When readers pick up your book and settle into their reading retreat, you want them to read it right to the final full stop. How do you want them to feel? Hopefully, the worded magic has treated them well as they happily twist and turn at your every clever scene change, character interaction, tortuous emotional routes, and powerful action. Blend all these carefully as you propel the reader through the script. You can have too much of a good thing.

The very nature of becoming a writer has bestowed on you permission to insert immeasurable deceit onto any relationship, in whatever manner you wish, manipulate a reader’s senses with deft sleight of hand, or turn a big win into a calamitous debacle. Words can let you massage your readers, gently, until they rest calmly into their favourite reading zone, the outside world forgotten, then shock the heck out of them. Make them cry, laugh hysterically, shiver with outrage, be smitten — oh, yes — but only if you want to.

“You can make anything by writing.” C.S. Lewis

Each reader has their own needs to be met when they plunge into the opening scene. How can you help them to navigate the entire manuscript? They will need signposts and warning beacons. Apply these carefully — allowing some moments to have predictable, but not one hundred percent, certainty, and others to reveal the reason and surprise disclosure behind small crumbs, jigsaw pieces you have deposited along the way.

Readers want to experience all they expected — all that was promised in marketing and book cover hard sell — when they have expended time and, probably, money to acquire your work. Did you create a new life for them to inhabit for the few hours they reside in the pages, leafing languidly in their pleasure? Will they be drawn into the daily lives of this new world, to feel and reflect the emotions of its inhabitants, to breath short, rapid gasps in exhilaration or shock at the words swirled from deep within your mind? Absorbing the pages should be a fulfilling departure from the mundane that is, too often, all that life is offering in the present. Let those page turners escape and return with experiences worthy of repetition — all the better for reaching that final full stop.

Readers need to feel their senses and imagination spark as they turn the pages. Why else would they enter? Certainly not solely for the purpose of satisfying your marketing push. You must live up to all the hype of that push, or you will be punished by a battered readership. They will turn on you and tell whoever is willing to listen how you broke your promise to them.

“All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.” Steve Almond

Booklovers want to be drawn to one character, repulsed by another, fall in love with someone, cheer on the underdog, and experience an excitement not imaginable in life outside the crafted pages they hold.

Give the mind something to do while emotions are being massaged. Challenge, give clues, laugh at misadventure, build a tranquil internal forest or a searing desert. Do anything to prevent the story making a beeline for the exit. Hold them, wrapped in layers of skill-encrusted pages, enthralled that such events are even possible, to the point that some small, or large, aspect of their subconscious is forced to defy or succumb to internal dialogue that may change their outlook on life. For, yes, that is the potential power embodied in your work.

When there are no more pages left to turn, a reader should feel saddened as they abandon the world within and the people you created to be actors for a few hours on that stage. Actors they may be but, as the book and its universe are set aside, are they set aside by someone enthusiastic about finding other works by you? Will they recommend such works to a future audience, and become a valued advocate? That is a grand goal.

All in all, you want your readers to be citizens of your novels, if only for fleeting moments. When they leave, they will tell others how wonderful a place it was to visit and, maybe, take a bit of your creation with them. Job done. Writing at its peak.

Have loads of fun creating your worlds and characters.

If you have any comments, please leave them below. We like to hear from you.

Have a great day. Damon

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