Does a page-turner have to be continually high-octane?
I've experimented with both critique partners and people I know (be they friends, family or colleagues) as unrewarded beta readers. The latter are very slow, sometimes reading slower than I wrote a first draft. Clearly, their reading periods are short and/or far apart. There are any number of personal reasons this may be understandable for an individual, but the pattern suggests I'm not writing page-turners people can't put down, which is presumably what every publisher and literary agent wants. And maybe that's why the former source of feedback often don't get back to me either.
We all know one kind of story that achieves that: the kind where the protagonist is always in danger and everything needs to be fixed now, and even then they'll still be in trouble. High-octane, so to speak. If you haven't read a book like that, you've probably watched a TV series that takes that approach, something like 24 or Death Note.
I really don't think the kinds of stories I want to tell, which explore themes and thrive on the ambiguous and thought-provoking, will ever look like that: at least, not if I'm their author, and my style stays as it is. But I do want to find some way to keep eyes on my work. (Apart from all the other obvious benefits, I'd get faster feedback on how to improve it.) So how else can a novel do that?
My stories are usually fairly fast-paced in terms of plot development; they don't have much in the way of padding or breathing spaces. But nor does everything that matters to the plot matter because a bomb might be about to go off. I'm worried I might be writing 20 years too late; because with so much choice today, people like to binge on something with the right kind of relentless addictiveness. Then again, if people are reading in the first place, they might be open to a broader range of experiences than those that TV as a medium provides.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/38925. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
What makes a page turner is that the reader is always wondering what will happen in the next few pages.
But, as @Alexander says, it doesn't have to be action, per se. It only means you have a constant hook (a long series of little hooks) of something unresolved, some problem that the MC must solve, and these are interwoven so that in the midst of solving one, another one begins.
Consider something like "Cast Away" with Tom Hanks. This is a man against nature film, basically (there is no villain persecuting Tom, just the difficulties of survival and escape, and then of reintegrating into a life where he was considered lost at sea and dead, his wife has taken a lover, etc). It isn't really an action movie, just a human drama, but the movie is good because they keep up this series of "Problem A solved but Problem B is going to kill him."
A mystery can be much the same. Puzzle A is found, solved, but leads to Puzzle B. We keep reading to learn about puzzle B, it is solved, but produces Puzzle C. Damn!
To be a page turner, even if it isn't an action story, you shouldn't go more than two or three pages without the reader having to wonder how the current situation is going to turn out soon. In a matter of pages. And it has to turn out, you can't keep up the same tease forever.
If you have a BIG reveal, your character can be thinking of that, worried about that, dreaming about that, and this can fill in for some spots where you don't have small reveals coming up.
For example, Amy must travel hundreds of miles to meet the witch in the black castle. The witch will grant her a favor she desperately needs to save her father's life, but will demand a price. Amy does not know what the price will be, but she has been told it will be painful, incredibly painful.
So you can give Amy some adventures and things to solve on the way to the black castle, things the reader will be wondering how they turn out in the short term. That keeps them reading. In between those adventures, Amy can be having nightmares and imagining all sorts of painful things the witch will demand of her. Perhaps a limb. Or her sight. Or she will carve a magical mark into her. Or perhaps she must be a slave to the witch for some time. Or the witch will take her soul! Amy will do it, she must save her father, but she dreads it the more she thinks of it.
Page turners are created intentionally, you must constantly stoke the reader's need to know what is going to happen next.
Some easy ways to accomplish this are through interesting conversations where Amy is learning something, and with new characters that come and go. When Alice is in Wonderland, she meets a series of characters that she may help or that she must get something from, or that persecute her or give her puzzles to solve. Situations also present puzzles to solve; e.g. the pills that make her grow big or small. That kind of thing works to keep the reader reading to find out how this encounter turns out: It won't be for the rest of the book, so they read to the end because it is interesting. But the end of one leads directly into the next situation to figure out.
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