A while ago, I wrote about the secret to writing addictive prose. I mentioned how creating a daisy chain, sentence to sentence, was how you gripped readers.
Subsequently, this came up in a class I was teaching. And I realised, as I was explaining it, that this toppling effect was closer to the cascade of dominoes than the linkage of a daisy chain.
With dominoes, there is a pulse of energy moving forwards. Often this comes from the domino one or two behind the domino starting to fall.
This principle works with sentences, too.
Prose can be very flat if each sentence only relates to, and takes energy from, those occurring immediately before and after it.
To jump away from the dominoes analogy, a paragraph can become like an ecosystem of references — the first sentence linked to the last, which might be fifteen sentences away. And in between, many other cross-pollinations, munchings and murmurings.
But that’s not the secret I’d like to talk about today.
This is something I noticed because it was absent in much of the writing I read when I’m teaching.
And yet if you watch a soap opera or a sitcom, or read a crime novel or a romance, this is the main thing they are doing.
Writing one scene to make the reader/viewer want to see a following scene — which doesn’t come immediately.
Shorthand for this would be, Creating anticipation then playing with it.
A simple example, from a soap opera, would be this —
A tells B that C has been badmouthing them. A angrily sets off to track down C. Cut to D and E talking about something equally urgent but completely different.
But this would work equally well —
A tells B that C really fancies them. A sets off delightedly to bump into C. Cut to D and E talking about how A has decided to humiliate B by lying to them about C’s feelings.
Within longer narratives, we watch pieces of information spreading through large networks of characters. Quite often, there is a secret which not everyone learns about until the very end — if then.
It is these kinds of structures of anticipation that make the reader ask, What happens next?
What happens in the scene when A is finally together with C?
Because it’s quite possible — in fact, it’s almost essential — to grip the reader by delaying and frustrating their desire.
And the anticipated scene should never go exactly as they’ve imagined it. They always need to get more than they’ve promised themselves.
How to delay? However you like.
In the first case, with the badmouthing, A rushes off to confront C. ‘What the hell have you been saying about me?’ But when A finds C they are cosily together with F, who A respects, and so A has the wind taken out of them, and the confrontation scene will have to happen later.
In the second case, with the false hint that C loves A, the delay could be the basis for a whole comic novel — in which A humiliatingly pursues C, observed by smug B, until C finally falls for charmingly klutzy A. And won’t we enjoy the scene where B, recently dumped by D for being such a horrible schemer, can only look on at A and C’s wedding.
What I often see, in unconfident writing, is the set-up — usually within the first couple of hundred words — of a great roaring engine of a plot device.
There has been a violent murder. It was witnessed by a child. They are now mute. Will the killer be caught?
But after this opening, I meet with a kind of giving up.
There’s the assumption that because-murder-therefore-suspense, so job done bish bosh.
The big scene the reader wants to see, where the murderer is caught by the clever detective — that’s what will power the intervening 200 pages.
No, it won’t.
A novel without a murder — a carefully plotted novel full of As, Bs and Cs with their intimate deceits and emotional confusions and delayed confrontations — that will be far more gripping than some abstract slaughter of people we don’t yet know or care about.
As I say, this is an open secret.
Any screenwriter knows it. And most writers of fiction do, too.
Most likely, you knew it already.
But it’s a good simple writing exercise to set, for yourself or for someone learning to write.
Create a scene that makes the reader powerfully desire to read a subsequent scene, but do this will as little violence and as much nuance as possible.
This is all very useful advice to maintain reader engagement, but I was confused by the second example. Shouldn't it be *B* telling A that "C really fancies them"? (Either that, or A and B need to be switched throughout the resulting exchanges.) Apologies for the pedantry!