Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence

by Lisa Cron

Subplots give stories depth, meaning, and resonance in myriad ways.

Subplots also help set the pace by giving readers a bit of necessary breathing room, allowing their cognitive subconscious to mull over just where the main storyline might be heading.

! Cognitive breathing room

Stated simply and eloquently by literary blogger extraordinaire Nathan Bransford, pacing is the length of time between moments of conflict.

When the flashback ends, the information it provided must immediately—and necessarily—affect how we see the story from that point on. The flashback needs to have given us information without which what’s about to happen wouldn’t have quite made sense.

Make sure you’ve given the reader solid tells along the way, so her reaction will be “Aha!” rather than “Give me a break!”

As neuropsychiatrist Richard Restak says, “In many cases we decrease accuracy and efficiency by thinking too hard.”

We develop skills in the clear light of consciousness, but then we let them go underground, into the roomy basement of our minds.…”

Ernest Hemingway, who, with characteristic blunt eloquence, so famously said, “All first drafts are shit.”

a pinch, most people can keep track of five states of mind at once. Says Dunbar, “When the audience ponders Shakespeare’s Othello, for example, they are obliged to work at fourth order intentional levels: I (the audience) believe that Iago intends that Othello supposes that Desdemona wants [to love someone else].

What makes good writers different? We can hold in our minds what we know and what our characters believe and at the same time keep track of what our readers believe, sometimes to the sixth or seventh level. Sounds like a video game, doesn’t it?

Finally, there is one more person whose shifting beliefs you want to chart: the reader. Ask yourself, scene by scene: what does the reader believe is happening? This question is so important that you might even want to close the laptop, get out of your PJs, and head into the real world to test the waters.

What information were you dying to know? • What did you find confusing? (This is as close to a real critique as we’ll get.)

This isn’t to say you may not actually have written a crackerjack book, but chances are, they won’t be able to tell the difference. In other words, love is blind.

REALITY: Successful Writers Follow the Damn Rules

Using freelance editors and consultants to help get a manuscript in shape is increasingly common.”

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra had this warning for his fellow writers: “No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly; and this self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind.”

As Jack London famously said, “Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club.”

Hemingway concurred: “Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail.”