What's at Stake? How to Make Readers Care About Your Story

By Janice Hardy

If readers don't care about your story, they'll never get past the first scene. 

Like many writers, I have story ideas languishing in my files that I really like, but haven't been able to make work yet because they don't have an answer to the "who cares?" question: 

Why should the reader care about this person and this problem?

Until I figure out a way to make the stakes personal, to make me care, those stories will stay languishing.

I know I'm not alone in this. I do a lot of critiques for a wide variety of writers. One of the most common comments I make is about the stakes. Why does this matter? Why should the reader care? 

Often I can see the stakes in the story, but they're general and vast, so they don't make me care. The author could put any protagonist into the lead and nothing about the consequences really changes.

How to Make Readers Care About Your Protagonist—and Your Plot

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

If you’re struggling with a lagging story, a lack of character agency might be the reason why.

A helpful-yet-brutal piece of critique feedback is “Why should I care?” Why should readers care about the character, the conflict, or the story in general? Why should they read this novel you’ve worked so hard to create?

“Because it’s my novel and I love it” might be true, but sadly, no one outside our friends and family accept that as a reason. And sometimes, not even then if we have honest critique partners. Potential readers are lost every day to novels that might be good in every other aspect, but they just “didn’t care” what happened to the characters.

Often, this is due to a lack of agency.

The Budrys Rule: Three Writerly Sins, One of them Cardinal

By Dario Ciriello

Part of The How They Do It Series 

JH: Dario Ciriello returns to the lecture hall today with three "rules" writers should never break. And for once, these rules are ones writers really should live by.

As an editor/copyeditor who reads a lot of manuscripts, I see many potentially fine, well-written novels with believable characters, rollicking plots, and crisp dialogue fail because they fell short of what I call The Budrys Rule.

The late Algis Budrys was a famous science fiction author, editor, teacher, and critic. He taught for many years at the Clarion Writers Workshop, and worked as a book editor for Playboy magazine. In his fine little 1994 craft manual, Writing to the Point, Budrys gives one of the clearest and best pieces of advice to authors I’ve ever read, and does it so succinctly it works as a simple mnemonic.

So What? Making Readers Care About Your Story

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Give readers a reason to care and they'll read on. Problem is, sometimes you can have all the right pieces of good storytelling in place and the reader still doesn't care, but you're not sure why. This often equates to the dreaded "it was well written, but it just didn't grab me" type comments and rejections.

So how do you get those pesky readers to care in the first place?

Four things.

1. Stakes 

"Go to bed" doesn't get much of a response. "Go to bed or else" does, because the "or else" could be something bad. The fear of that something bad forces a reaction. When the reaction you want is fear and worry (which leads to caring), you have to dangle something bad as a threat.

Let's say you have a scene where Joey is sitting at the dinner table, and his babysitter is forcing him to eat his broccoli. He refuses, she insists. This is going to get ugly and one person is going to end the night unhappy. Even though they both have strong goals to drive the scene, do you care if Joey eats his vegetables? Probably not. It doesn't matter if he does. Nothing will happen to him if he doesn't.