For want of a nail

icon by Peg Ihinger

“For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.”

–Anonymous

I have never met a writer who wasn’t interested in how to keep readers reading. “I couldn’t put that book down!” and “I stayed up until 3 a.m. to finish this!” are comments most writers love to hear about their books.

Unfortunately, “how do you keep readers reading” is a question with a complicated, multifaceted series of answers.

The first answer depends, of course, on the reader. Different readers find different things fascinating; sometimes, different things are fascinating for a particular reader depending on the book they’re reading. I’m usually a plot-and-puzzle reader, but I stayed up an extra hour last night because I could see that a non-plot-centered meetup was coming between two characters that was going to be…emotionally fraught, and I had to find out how it would play out.

The reason it’s important for writers to keep this in mind is that, for every aspect of a story (be it style, plot, characterization, theme, setting, etc.), there is some reader who will find it compelling if it’s done well. Doing everything in a story well in an attempt to make it compelling to every reader is, at the least, advanced Ascended-Masters-level writing. Which doesn’t mean one shouldn’t try, but does mean that one should be prepared to fall short of getting every story aspect to this level at once. And even then, one has to remember that one does not and cannot control the readers’ reactions.

The second answer has to do with pacing. Pacing does not have to do with how fast the characters move, or how much ground the story covers. It has to do with how fast the story reads, which often relates to how fast information about the characters, plot, etc. is doled out to the reader. This is, in turn, affected by a lot of other things—how dense the prose is, how urgent the characters think things are (and whether the reader agrees with them), how important the characters and/or reader think things are, what the characters/readers think the stakes are, what the real stakes are and how soon this is revealed, how much the protagonist/other characters/readers care about whatever is at stake, and, to a surprisingly large degree, the rhythm of the story.

Some of this is obvious. Really dense prose takes more of a reader’s attention, and requires a bit more time to comprehend and process, because it contains a lot of important information. This makes it take a little longer to read. A paragraph of dense prose can feel as if it takes much longer (in story-time) than three pages of snappy action or witty dialog that covers the exact same information.

Things like urgency, importance, what the perceived or real stakes are, and how much the characters care about the outcome, are all potential gotta-keep-reading drivers…depending on the readers’ agreement. Most readers are likely to agree that stopping the bomb from exploding in the middle of the football stadium during tomorrow’s big game is urgent, important, and high stakes, but buying a plane ticket in order to check off a bucket list item is something that is none of those things.

It’s fairly easy for a writer to make buying the plane ticket more urgent, important, and high-stakes—possibilities range from the protagonist having a terminal illness (making this their last chance to take that bucket-list trip), to their need to catch up with a serial killer who just left, to the protagonist needing to track down the heirs to a fortune before some arbitrary deadline set in a will. It’s a lot harder to make stopping the bombing less urgent, important, or low-stakes, because most readers will consider saving the lives of all those spectators urgent, important, and high-stakes, even if the protagonist doesn’t care.

Rhythm is less obvious, but possibly more important. To my way of thinking, rhythm in a story involves the variation in tempo and emphasis that the writer gets from playing around with all the other elements of pacing. The proverb I opened with has a repeating rhythm that ups the stakes at the end of each line, building from losing a horseshoe nail to losing the kingdom. It only takes a line or two for the reader to recognize that, which makes for a steady increase in tension.

In a proverb, poem, or short story, that steady build-up of tension, intensified and underlined by the repetition, can work really well. That same rhythm is difficult to sustain for the length of a novel. Rhythm is not a steady “eeeeeeeeeeeee”; it’s a series of sounds and changes in emphasis in varying patterns: DUM-da-da-DUM-dum; RAT-A-TAT-TAT; de-DUM-de-DUM. In writing, this can be thought of as different types of scenes—a plot-dense action-packed scene, followed by a low-key recovery scene, an information-dense planning scene, and another action scene; or a string of fast-moving action scenes; or a rocking-horse rest-action-rest-action rhythm.

If the pacing in a story isn’t working, one way of adjusting it is to examine the rhythm. Story flow usually works best if there are highs and lows, but a long string of tense, dramatic, or action-packed scene followed by a series of slower reaction, recovery, processing, or planning scenes may not work as well as a sequence that has more variation.

Finally, it’s worth noting that rhythm effects stack—that is, if you have a scene that combines a slightly tense moment from a subplot with a main-plot moment that’s medium-tense, you probably end up with a high-tension scene, while pairing a low-tension main-plot with a high-tension subplot development can raise the tension to medium or more. A writer who’s aware of this can use it to great advantage; a writer who isn’t aware of it may end up wondering why the tension level in their novel seems flat.