7. Don’t stray too far from your genre. Every genre has a series of tropes you must hit, or you aren’t writing in that genre. Your reader expects a series of things to happen, yet she wants a new story. Tropes aren’t a sell-out. They’re a must, if you want to be a commercial writer and hope to develop an audience. That military sci-fi/romance/western/adventure/mystery will probably garner yourself an audience of one. You’re not a unique snowflake. The more you try and write a one-of-a-kind story the more you’ll get a one-of-a-kind audience.
8. Use a classic, top-selling story as a framework for your new story. Cinderella (Cinder), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Ready, Player One), and The Bhagavad Gita (the Legend of Bagger Vance) have all been used to create new stories. Take a classic, bend it into a contemporary. These frameworks have already proven themselves as classics over many years. Why not start with a model that works?
9. Watch a ton of TV. Netflix is a great teacher for page-turners. Find a series you love and note how they end each episode. There are armies of writers working on these things. There’s a reason you binge-watched all 453 episodes in one weekend. How did they keep you engaged? Do the same thing with your readers.
10. Read in multiple genres. You can borrow page-turning ideas outside your genre too. What works in one niche may work well in yours. As a writer it’s important to feed your tools with a variety of food. Read in multiple genres and bring what works back to yours.

Page-turners don’t have to be hard

It’s hard enough writing a story that works. We might as well use human psychology, classic stories, and tropes that have already proven themselves to work.

Writing takes time.

Why not give ourselves the best start we can get. Before we spend all that time writing a story that falls flat.

Give us a story that makes us late for dinner. Then you’ll know you did your job. Let’s live up to our half of the reader-writer agreement.

We’re waiting for you.

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August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. A self-proclaimed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indie authors how to write books that sell and how to sell more of those books once they’re written. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.