Engaging Readers (of Your Novel)

I’ve had a few reading experiences where I felt pushed out of the story. Where story ideas were interesting and I wanted to sink my teeth in, but the way the writer told the story and wrote the characters kept pushing me back to arm’s length (or further). So this blog aims to give examples of ways you can let your reader access your characters emotionally, logically, and enable the reader to properly join your characters on the journey your story takes them on. It aims to get you thinking about engaging readers more deeply in your story.

I’ll given advice on positioning your readers so they aren’t chasing after your characters asking, ‘WHAT?’ ‘WHY?’ and so your readers don’t find your characters every action unconvincing. I’ll try to help you show your reader how your characters feel, think and are developing. And to foreshadow events and build your story into a journey on which it makes and keeps satisfying promises to the reader.

Ground Zero

Characters & Status

There are a few simple ways to let the reader truly see and get to know your characters. First: show their emotions. Don’t only let the reader know what your character says to their boss. They can’t be their entirely honest, true self to the boss, they’ll be constrained by professionalism, their ambitions in their workplace, job insecurity, workplace politics etc.

So have your main character spend some time with a friend/ partner/ family member they trust, and can be completely honest with (throughout the novel –when possible). What your character shares of their thoughts and feelings, and how they express both in the presence of people they trust will show us things we cannot see when your character is at work.

Similarly, where relevant, show how your character interacts with people of higher rank, or possessing different and or greater forms of power (in any relevant setting to your story). Show when and how your character must hold their tongue, or restrain their emotions or reactions, or conform to others expectations because they lack position or power relative to others.

Who is your MC among their equals, their superiors and those less fortunate than themself?
All of those situations can reveal different aspects of your main characters to your reader.

Showing Feelings & Developing Feelings

Thoughts That Heighten Feelings

Don’t have your character make a single comment that suggests to the reader they’re angry, then have them punch someone in the face. Give us some internal thoughts (internally or via dialogue) to show the build up of emotion (unless you’re writing an emotionally unstable or extremely on edge character who goes from zero to ten on the temper scale in two seconds).

Example:

Why was it always Jorgen who got the nasty, most disgusting jobs? The ones that took the most effort and time to complete? While everyone else came in out of the cold early, put their feet up and got an extra serve of meat soup, Jorgen was shovelling shit and shivering in the cold.

The shovel in Jorgen’s hands stilled. He was falling behind in his studies. It was all the extra work. While he groomed the fine stallion nibbling straw opposite him, and mucked out its stables, his older siblings were racing ahead, towards better jobs. As each of them completed their studies and departed to jobs and lives of their choosing, who would be left behind, stuck doing extra chores in a life he increasingly resented?

The shovel fell, as Jorgen roared and charged out of the stables, headless of the horse dung flicking up in his wake.

Non-Verbal Emotion Cues

This is important. A book lacking emotion cues can also keep characters at arms length from the reader. So show characters feelings with nonverbal cues. The way the oldest sibling rolls their eyes dismissively as Jorgen makes his case. The second eldest crossing their arms as they protest that washing up the dishes and foodscraps is also yucky. The way the third sibling eyes the hem of their immaculate clothes, not even bothering to look at Jorgen as they dismiss his protests with the statement ‘everyone does chores.’

Have Jorgen pause his shovel as he realises who’s got the short end of the straw. Have him drop it when he realises everyone’s using him, right now and always. Then have him charge out of the freezing stables and into the warm kitchen, where no one really listens or seems to care about him or his point of view. Then, having emotionally engaged the reader by showing them everyone’s feelings along the way, when Jorgen’s most arrogant sibling tells him “we all do things we don’t like, suck it up” the reader will totally understand why Jorgen punches the arrogant snot in the face (and quite possibly cheers him on as he does so).

Side Character Agenda

Don’t reserve agendas for the MC and major players in the plot. While the agents of the Intergalactic Police confront a crime wave of chemical weapon sales (and potential attacks), you can still have the MC’s little brother searching for his missing cat. Why knows, maybe the cat is onto something, and in finding the cat, the little brother will lead their older agent sibling to a major clue in locating the lab that produces the illegal weapons, bringing him that much closer to said criminals and shutting down their illegal trade?

Giving your side characters goals gives them the opportunity to grow and develop independently of the role they play in helping your MC. By giving them a life outside of the MC’s bidding, and in making side character’s more fully rounded people, you make your story richer, more authentic and a more enjoyable experience for readers.

Character Internal Development

Please be very aware of the emotional and mental state in which your MC (and supporting cast) begin the story. Of the skills they possess, their social and technological and any other relevant competencies they have. Be aware of how these things and their relationships with other characters grow and change for the MC (and supporting cast) to achieve goals and solve the story problem.

Track these things throughout the story (especially when editing, if like me you’re a pantser). This isn’t just to show the reader how your character strives to change for the better or to strengthen their relationships to the solve the plot problem. Its not just about positioning the reader to share the character’s inner journey and cheer them on and provide the reader with a sense of payoff when the characters finally succeed in their goals. Showing the reader how characters and relationships develop also helps you avoid sudden, unexplained leaps in confidence and ability. Sudden changes (even inconsistencies) in character can confuse the reader, make characters seem implausible to them and ultimately pull the reader out of the story.

Story Foreshadowing & Tension

If you’re writing SFF, Thriller, Crime or Historical in particular, and don’t bother much with foreshadowing —you are killing your story’s tension. As a reader, I want to know what could happen next. My favourite authors, like Robert Jordan and Steve Erikson will suggest via world building and character interactions that two different events could unfold. Then they will lead me down a third path I never saw coming and I will love them for it.

But when a writer tells me there’s a spaceship that a side character can repair for everyone to escape in, then at the twelfth hour characters discover a secret tunnel and everyone escapes through it.. I wasn’t expecting that. I had no sense of anticipation, so I couldn’t be satisfied when my anticipation was fulfilled. I didn’t even know that was an option, so I may be initially confused, instead of satisfied by the way a story problem has suddenly and unexpectedly been solved (in a pulling-me-out-of-the-story way).

As a reader of primarily SFF, the bare minimum I want is Granny built a secret tunnel and no one has seen her for months. So when she does appear, having extended her secret tunnel into the prison cell just before everyone’s execution, her appearance doesn’t pull me out of the story. But if you want me to be really excited to see Granny, show me her struggles to dig fast enough. Let me hear her worries the tunnel exit will come out in the wrong place. If you do that alongside characters fretting as they probe a cell with no possibility of escape and the execution is at dawn and the pale grey of first light is creeping across the cell floor like the ax that’s about to chop off their heads… now I’m feeling the tension!

Tracking Foreshadowing

This is also important. Because if you mention Granny vanishing in chapter one, rumours she’s digging a mysterious tunnel no one quite know’s where in chapter six, then she breaks into the cell to save the day in chapter thirty two… by then I forgot this story had a granny. I’ve forgotten where she is and what she’s doing (unless nothing much happened in chapters seven to thirty two).

So when you’re doing a structural edit, take note of how early you show the reader story facts that will be crucial later. Notice how often you remind the reader of those facts. And check in with your critical readers if they recalled those facts, and the foreshadowing did prepare them for what was coming, and help them enjoy it, even if like Jordan and Erikson you manage to take the story down that third path, making a use of those facts beyond your readers anticipation.

Character Foreshadowing

This is something I’ve enjoyed in films in the last decade or so. I’m noticing more films where a side character has what seems to be a random hobby, and that interest or skill turns out to be crucial to assisting the MC in the finale. So again, if you have side or unlikely characters playing crucial roles in the end, track when and how often you incidentally remind the reader of their skills/ knowledge. When it helps the MC save the day, you want the reader to feel rewarded for paying attention and not pulled out of the story by a side character doing something they didn’t realise the side character could do.

Third Party Development In Stories

This might be an organisation in a contemporary or historical story, or a city, race or empire in SFF. As with your side characters, be wary of under-developing your third parties. I don’t just want to know Sarah’s Sewing repairs clothes. I’d like to know she has access to rare and expensive fabrics no other seamstress has, which may have come from the black market.

As a reader of my own book, I wouldn’t be satisfied if the book just showed the Zaldeans as toxically masculine warmongers. Given that the lead warmongers betray their peace-loving king by trying to manipulate him to war; I want to know what drives them. What does war give them other than the promise of glory? It gives them the opportunity for governorships —political power, and personal estates —wealth. It gives middle ranking men the chance to trade with new markets, where their goods are rarer, and they can charge more and make more money.

Don’t just tell me what the head of the third party/ organisation/ country wants. Show me what’s in it for everyone. Show me what lengths these contagonists or antagonists are prepared to go to, to further their own goals. Show me why its so important to them to achieve their goals.

Why? Because letting me as the reader see what drives the baddies and the characters who get in the way as well as I see the ‘goodies’ ramps up tension. It makes me get more emotionally invested in the story.

I confess, I did laugh reading one of Brandon Sanderson’s characters in the Stormlight archives answering the question, ‘How did all this start?’ with something like, “Other people had stuff and we wanted it.” Yes, in war that’s often what it boils down to. But the more layers you give the agendas of characters on all sides of any conflict, the more tension there is, the more emotionally invested the reader is; the more emotional pay off we get when the story problem is resolved!