Narrative | Casting the Bones

How to Create a Pageturner

There is an old screenwriting trick that works just as well for novels and short stories. It’s a great way to keep your scenes moving, giving your work that page-turning urgency that keeps the agents, editors or producers reading.

It’s called Enter Late/Leave Early.

When writing a scene, rather than start at the “beginning,” try entering the scene late — coming in after events are already in motion. Then make sure you get out of there before said events have concluded.

For example:

John and Mary decide to go for a jog. Instead of cutting to the two of them throwing on their jogging shorts, pulling on their running shoes, and hitting the road, we cut straight to John and Mary running side by side, in the middle of a conversation.

Then, once the point of the scene has been made, we cut away from them — BEFORE they finish their jog or their conversation. And to compel the reader forward, it often helps to use a line of dialogue or prose that’s a springboard into the next scene.

Brevity is extremely important in screenplays and short stories, but it’s important in novels as well. That last thing you want to do is bore your reader and, while novels give you more room to explore character motivation, background and feelings, it’s important to keep things moving.

Any good story should have rhythm, aided by the ebb and flow of your scenes. And ELLE is one way to maintain that rhythm.

Get in, make your point, then get the hell out.

How Not to Write On the Nose

I was recently sitting with a friend who asked me what I thought of [BIG BESTSELLING AUTHOR]. My response was something like, “People seem to love him.”

“No,” my friend said, “what do YOU think?”

I hesitated, because while there was a time I would openly criticize writers, those days are long gone. Partly because I’m not immune to criticism myself and partly because I’m in a business that requires a certain etiquette — and I’m learning to be polite.

So, I simply said, “For me — and this is my opinion only — his writing is too on the nose.”

Then came the usual question. “What does that mean?”

“It’s a Hollywood term,” I said. “When everything is up front, there’s no nuance or subtlety, no subtext.”

The writer in question, I went on to say, often writes things like, “The evil killer watched them from the hilltop. He was going to kill them all.”

Now there’s nothing particularly wrong with that, I suppose. But, for me, it’s painfully matter of fact. It tells the reader exactly what he needs to know without making him or her work at it.

And, to my mind, the reader should always have to do a little work.

I think of a story as a puzzle. It doesn’t matter what genre you’re writing in. Your job as a writer is to supply the pieces of the puzzle and enough juice behind them to get the reader to want to put those pieces together and figure out what picture they form.

So rather than tell them that the guy on the hill is an evil killer, you instead put that guy on the hill, but you don’t tell them who he is, WHY he’s there, or what his plans are.

You only give them ONE piece of the puzzle.

Then, somewhere in the next several pages you might mention Joe’s missing brother Johnny. Johnny hasn’t been seen in three years and nobody knows where he went.

Put those two pieces together and your reader is pretty much figuring that the guy on the hill is Johnny. Or, if he isn’t, he certainly had something to do with Johnny — maybe even Johnny’s disappearance.

Who knows? You’ll only find out if you continue to read.

The point is, of course, that by not telling them everything up front, you create something VERY important in your reader:

The desire to learn more. And once they have that desire, they will not stop until they satisfy it.

If you spell it all out for them right up front, however, what have you created? For me, you’ve created a reader who’s about to toss the book.

But I guess that’s just me. Because on the nose or not, the writer in question sells books like crazy. Is it because people think he’s a terrific storyteller or because they just don’t want to bother to do any work?

Beats me.