Reprinted with permission from the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.
The secret to writing novels that readers can’t put down is simple — in theory.
All you have to do is making the ending of each chapter so exciting that your reader can’t help but turn the page.
That’s a nice theory. How do you do it in practice?
The answer depends on the kind of novel you’re writing. The purpose of a novel is to give your reader a Powerful Emotional Experience.
Each category of fiction creates its own mix of emotional experiences. Each category makes a promise to deliver a certain kind of emotion at the end of the novel. A romance promises to deliver love. A suspense novel promises to deliver safety. A mystery promises to deliver justice.
As your story progresses, your reader tracks how close you are to delivering the final emotional payoff for your story. If the payoff looks like it’s getting closer, your reader’s tension eases. If it looks like the payoff is getting further away, your reader’s tension tightens.
When something happens at the very end of a chapter to make the payoff suddenly look dramatically less likely, that’s a cliffhanger.
Lee Child is a master of writing cliffhangers. Child is the author of a series of thrillers starring Jack
Reacher, a drifter who left the Army after 13 years as a military cop. Now Reacher hitchhikes around the country, running into one set of bad guys after another and reluctantly puttings right.
Reacher is a skilled street fighter who knows every dirty fighting trick in the book and uses them to get out of trouble. That’s a great skill to have when you get in fights with thugs three at a time, or you’re threatened by guys with guns.
In one scene in KILLING FLOOR, the first novel in the series, Reacher and a businessman named Hubble are put in prison on a trumped up charge late one night. There’s been a murder in town, and both Reacher and Hubble are incidentally connected, even though they’re not suspects. They’re supposed to be put on the holding floor for nonviolent prisoners. By mistake, they’ve been put on the floor with the hard guys — lifers.
You have the passion to be a writer or a daily blogger. It’s there gnawing at you every moment of every day until you give in and start writing. If you’re not writing, you’re thinking about writing, you’re jotting down ideas, you’re thinking up great blog posts, new angles to share with your readers—this is your life; you are passionate about being a writer—you are a writer.
Larry Brooks is a bestselling author and writing instructor, and the creator of 
If you don’t know, how can you write compelling characters? All our characters, in a sense, wear a mask. Some wear many masks and until we can “see” behind those masks, we don’t know who they are. Sure, you can give them a past and all the other “typical” information that goes with creating a character, but you have to step into their shoes, slip into their skin and get inside their head—almost literally.
Writing strong narrative is a difficult task even for seasoned writers. They know to use strong verbs and to cut out the clutter and material that isn’t necessary, but do they follow any certain rules for doing this? I’m sure each writer has their own set of guidelines for writing good narrative and you will device your own set of rules as you become more practiced in your craft, but here are a few guidelines to help you get started.
“, you need to. I was under the impression (once upon a time) that writers like Stephen never had a rejection in their life. Turns out, the greats have had more rejections than anyone because they kept writing and sending out submissions.
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