So how do I make my novel a page turner? First trick - unanswered questions.

I've discovered something astonishing! It's a secret. It'll make you a great and famous writer when you know it. But you'll have to win that secret from me. You'll have to answer three questions, each more tricky than the last...

When you're really into a book, what is it that makes you keep reading?

Simple. You want to know what happens next. If your story is going to engage people then there must be no point ever that they aren't both:

1. wishing for the next bit of information to end the suspense
2. hoping it never ends

That's a bit of a paradox, I know. You want it to move towards the end but never actually end. But that's how a great read feels, doesn't it?*

Unanswered questions in your novel

One writer a long time ago, Wilkie Collins, said that there were two things that made readers want to know more information:

1. unanswered questions
2. incomplete actions

Let's look at the first. Everything you write should have a question somewhere in the background. And in a sense, everything does invite some kind of question.

Take for example this simple sentence, 

    Paige walked into the room.

Not a great story opener but there's been worse, I reckon. Are there any questions there? Well, perhaps. You might have things you'd like to know more about. Who's Paige? What room is it? Why is she walking?

The problem with this is that the questions are floaty and distant. They aren't particularly compelling. For a start you don't know if those questions will get answered at all.

What if we say, 

    Why did Paige walk into the room? 

That seems a bit of an improvement. This brings the question a bit closer to us. The first one had some unknowns but no promise of an answer. This time we have actually asked a question and put a question mark and everything. The question is being asked directly. That suggests that we readers need to think up an answer. It also suggests that the answer will be coming from somewhere. 

This still isn't quite gripping enough, though. It's missing some other important elements. For a start there are just too many possible answers. That's no fun to have to think through all of them. With there being so many possible answers we also risk the reader just believing that most possible answers will be ordinary or recognisable. 

We need the reader not to think this is just an everyday ordinary question to be answered. So we could swap a word or two:

Instead of Paige - who I know well but you might not at all - you could have something else. 'Paige' makes you think a milli-second before coming up with what kind of character would be called Paige. You know it's a novel so you know the name's been chosen for a reason. Is it a pun on page/Paige - is that The Virgin Paige? [well, yes, duh!] She opens the story so she's important to get to know - MORE QUESTIONS - how old is she? what's she up to? Again, there's questions there ... but no precision.

What if it was a less usual name. 

    Why did Zebedee walk into the room? 

It makes questions of a different kind, no?

What's important though isn't necessarily whackiness or something colourful and bizarre - although many authors make this work very well indeed. The important thing is more about achieving the right focus to make the question fully engaging. 

That lack of detail makes us think that this question won't be answered any time soon. Or that there are just too many possibilities. A character sitting in complete darkness and silence may well invite questions. Who, what, why, how? The trouble is, the question is too open. We need something to latch onto, to help focus our heads on just one or two important questions. A character sitting in semi-darkness under a swinging blade - that's going to make everyone focus more.

So we need a question. We need it to promise an answer. We need that answer to come from a focused range of possibilities. We need some kind of promise of an answer - it needs to be the kind of question that's answerable in a page or two before bedtime rather than after a lifetime of angst. I'm not going to turn the page if you're clearly never going to give me an answer, am I?

We're still missing something.

The other thing we need is: why is this question important to answer?

The question of jeopardy in story telling

For that we need to suggest that there are high stakes to the question. We need to know the answer - either for ourselves or vicariously for the character we're hoping to identify with. One way we might do that is by suggesting jeopardy for the character. 

Could we do this with a simple change of the verb?

    Why did Paige crawl into the room?

That's got more to it already. No-one crawls into rooms normally. So we've got something unusual. A question not easily answered. We might have to work for this answer and that will make it all the more rewarding. It's more precise, too. We're asking particular questions about 'why would she be crawling' - importantly, we also might have some answers of our own that we want to test - is she wounded, showing subservience, a giant?

We could leave it there. No point putting too many questions into one sentence. Or we could just tweak it a bit further through word choice. 

We know the verb could create the jeopardy here. And we've seen above that the proper noun (name) in the sentence does curious things to our question-seeking brains. These both help focus the questions we might be asking. 

Maybe we could develop the last of the nouns in this example sentence though, the one that gives information about place?

Yes - how about this - what if 'room' became a place that had more of its own resonance as far as drama, high-stakes, jeopardy? Questions. It could be 'hospital' for example. Or it could be somewhere that the word 'walk' gives an unusual edge to - somewhere that you'd walk to less than casually:

    Why did Paige walk into the ocean?

That gets a bonus point or two in my book for being evocative. The word 'ocean' fills my head and heart pretty quickly with memories and thoughts... and more questions. 

Or what about 'barricade' and what if - let's try: 

    Why did Paige crawl towards the barricade?

And there's a 'towards' in there that just give an extra edge. Why? Because of that other thing that Wilkie Collins** said - incomplete action.

And what kind of writer wouldn't look at incomplete action next?  

*If you find that idea of plots and endings interesting, check out Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot

** You must read some Wilkie Collins, friend of Dickens and totally brilliant. If you haven't read any yet, go for The Woman in White, there's probably a free version on Kindle.