Hijack Your Reader
Many novelists make the mistake of the wind-up, the expositional equivalent of sitting in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. While we, as writers, set up the plot with absolute, need-to-know, won’t-understand-the rest-of-the-story-without-it, details, our readers are bored to tears. They haven’t had a chance to become invested in our characters, our setting, or our plot. We expect them to stay with us through it. We need them to. But they won’t. Not until we can learn how to capture our readers’ fleeting interest in that brief moment that they decide to pick up our book.
There are so many tips lined up around this topic, so many suggestions, so many ideas and workshops. Countless articles, blogs, books, and theories aim to educate us poor, misguided dabblers of the written word. Here I am, now, doing the same thing. My advice, however, is more of a holistic approach–guerrilla tactics, if you will.
1. Maybe it’s a cheap shot, but if done well, an attention grabbing first sentence will buy you a little more time with your reader. Your goal here, no matter the genre, must be intentionally to build mystery. The first line must incite intrigue. It must literally force your reader to read on. It must be so strong, that choice is not even a part of the equation.
The goal of newspaper and magazine article headlines are to do just that. They grab the reader’s attention. They make us want to know more, and we are victims to it. We have all read a headline on Facebook or Twitter that captured our attention so exclusively that there simply was not an option to not click on it. I’m not suggesting writing headlines, though. I’m simply suggesting that a powerfully intriguing first line will grab just a little more of the reader’s precious reading time and allow us to enact phase two of our attention hijack.
2. Write your story as you normally would, introduction, exposition, everything. Describe the weather, the particular shade of red lipstick your character is wearing, her hair color, eyes, profession, mental disposition, all of it. Write. Tell your story. Then, when you have completed your manuscript, trash the first three chapters. Or move them. The idea here is to get into the middle of the action from the onset. Studies have shown that most books are well into the “rising action” arc of their story by the fourth chapter.
Our readers don’t want description. Not yet at least. They need to be invested in the characters before they care how the character looks or what color cardigan he’s wearing. Drop the reader in the middle of the action from the first word. I am reminded of the movie, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. The movie starts with Doctor Jones negotiating a booby trapped cave to steal a golden statue. We have no background, no reason why, no idea who he is or where in the world he is. But it grabs us. The first ten minutes of the movie forces our investment in him and though we have no idea who he is yet, we find ourselves rooting for him, knowing that there’s an unwritten promise that we will undoubtedly be filled in on all of the background stuff at a later time.
3. Now we have a first sentence grabber, we have immediate action, and finally, the first chapter must, absolutely must, have a cliffhanger leading into the next chapter. Ideally, this is the desire at the end of every chapter in the book. It makes the reader refuse to stop at a natural breaking point. They must read on. They simply can’t help themselves. This facet of a book is what makes people call it a “page-turner.” It is why people stay up to finish a book well past their bed time. It is also the point at which a prospective buyer closes the book and purchases it.
I’m not downplaying the importance of the content of the later chapters, but it is abso-freaking-lutely (so much so, that I had to use an infix!) imperative that the first chapter have these elements. If you are good enough to employ these three points in every one of your chapters, you just might have a best-seller on your hands, and some very fulfilled readers.
Written by
Bill C. Castengera
Author of Shift!
Purchase Shift! on Amazon!
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