Having a clear idea of where your work is heading is all well and good, but remember: readers don’t like a giveaway, so keep them guessing by plotting cleverly. Getting the reader to turn page after page is the most important concern for a writer, and the best way to arrest their attention is by raising questions and delaying the answers. If you pose an intriguing enough question at the beginning of a piece of writing a reader will charge through a thousand pages or more to find out what happens – just look at The Lord of the Rings.
Plot, especially in a novel, is like a treasure map. As a writer, you’re guaranteeing to a reader that the instructions you give them will lead them through the dark forest to the golden doubloons at the end – it’s a guarantee that you’re sending them in the right direction, and that whatever lies at the end is worth the trip. If the map you provide doesn’t meet these two requirements, the readers will lose their way, and you’ll lose their trust.
But it’s a little more complicated than this. Readers aren’t just looking for a final payoff – they don’t want freebies. If people were after a quick resolution, all stories would be two pages long; a beginning, then straight away a conclusion. Or readers would skip to the last page of a novel as soon as they’d finished the first. The map you provide has to be one that takes the reader on a number of adventures, that builds up their suspense and relives it bit by bit on the journey to the end. Readers like to be teased. They want to get to the end of a novel (how many times have you cursed yourself for not being able to read fast enough to find out what happens at the end of a book?) but they also want to feel they’ve got something from the whole experience, not just the resolution.
In order to create tension in a plot, to keep readers turning those pages, you need to ask questions and hold back the answers. In most texts, the initiating event poses the big question: readers want to know how a character is going to react, and what the outcome will be. If the uncertainty you create at the beginning of the book is exciting enough, they’ll keep reading until they get to the end, until the question is resolved.
For some, though, the thought of slogging through an entire novel for a final resolution is daunting, so keep up the tension by posing smaller questions in each chapter. Remember, each problem or obstacle you pose for a character is a question raised – every challenge you set a character creates an uncertainty in the reader: will they make it out of this one? Keep your readers hooked by holding back the answer, and posing another question as soon as the previous one is resolved. You can do this at the start of the chapter, or you can end chapters with a cliffhanger, but either way the reader is propelled forwards by their need to find out what happens next. Many thriller writers have got this down to a fine art.
Whether you’re creating a plot from an outline, or leaving it to the actions of your characters, you should be aiming to show how life is a great deal more complicated than a simple story. And in order to do this, you don’t just want to be showing events themselves, you need to focus on how they shape your characters. Plot is a journey, sometimes physically but always emotionally and psychologically. Central characters need to change in the course of a plot: when they arrive at point B they can be anywhere – happier, sadder, richer, poorer, deader – as long as they are not still at point A. Somewhere between each uncertainty and each resolution, your characters change, they evolve. Without this change, for better or for worse, readers will find it hard to empathise with your characters.
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