Keeping Readers Reading

I found a blog post some time ago where several successful authors spoke on how to keep our readers reading.

This is from Libby Fischer Hellmann:  Suspense depends on presenting obstacles and complications for your characters. And when you couple those obstacles to a deadline, you have instant suspense. Will he rescue the girl in time? Will the bad guy get away? Can he defuse the bomb before it blows? Those are classic examples of suspense.

Suspense-Building Decisions

Today's Suspense Secret: suspense is increased through characters' decisions and the resulting consequences.

The main character of every story, no matter the genre, must have a goal he or she is trying to achieve or there is no story. I emphasize the word trying because that is the key to the suspense. Without effort, characters may have bad things happen to them, but if they simply defend against those obstacles, they appear dull and passive. Interesting characters, on the other hand, choose a path and deal with the tightening noose that follows. For example, if Pinocchio hadn't gone looking for his father, he wouldn't have been swallowed by the whale. And if Frodo, in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, hadn't decided to trust Spiegel instead of his best friend, he wouldn't have been lured into the spider's den.

Even worse, we, the audience, wouldn't have been on the edge of our seats, wondering how--or if--the character was going to get out of his peril.

Obstacles Create Suspense

I never realized how many elements of good fiction writing apply to suspense until I began to do more research on the subject. Case in point, most fiction writers know that when they are creating plots for their characters they need to throw obstacles in their way. But did you also know that obstacles are important to building suspense? Check out the following article by John D. Brown, author of Servant of a Dark God.
An excerpt:
"Readers want to hope and fear for a character. To feel this, they must not know what WILL happen, but do need to suspect or know what MIGHT happen and feel tension about the possibilities. They want that tension to build, and then they want to feel a cathartic release. 


"The reader will continue to feel that tension as long as the problem is unresolved (the danger or menace remains, the character continues to suffer hardship, the mystery becomes more puzzling) AND the situation changes in such a way that the reader’s worry grows. . . We do this by throwing OBSTACLES into our character’s path. We make the problem hard to solve.


"There are four types of things that make the problem hard to solve: disadvantages, conflicts, growing troubles, and surprise. . ." more