What makes my reader keep reading? (What is it that propels a reader through a swath of my prose?) How would we know? Well, as we’ve said, the only method by which we can know is to read what we’ve written on the assumption that our reader reads pretty much the way we do. What bores us will bore her. What gives us a little burst of pleasure will light her up too. This is, on the face of it, a weird assumption. We all know, from book clubs or writing workshops, that people don’t read identically. And yet, in a movie theater, people sometimes do gasp all at once.
