Keep the Reader Hungry... Or, Staple Their Eyes to the Page

I've been struggling with the ending of my WIP. I already know my beginning needs to be completely overhauled (it's boring and doesn't engage and certainly doesn't hook the reader)... and now I'm thinking that if I can fix my lead, it'll result in my final pages getting polished to a high sheen.

I need to make sure my reader's hungry.

Recently I read this article by Lee Child on creating suspense/tension. I've been roaming through a forest of confusion--when it comes to the final part--and needed some guidance. Child wrote:

We need to bring the same simple principle to our books. Someone killed someone else: who? You’ll find out at the end of the book. Something weird is happening: what? You’ll find out at the end of the book. Something has to be stopped: how? You’ll find out at the end of the book... The basic narrative fuel is always the slow unveiling of the final answer.

I'm starting to understand that if I can create the whiff of a question in the first few pages, I can answer that question at the end... and keep the reader hungry until the very end.

photo by pixabay

This summer I'm teaching the class I have for the past five summers. It's an intense graduate class. The course teaches teachers to think of themselves as writers. It's all of June, all day and five days a week.

It's also a blast. 

Invariably, to prep for the class I reread some of my writing books to find articles and essays to share with the other teachers. Ralph Fletcher is always on the top of the stack.

Being self-centered (I'm-telling-myself-I'm-doing-research-for-others-but-in-reality-I'm-doing-it-for-me) I skimmed through the table of contents of Fletcher's What a Writer Needs until I found a section on tension. Fletcher writes:

This is such a fundamental expectation that while we read we are always on edge, slightly tense, awaiting the first sign of calamity. We actually get disappointed when events unfold smoothly: "Nothing is happening..."

Tension staples the reader's eyes to the page, and writers work hard to create it.

If I can craft a subtle question in the beginning of the story, it'll help me improve the ending. (After all, the middle was so easy to write. It practically wrote itself.)

And hopefully the reader's eyes will be stapled to the page the whole way...

If you're working on a manuscript, what kind of tension are you weaving into your story? Frustrated (and nosey) minds want to know...

Sioux is a writer, a teacher, a wife, a mother, a mother-in-law and a grammy. She's keeping her fingers crossed that a story of hers makes it over the final hurdle for the Chicken Soup for the Soul: My Kind of America. In her spare time (when she's not teaching or sleeping or fantasizing about sleeping) she reads voraciously and writes. To read more of her meanderings, check out her blog.