A Goodreads user asked Mary L. Tabor:

With so much fiction being published these days it makes sense for authors to turn to the multi-novel series more and more. The idea being that Book 1 gets the reader "hooked" and guarantees the purchase of Books 2 thru 6 (or what have you). In your own work Mary, to what extent do you consider "hooking" the reader to be a part of the job?

Mary L. Tabor The idea of working to “hook” a reader only operates for me in the sense that I know how good writing works. On the macro level: I read great fiction and memoir and poetry. On the micro level: I know, as one example, that the first sentence of a story needs to do a lot of work—or forget it. Your reader is already gone, out the door.

However, and more to your point, the real problem for me is that “hooking” a reader based on my last book, would be an act of “selling direct.” And I think the work would be “idea” driven. Ideas are not conflict as we understand the nature of conflict in fiction or memoir. Good memoir and fiction don’t operate that way.

Let me explain this way: Newspaper op-eds sell direct—the idea drives the essay. Stories that sell direct—and no, I won’t name names here—only wear the clothes of good fiction and good memoir.

A story takes on the feeling of experience for the reader when it’s told inside the character. In my memoir (Re)Making Love, I am indeed the foolish, broken-hearted woman who lived the tale to tell it. My readers know I’m telling them the story from inside me, as the character on a journey. I’m not pulling punches. I’m on the page in a way I could never be in person or in any social situation.

I hope my readers will want to read my novel Who by Fire that tells this real-life story through fiction—and a very different story it is: For one thing, the heroine is dead in sentence one. In whatever sense my novel is autobiographical—and maybe Freud would have a field day with this one—I kill myself off at the get-go. I suppose I felt as if I had died when the man I love left me.

In this fictional account I go to the place of hard emotional truth in a way that my memoir can’t do because of its hold on the facts, on what really happened. I hope readers who get to know me will want to read that book and my fourth book. It’s in the works.

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