How to Keep Your Readers Interested

Here are today’s Wonderful Words:

The brilliance of Thomas Edison was not in his mind.

Discipline is Destiny, Ryan Holiday, page 43

Background

Discipline is Destiny is Ryan Holiday’s most recent book about…you guessed it, discipline. This was the first sentence of a chapter titled Just Show Up, a chapter whose main point is that consistency is more important than genius or creativity. Thomas Edison said the ‘genius’ hangs around his laboratory day and night, that way if anything happens, he’s there to catch it. He was basically saying he could never tell which days would produce good ideas, so by simply showing up every day, he guaranteed he was there at the same time as the ideas.

What makes it wonderful?

I liked this simple sentence because it’s counterintuitive. How could someone who invented light bulbs and batteries not have a brilliant mind?

Of course Edison had a brilliant mind, but he also had something else working for him—consistency. And consistency was the point of the chapter.

So Holiday tells us something that is technically true, but it’s counterintuitive. Most readers will fall into one of two camps: intrigue or disagreement. Either way, they’re likely to keep reading to hear the explanation.

And that leads me to today’s technique: creating suspense.

Let's get technical

Lee Child, author of the famous Jack Reacher thriller novels, penned an excellent explanation on creating suspense.

Simply, he said, ‘How do you create suspense?’ is the wrong question. It’s the wrong question because the goal isn’t to create suspense. The goal is to keep the reader reading.

If you want your family to gobble down the meal you spent all day cooking, you shouldn’t ask, ‘How do I bake a cake?’ but ‘How do I make my family hungry?’ Because you could bake a cake nobody wants to eat, but if you make your family hungry, they’ll want to eat anything you cook.

Turns out the way to make your family hungry is to make them wait hours for dinner.

Creating suspense as a writer is similar.

To keep the audience reading, make them hungry. Make them want what you have.

You can do this by implying a question and then waiting to answer it.

That’s exactly what Holiday did with this sentence. He implied Edison’s brilliance came from somewhere other than his brain, but he didn’t tell us where. He intrigued the reader. He created an open loop.

He kept us reading by placing a question in our minds and delaying the answer. He didn’t focus on baking the perfect cake. He focused on making us hungry.

The only way to succeed as a writer is to get eyeballs on your work—and then keep them there. Now you know a simple way to do it. You don’t have to bake a cake. You just have to make your readers hungry.

Happy writing,

Joe

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