A Simple Trick to Keep Readers Turning the Pages

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Scene and chapter breaks are the most likely places to lose a reader. Are yours doing all they can to keep them reading?

On Monday, I talked about writing without chapters, and one of the benefits of that was choosing the best places to end my scenes and chapters. Today, I want to elaborate on that a bit.

When I was still new to writing, I thought a scene or a chapter was a contained bit of the story. It started, and then it wrapped up by the end. It might talk about what to do next, but that happened in the next chapter. I made the same mistakes pretty much every new writer does. I ended scenes with:

• Characters going to bed
• Characters setting off somewhere
• Characters achieving a goal and being happy about it
• Characters musing about the next day or the next task
• Obvious foreshadowing of doom (dum-dum-DUM!)
• Melodramatic cliffhangers with characters in trouble or shocking revelations

There are ways to make every single one of these work, but more often than not, they aren’t strong endings and don’t provide the best hooks for enticing readers to turn the page.

Sunday Writing Tip: Make Sure Your Scene Endings Hook Your Readers

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Each week, I’ll offer a tip you can take and apply to your WIP to help improve it. They’ll be easy to do and shouldn’t take long, so they’ll be tips you can do without taking up your Sunday. Though I do reserve the right to offer a good tip now and then that will take longer—but only because it would apply to the entire manuscript.

This week, check how you end each scene and/or chapter and make sure you’re giving readers a reason to turn the page.

A scene break or chapter ending is a natural place for readers to put down a book, and sometimes we write it that way without considering the downsides. Characters go to sleep, they leave for a journey, they settle in to wait—they at in ways that say “pause the story here” in some way.

How to Write Transitions That Keep Readers Hooked

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

How to lead readers smoothly through your novel.

As writers, we spend a lot of time on our scenes, but we don't always pay enough attention to how we move from scene to scene. But how we move our readers from line to line, paragraph to paragraph, scene to scene, and chapter to chapter all lead the reader though our story. If we don't do a good enough job, they won't get very far in the novel. Jarring jumps, awkward shifts, missing information, can all knock a reader right out of the tale.

And we don't want rough transitions that make readers give up on the book.

Tips on Writing Scene and Chapter Transitions

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Stories flow from word to word, sentence to sentence, scene to scene. If we’ve done our job well as writers, each one draws the reader to the next and pulls them through the story. If we’ve stumbled a bit, they hit rough patches and ugly spots that stop the story and might even make them out it down and walk away.

The story is important, but so is how we transition from one scene to the next. This hand off is what creates the smooth narrative flow and sense of a story unfolding, versus a bunch of scenes where stuff happens but it feels disconnected.

There are all kinds of transitions. Paragraph transitions. Scene transitions. Chapter transitions. They each play different roles, but at the core, they all have the same job—to keep readers reading .

And...End Scene: When to Add a Scene Break

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Elmore Leonard is frequently quoted as saying: "I try to leave out the parts people skip." Nowhere is this more useful than in knowing when to break a scene. Transitions have a funny way of being the parts people skip.

But there's a skill to knowing when to break a scene. You don't want to just stop and jump ahead in time or location, because that can jar the reader. Too many awkward scene breaks can feel like pieces of a story strung together and lose the narrative flow. Breaking every time you get to a good hook line just feels choppy and...weird. Like chapter breaks, a good scene break should make the reader think "ooooh" and keep on reading.

What makes a good scene break?

Working With Multiple POVs and Timelines

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

And the January Q&A continues today with:

Q: My question involves multiple timelines. Right now my draft follows the protag and antag. The antag's storyline starts a long time before the protag's does, and they converge near the end. How do you decide when to switch POVs, if one of them gets significantly less screen time?

A: It all depends on the story you're trying to tell (which is the answer to a lot of questions, to be honest).

Any time you have multiple POVs, you run the risk of readers liking one POV more than the other(s). In a protagonist/antagonist split, the risk is even higher, because antagonists typically aren't the nicest people, and knowing what they're up to can hurt the suspense and lower the tension in the novel.