Tag: Secrets

Books, their souls and secrets

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Secrets of souls

One of the things I love about reading is that it opens up to us the secrets of the rest of the world. Written down are all kinds of secrets, secrets of all the educational disciplines,  stories, strange and true, weird and wonderful, biographies and autobiographies of people, their cultures and quirks.

The more I know about others, the more I learn about myself by identifying where I differ from others and where I am similar. It’s much easier to see in others what I find difficult to see in myself. It’s a good thing that reading is so personal and private. A lot of the things I learn are not things I want to broadcast to the world, especially not until I’ve had the chance to correct my direction. As a lifelong learner, there have been many such corrections I’ve had to make and every day I find more.

Good books and their secrets

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Secrets

There are many ways to make your book a pageturner. Here are just some.

  • Craft suspense whatever your genre. Make each scene and chapter a cliff-hanger, leaving the reader with questions for which they need answers.
  • Create a delicate balance between what your reader knows and what each character knows.
  • Foreshadowing what is to come creates anticipation.
  • Lead and mislead your reader at appropriate times.
  • Language and word choice create mood and atmosphere.
  • Lush writing involving all the senses creates an emotional response in the reader.
  • Dripfeed your story, allowing your reader the satisfaction of piecing most things together for themselves.
  • Use pacing wisely. Vary the pace at which the story moves, sentence length and structure to build to a climax or relax the reader before a shock or surprise.
  • Raise the stakes both external and internal for your protagonist, then set a clock ticking on a time limit.
  • Use twists and turns to keep the reader curious.