How to Write Fiction that Grabs Your Reader

If you’ve ever studied writing fiction, you’ve been taught to begin your story at a high point of action.

But even a story that succeeds there can fail if you don’t compel your reader to care about your characters. Believe it or not, readers can actually become bored by action, even cliffhanging predicaments, if they haven’t been given a reason to become emotionally invested in your characters.

If we writers do our jobs, readers get caught up in more than just the excitement—because they feel they have come to know the players. If they don’t connect with your characters, they won’t keep turning the pages, regardless how dramatically you portray the action.

How to Make Your Reader Care

A car teeters atop a guard rail on a mountain road, a young mother and her baby trapped inside.

The threat of death, especially to a baby, will hold the reader for a page or two. But your goal is to grab the reader by the throat and not let go until the entire story plays out.

Discreetly work in enough details about your main character to make your reader care about what happens to her, and that reader won’t be going anywhere.

Knowing where and how to do this separates the pro writer from the amateur. Raise the stakes for the young mother and her baby and you’ll ratchet up your reader’s anxiety over their danger.

Were storm clouds roiling when the mother backed out of the garage, making her wonder about traction on the curvy roads?
Did she check her mirrors twice, recalling a childhood driveway tragedy?
Is she worried her husband might forget the baby’s first birthday party that evening?
Had he left just before her, following tension, even an argument, at breakfast?
Has he been distant since the baby was born, still tentative because they lost their first at birth?

All these elements foreshadow danger, and they also lead readers to care about your protagonist.

She’s thoughtful, careful, loving, hopeful, worried.

What’s riding on this birthday party?

Now that the baby is a year old, will her husband return to his old self, or need she still worry that his new secretary has caught his eye?

Now, when the brakes feel mushy, forcing her to take a mountain curve too fast and sending the car hurtling toward the guardrail, your reader cares much more than if you’d started in the middle of that harrowing scene with no mention of her background.

And even after she escapes that harrowing situation, your reader still feverishly turns pages to see whether the husband really tampered with the brakes, and if so, why? Not to mention all the other unanswered questioned above.

Character is the foundation for fiction.

Have trouble plotting? Put interesting characters in difficult situations and watch your story emerge. The operative words are interesting and difficult. If a scene lies flat, inject conflict. If character is the foundation, conflict is the engine of fiction well told.

In a movie you often meet the main character in a vulnerable situation, because that endears him to you. Some writing coaches call that the “pet-the-dog moment”—showing a character’s soft side.

Your hero must be a real, normal person who rises to the occasion. My characters say things I wish I would, things that in real life I don’t think of until it’s too late. My characters learn to be direct and brave after having been tongue-tied and afraid. They change and grow. That’s the definition of character arc.

Authors, too, must change and grow. If we do our jobs correctly, we should be different people by the end of the writing as well.

Tell me, how are you going to make your reader care about your characters?

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