How To Keep A Reader Interested In Your Novel

Readers are fickle mistresses who will drop your book in a heartbeat if you do not serve them well. And you cannot blame them. You would do the same if you knew there were a thousand and one books waiting for your eyes to caress their inked pages.

Today I’m not talking about grabbing your readers’ attention—start with a sizzling paragraph and you’ve got readers hooked—I’m talking about keeping that attention, because unless you cultivate that skill, your reader will move on to the next book that has an even more sizzling opening paragraph.

Almost every new writer experiences what I like to call the midpoint drag. This is when you run out of steam just after reaching the midpoint. If you are a pantser, you might not realise you have reached your midpoint and might erroneously call it a writer’s block. If you outline your work, you may find that your stories tend to stall whenever you get to the middle of your novel.

If you don’t learn to navigate this, your readers could get to your story’s midpoint, feel the drag themselves and, unless you have a few tricks up your sleeves to keep them, slip through your fingers like water and find their way into another story.

Here’s a few ways you can keep your readers in a chokehold until the last page, or if you’re lucky, until a flashback two years later while they’re having breakfast that leads to them bawling over your characters.

Well-written characters motivate your readers to read your story till the end. Your characters are the vehicles that drive your plot, and are the eyes through which we see your story world. If your characters lack depth, only a handful of readers will want to keep reading—and this is only if your plot is interesting.

A well-written character is a character who could pass off as a random person we meet on the street, and in the story, a person who we care deeply about. This care could be because we see something relatable in them like their struggle with addiction, their pursuit of happiness, or their determination to ‘make it’. When you write characters who lack motivation, flaws, and who have everything they want fall into their laps, you are telling us to save our love for another more deserving book whose author understands human complexities.

Well-written characters also work to prevent the midpoint drag, because they become so dynamic that sometimes they push your story forward without you trying.

Just as readers expect to care for your characters, and in extension, the world your characters inhabit, they want to feel a sense of connection with your story itself. This is where themes come in: the deeper meaning of your story. Are you trying to tell a story that makes us think twice about what we call justice? Is your story about finding identity? What is that universal idea that your story contains? If you do not have that, you risk losing your reader’s interest.

This is a tricky thing because one of the reasons some fiction lovers pick fiction is to escape reality, and if your story has a theme that is poorly concealed under shallow and unlikable characters, your reader will drop it. The solution is in the balance then, but for the sake of this post, I’ll assume you have that under lock.

So, one of the ways to keep readers interested in your story is to make your story one that they can relate to. You could write about a hen who has to decide whether she would be Christmas meat or new year’s meat in a bid to save her chicks, and though none of us are actual hens (no offense to any hen reading this—you’re an outlier) we can relate to the story because of the theme.

We have all been in situations where we were forced to choose the lesser of two evils. We might’ve had to make a sacrifice for the people we love. It doesn’t matter that the protagonist of your story is a feathered friend, all that matters is that their story reminds us of what it feels like to be undecided and uncertain. It strikes a chord within us and makes us go ‘aha! I recognise that’.

No, you do not have to write about Captain Hook to keep readers reading your story, but you do need to sink your hook in their flesh at every turn—preferably at the beginning and end of each chapter.

This isn’t the first on my list because I believe it is good for grabbing a reader’s attention in that split second when they are weighing your book against another book, but not as important as good characterisation or a solid plot when you are trying to keep them interested beyond the first page.

I know this for a fact because I have read books that came highly recommended, and I noticed that some of them do not go for your jugular in the very first paragraph. They are more subtle—especially when you’re expecting excitement and fire. In fact, with these books, I never would have gone past the first page were it not for the claims to their ingenuity.

Hooks work well because they keep readers anticipating, and using them at the beginning and end of your chapters will ensure that the reader turns the next page. So, when you have your reader interested in your story because they care about your characters, you can keep them turning the pages by making the first and last paragraphs of your chapters powerful.

I saw this on Quora in response to a question about grabbing a reader’s attention as quickly as possible. It was a response by Beth Turnage, who suggests answering five questions in the first paragraph to bring your readers into the story as quickly as possible: who, what, when, where, why.

Who is telling the story, what are they doing (what is happening to them), when is this event happening, where is it happening, why is it happening?

You would agree with me that it does bring the reader into the story. However, like with hooks, this can be applied to the rest of the story to keep readers grounded. Sometimes we are so carried away with the story we are writing we forget to carry the readers along. You might believe pronouns are sufficient, and your readers would understand who is speaking at every moment, but your familiarity with your story may blind you to the fact that your scenes may be vague.

Asking yourself these questions when editing can help you put the right information at every turn to keep your readers from asking those questions themselves and falling out of the story. When you answer these questions naturally, you drastically reduce your chances of confusing your readers and sending them running for the hills.

Nothing beats a good story when it comes to keeping readers interested. Like with those stories I talked about—the ones with boring beginnings—, when your story is good, it is good. People will recommend it, and those it is recommended to will read it despite a little dry first paragraph. I mean, what is a dry first chapter in comparison to the absolute deliciousness that is a powerful story?

I remember thinking Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It was a bore within few minutes of starting it. It was probably because I picked it up expecting the book to be so interesting I wouldn’t want to put it down. At the time, that meant starting the story off with something really shocking like ‘The corpse in my fridge keeps talking to me’.

When I read the opening sentence, I was unimpressed—again, a matter of taste because if you ask me now, I’ll say the opening sentence is fire. Anyway, I kept reading it because I trusted the person who had recommended it to me, and soon enough it became unputdownable. A good story.

A good story will remain a good story even with a small problem with character development, grammatical errors or a weak opening. I’m not saying be lax about these; I’m saying write a good story and these issues can be easily fixed.

And there you have it: a few ways to keep your readers interested in your novel.

Here’s the opening line of A River Runs Through It, by the way:

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.

What do you think? Would you want to keep reading the book based off this line alone?