Keep Your Readers Coming Back for More

“If anyone’s going to spank my wife, it’s going to be me, not some testosterone-crazed football player.”

Trace Evans, to the judge of the Memphis Municipal Court, in “Giving Him the Blues.”

Hook Your Readers in the First Three Seconds or Lose Them Forever

Keeping a reader’s attention is a lot like catching fish: you need a hook, line, and sinker. This is particularly true on the internet. Your first line has to catch the reader’s eye, and you have an eyeblink, maybe two, in which to do it. Readers scan through text very quickly on the internet. He will take a second or two to see if you have anything unusual, new, interesting fun, odd or awful to say. That is all you will get, unless you set your hook.

The hook is an attention-grabbing opening line that makes the reader say, “Huh? I have to know more.” Answer the reader’s most likely questions in your article or story, but leave one or two things unanswered. End each paragraph with something that leads into the next one. End each chapter with a problem to solve, a question to answer, or a peril to be overcome. Begin the next chapter with the event and its resolution.

Once you have your great opening line, follow it with a punchy story. Whether it is an article, short story or novel, you need to have something new to add to the existing body of knowledge. You need to entertain, inform, coax, shock, soothe, unsettle or reassure the reader. Do or say something unexpected. Have your characters reverse roles.

The sinker puts your work in front of the reader. It needs to stand out: shiny, bright, interesting. Build tension. Don’t let it be obvious what it going to happen next. Brainstorm a list of possible plot points, and if your story is headed toward a cliche, use something from your list instead.

Finally, give your readers a way to reach you. Do your best to answer their questions. Thank them for supporting your work.

Meet Trace and Katelyn Evans. Trace and Katelyn are sentenced to “spouse arrest” after a protest march gone wrong, trying to get the city of Memphis to take action to find and prosecute a serial rapist. Terror enters their home, costing them more than Trace is willing to lose. Trace confronts himself, and the foundation of everything he believes, before he can finally lay down arms and have the life he had envisioned while under fire under desert skies.