Make 'Em Wait: Delaying Reader Gratification

Popular nineteenth century novelist and playwright Charles Reade once famously shared this advice on writing: "Make 'em laugh; make 'em cry; make 'em wait."

Today, I'm taking a few minutes to focus on the last facet, that of "wait time," in the art of storytelling.

To keep the reader flipping pages, the writer strives to quickly raise compelling questions by giving incomplete information in the form of intriguing dialogue or narrative. There's no shortage of advice on how to set hooks that appeal to reader curiosity.

To look at one example, here's a quick snippet from the opening of one of my recent romantic thrillers, Beneath Bone Lake (Lovespell, May 2009):

The boatman’s paddle dug deep beneath the moss-green surface, biting and twisting like a switchblade’s killing thrust. Pulse thrummed and muscles burned as he dragged the canoe forward, threading through a swamp-dank maze of pale trees, the ghost sentries of a forest flooded years before. Above, the skeletal branches reached skyward into silver, their bony fingers veiled in Spanish moss and predawn mist.

A harsh cry heralded a white egret’s low flap over water, and a higher-pitched, more melodic twitter warned the sun was close to rising. With a glance down at his watch, he swore, then flipped away the cigarette he had been smoking. He had to get moving, get the hell out of here because cold or not, the damned bass fisherman would be out at first light. He couldn’t take the chance that the silent incursion of an electric trolling motor would bring one close enough to notice that he carried no tackle — close enough to hear the splash as his loathsome cargo slipped over the canoe’s side.

By this point, the reader is (I hope) wondering who is this guy, why doesn't he want to be spotted, and (most importantly) what -- or who -- is the "loathsome cargo" he's on the water dumping?

After growing curious about these important questions, the reader might be mildly engaged if they were quickly answered. But tension is heightened with a "jump cut" (quick switch to a totally different scene) where Ruby Monroe, flying into Dallas after a year-long civilian work stint in Iraq, is extremely excited about the prospect of reuniting with her little girl and Ruby's sister, who's been caring for her. A new set of questions is raised, including the airport theft of an important item along with Ruby's family's failure to appear.

Now, with any luck, the reader should be caught up in Ruby's anticipation, worried that the body from Scene One isn't one of the heroine's family members, and compelled to keep flipping pages (with mounting dread) to find out what's really going on.

Rather than offering a quick pay-off, however, the story then forces readers to follow a chain of discoveries, revelations, dubious allies, and tantalizing possibilities to get to the questions' answers, the most important of which are delayed, delayed, delayed until the final pages.

But it's a balancing act, and no easy task, to keep the reader from becoming confused and/or giving up in frustration. To prevent these pitfalls, it's important that the author also raise lesser questions, which are answered at varying intervals. By satisfying reader curiosity on those counts and doing so in a fresh, novel, or unpredictable way, the author sets out the trail of breadcrumbs that will eventually lead the audience to a satisfying intellectual and emotional payoff.

Achieve this ideal balance, and you've effectively "bookmark-proofed" one page-turner of a read.

Question for the day: What was the name of the last "page turner" you read? How did the author make it "unputdownable?"