Making your story a page turner – part 2

A post about engines, about creating some device to keep your story constantly moving forward.

Hello! I hope all this advice has been proving useful these past weeks. All I’m trying to do in this series is outline techniques that I know for certain have worked for me. I’ve no idea where they fall on the scale of revelatory to meh. I just know they’ve worked.

So here’s my second post on different ways to make your story a page turner. I’m personally so intent on not boring my readers I once had a review for the Men Who Stare At Goats that accused me of including too many cliffhangers. I think I probably did over-cliffhangerize Goats so I can’t be too angry with that critic who I hate.

This post is mostly about a eureka moment I had when I was writing my first book* Them - an idea for an engine that was so perfect it kept the story rolling forward from the first page to the last. And by engine I mean some big underlying narrative device. There are great, audacious engines and there are small, subtle engines. Both can be equally gripping. But let me start with a big one. Most importantly this post is about how I came to the idea, and why it worked. Because I think those things can be replicable.

(*Actually Them wasn’t, strictly speaking, my first book. I’d already published a book called Clubbed Class, but it was just a stocking filler. When Them got nominated for the Guardian’s First Book award some bastard blabbed on me and the head of the judging panel telephoned to confront me about Clubbed Class. I said, “Well, it was book shaped.” I was disqualified.)

Anyway…