Hooking and Holding Your Reader's Attention

Before I get into the craft chat portion of this blog, I just wanted to address the fact that for some reason, Weebly has changed all my blog photos to the same photo, and that was certainly not what I uploaded to each post. I will be addressing that in due course, but at the moment I am preparing to go away on holiday, so that job will have to wait. 

There will also be no regular weekly blog post here now until September 20th - I know you will miss me, ha ha. Is anyone actually reading? LOL

I will, however, be posting daily as always, with some writing-related musings on social media, along with some lovely photos from my Greek paradise - just to keep myself jollied along and thinking about writing, or at least thinking about all those places we can find inspiration for stories while we are enjoying some down time.

So now, onto what I have been taking about this week, which has been Hooking and Holding Attention. 

We often talk about the importance of a good hook, particularly at the beginning of a story. But hooking a reader is only half the job and the real challenge is holding their attention.

And that doesn't necessarily mean filling every page with drama. Readers keep going because they have questions. They want to know what happens, what a character will decide, whether a relationship will survive, or why something doesn't quite make sense.

Sometimes curiosity is created by an intriguing opening. Sometimes it's a secret, a difficult choice, a piece of information the reader doesn't yet have, or simply a character who wants something badly enough for us to care whether they get it. We don’t even have to like the character… maybe what we care about is that they don’t get it.

The important thing is not to answer every question immediately. Give the reader just enough to understand what matters, while leaving them something to wonder about. A great cliffhanger at the end of one chapter should not be immediately addressed in the next. It’s a device they employ all the time in soap operas. One dramatic scene ends with you gasping and wanting to know what happens now… and they take you to someone having a pint in the Rover’s Return (Coronation Street) as a tease!

Plot aside, a beautifully observed detail, an unusual character, a charged silence or a sentence that makes us stop and think can all hold our attention just as well.

When revising, try reading your work as though you've never seen it before. Where do you become curious? Where do you start skimming? Where are you asking the reader to wait too long for something interesting to happen?

What makes you keep reading a story? Is it curiosity, character, suspense, beautiful writing, or something else? Let me know in the comments. I always love to hear from others what their thoughts and opinions are. You have plenty of time to send loads of comments here for me to deal with during my posting break!

See you on 20th September. Until them, Happy Writing!