Forget Hooks: How to Pull Readers Through a Short Story by Making Promises and Raising Questions

By José Pablo Iriarte, @LabyrinthRat

Part of the Focus on Short Fiction Series

JH: Keeping readers engaged in a story is no easy task. José Pablo Iriarte shares tips on how to keep readers wanting more.
I'm going to talk about story openings in this post, but this isn't a post about story openings. Rather, it's about grabbing the reader's interest and sustaining that interest throughout an entire story. That's important to authors working at all lengths, of course, but I think writing short stories comes with its own special challenges when it comes to reader interest.

You would think that short story authors would have it easier when it comes to pulling the reader through a story. What is a short story but the perfect prose morsel for the short attention span age? But on the other hand, we don't just want readers to finish our stories. We want our stories to be memorable. We want them to lead to something . . . the reader seeking out our other works, or reprint sales, or award consideration. With a novel, you've got tens of thousands of words with which to make an impression, to win the reader over or wear down their barriers.

Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com