Ingredients for a page turner

One of the highest compliments you can give a book is that it is a page turner – but how can you write one? How do you craft a text that keeps people reading, always making them want just one more chapter before bedtime? Well, here are a few general tips to make your writing that little bit more gripping.

The key thing in most fiction texts is to have some kind of puzzle at the heart of it. If the set-up is good and people want to find out the solution, they will keep reading. In certain genres, the puzzle is far more obvious than others  – in most crime novels, it’s a case of ‘who is the criminal?’ or ‘why did they commit this crime?’ – but you should always have a puzzle or a question at the heart of your text. ‘Will my protagonist find true love?’ or ‘Who will win the battle?’ or ‘Will they reach the destination they’re heading for?’ – no matter what  the question is, your audience will want to find out the answer if it’s interesting (and one to always hold in your mind – ‘what happens next?’).

Obviously, along the way, you want some interesting characters. They could be characters you really care about, characters you despise, or just interesting people, but there has to be some reason to follow them. A story following a boring character is likely to also be incredibly boring, and who wants to read that? Now, this applies to your main characters and any antagonists they may face, and you have to take care in striking the right balance.

There are some general prose tips that help drive a book forwards, and short sentences is a key one

When they start to write, most people (and I’m included in this) create a bland character who’s essentially a perfect version of themselves, but these characters aren’t interesting. How do I root for this wonderful person, and why should I? You need some kind of conflict, personal or actual, to drive them – it’s good to see a character struggle, have secrets, develop throughout a narrative. If your characters are perfect at the start, they aren’t going anywhere, so the reader probably won’t bother.

There are some general prose tips that help drive a book forwards, and short sentences is a key one. There’s nothing wrong with long paragraphs at all, but they can be hard work to get through – short sentences and paragraphs, on the other hand, add pace to a book. If there’s a sense of speed in a text, the reader will build a feeling of momentum, and it will likely keep them reading – when you’re on a roll, it’s hard to break away.

Most books will operate on some kind of chapter or section system and, although I wouldn’t recommend it all the time, cliff-hangers are a great tool for making the audience read on. If you’ve got the reader gripped and then, suddenly, there’s a break, they’re very likely to turn the page to find out what happens next. And, when they’ve started just one more chapter, what’s a further one after that? There are some good ways to do this – end with your character in a perilous situation, or on the brink of some grand discovery. People like a sense of finality, and so they won’t often want to leave until the situation is resolved.

What works for one text may not necessarily work for another

Or, the inverse of that – fill the end of the chapter with hints of the next stage of the story. If you’re effectively beginning something new, people will want a bit more detail. Here’s an example from Death on the Nile: Poirot and Colonel Race have spent a number of chapters looking for a murdered woman’s missing maid. They check her room, and Race makes a discovery. ‘Race said grimly: “She hasn’t disappeared. She’s here – under the bed…”’ and, with that, the chapter ends, but it marks a new phase in the story. The reader wants to know how, they want information and thus, they read on.

These are just a few rules and, obviously, every reader is different. What works for one text may not necessarily work for another. But, on the whole, these techniques work – if you want to craft the next page-turner at the top of the best-seller list, you could do worse than keeping some of these ideas in your head.