How to keep the reader's attention

Format Under Construction. My apologies for the current unsightly mess.

Because I Say So: My Literary Criticism Homepage

kelper@talk21.com

How to Keep the Reader’s Attention

Or: How to Avoid Alienating the Reader by Accident

by Fiona Clements

Part One: The Story as a Whole

This was written for a writing workshop at a media fandom convention in 1999, which was before fandom went well-and-truly online. I haven’t brought it up to date, so there are some assumptions in it that may seem bizarre - such as the assumption that the story is being written for publication in a zine.

Part Two: From Paragraph to Paragraph

Part Two: From Paragraph to Paragraph
Avoiding Sighs of Exasperation

Grammar (and Spelling)

At their worst, the rules of grammar are an obstacle course for the unprepared. If there are weaknesses in your grammar, and the reader is sensitive to these weaknesses, she is going to be distracted by them. Not all readers have the same sensitivities. one reader might not notice anything, while another may give up on the story after a few pages.

Deciding if there are weaknesses in your grammar

Show some of your writing (e.g. 4-5 pages) to a person who you know has a solid grasp of grammar, and ask for detailed comments on this alone (not on other aspects of the story), with errors graded for severity. If her free time is scarce, ask her to find only the first ten errors instead of all of them.

This will give you an idea of how much effort you'll need to improve your grammar, and of where you should start work.

Correcting the errors with reference books and workbooks

In the long term, reference books are probably the most thorough and enjoyable way of improving your grammar. You can work at your own pace and in privacy, and the authors have usually had the time to find or devise useful examples.

Personal recommendations:

The Transitive Vampire by Karen Gordon (“a high-camp grammar textbook”). The level is basic and the range limited, but the examples, illustrations and introduction are delightful. Even if it doesn’t teach you much you didn’t already know, it might start you on the habit of reading grammar books for fun.

Fowler’s Modern English Usage. This is more advanced and is extremely comprehensive, and might be intimidating at first. It’s about writing clearly and directly - i.e. avoiding jargon and clichés - as much as it is about grammar, and makes its case with some examples of both good and bad writing that are often very entertaining

If you master every point in Fowler you will be: a) beyond criticism; b) unique. There are some points that almost no one is sensitive to these days, and there may be others where you simply cannot see what he is talking about, where Example A looks exactly the same to you as Example B. If you’re solid on the majority (say, 80% of Fowler), even those readers who are sensitive to your remaining weak points will probably just take them as elements of your personal style and will not get irritated and distracted.

Workbooks: I don’t know of any that are currently published, but I do know they can be helpful. Someone lent me her copy of an Open University workbook on “Writing Plain English” and the exercises and multiple-choice questions gave useful practice and feedback. There must be similar books aimed at students at different levels.

Correcting the errors with personal tuition

If you have no idea where to start with books, and can’t find any that tell you what you need, you should ask for help, possibly from the person you asked for the initial assessment.

I think this can be quite a tense and tiring experience, on both sides, unless your tutor is used to teaching adults. Take a little bit at a time, say by booking an hour’s session once a week. If you don’t limit the duration for each session, they might run on in such a way that you feel that your list of grammatical errors is endless, and this will be unnecessarily discouraging. Also, you and your tutor might find it harder to switch out of teaching mode back into friendship mode, which won’t help either the teaching or the friendship.

Keep on trying the books periodically, to see if they’ve started making sense to you. You should aim to become independent of your tutor as soon as possible, so that you’re not taking up any more of her unpaid time, and so that you can turn to the books to answer your questions when your tutor isn’t available.

Regional variations

There are the well-known differences between US and UK English spelling and terminology, but there are also differences in grammar, e.g. “types of car” vs. “types of cars”, “they hardly could believe”, and the subjunctive. And there are also regional differences within a nation.

If you’re writing stories set in another culture, it’s up to you to decide how much of that culture’s language you want to adopt, and how much effort you want to take to be authentic.

If you’re even slightly unsure, definitely ask a native speaker to read it for errors in the dialogue, so that you don’t have English characters referring to “eggplant” or “scallions” or to the department store Selfridges being on “Oxford” (should be “aubergine”, “spring onions”, and “Oxford Street”).

You may want to write the entire story in that language (not just the dialogue). There are books and websites that list differences between the languages - though mostly in spelling and terminology rather than grammar. You could get a grammar textbook in that language, but it will be tedious trawling through it looking for differences, and the “errors” in grammar are the errors least likely to annoy a native speaker. Do what you can with your reference sources, and then consult another native speaker who is strong on grammar and will be able to explain the differences to you.

Factual Errors

These can really throw the reader out of the story, so that the mistake is all she remembers about the story afterwards. There are different types of error, and different ways of avoiding them:

—

John Grisham, in The Chamber, gives a list of the places where his bomber has been active, including “Northern Ireland, Belfast...” - and it seems fairly clear that Grisham thinks that he's listed two completely unconnected places.

This is general knowledge, and you’d think that any editor would have picked this up.

—

Michael Moorcock in Mother London, mentions that a character had studied French at Imperial College, London. She couldn’t have, because Imperial teaches science, engineering and medicine only.

This is specialised knowledge. You can’t show the story to every possible specialist reader, so the best way of avoiding this is to take details like this from your personal experience as much as possible. If it’s important that the character had studied French/gone to Imperial, then choose someone you know who did, and use their university/discipline.

—

Elizabeth George, an American detective writer who sets her books in England, says of a particular black police officer in London that he was a member of the “Brixton Warriors” before joining the police force. So, George knows that Brixton is an area of London known for its large black population, but she doesn’t know that it doesn’t have gangs of the type that would call themselves the “Brixton Warriors”. A man who had been a part of the Brixton equivalent would be very unlikely to join the police force - neither his friends nor the police would accept it.

This is a more subjective matter than the first two. Its not impossible that there are gangs of that type in Brixton, or that a former member might want and manage to join the force, but George’s handling of it feels wrong - far too casual given the combination of improbabilities. If the story is set in a culture that is not your own, you should ask a native to read for this kind of wrong note. If the errors that the reader reports aren’t important to the story, take them out straight away. If they are important to the story, or you don’t agree with the comments, try a second native reader, and if they both agree, make the changes.

Unnecessary Details and Explanations

Giving “Rules” for Magic

If you’re writing science fiction and fantasy (or a conspiracy thriller?), you might think you have it easy regarding factual errors, because there is no one who knows this world better than you do.

This is true, but you can also distract the reader if you mishandle the “facts” that you have invented about this world. It’s good to have your own picture of the world that is as rich as possible, but if you present the reader with all of the details directly, it may make the reader less convinced rather than more.

Example a friend gave from a computer game: in parts of this game you moved underwater, apparently sealed off from the water by some sort of bubble or force-field. My friend accepted this effect without question, as just another piece of “magic” along with the teleportation and talking animals - and then one day he looked at the book that came with the game, and found an elaborate description of the “microbes” that allowed the water to behave like that - and this started him thinking about and then criticising their “explanation”, and he's never enjoyed the game quite as much since.

If it isn’t important to the story, and if it’s close enough to the laws of physics to give the reader something to argue over, then take it out.

Sometimes it may be important to the story, if the characters have to work around these rules in order to solve a problem.

Hey! I've Got a New Hobby

In general, be careful about giving a lot of details that aren’t important to the plot. If you’ve just acquired a new hobby or skill, it’s easy to overestimate how much interest this activity holds for the rest of the world, and you can end up telling the reader far more about yourself than you realise.

Example: it was very easy to tell when Anne Rice first got a computer, because she made her heroine a “computer whiz”, and insisted on telling us the file name every time the heroine saved a new text file to disk - and writing and saving text files was all this “whiz” seemed to do.

Photofit Desctiptions

Solid paragraphs of literal, detailed description (of people, landscape, buildings ... ) rarely convey a vivid or useful image to the reader. It’s more likely that her eyes will glaze over and she will skip to the next paragraph - and you do not want her to get into the habit of skipping your paragraphs.

Example: detective writer Jonathan Kellerman introduces every new character with a long paragraph describing them from head to toe; you’d need the services of a police artist to construct anything meaningful out of this information. Fortunately, the characters become real when they start to speak, but Kellerman obviously doesn’t realise that he’s strong on dialogue, but weak on choosing telling visual details.

Similes are frequently more effective than direct description. They usually involve some exaggeration, which makes them memorable, but the reader knows not to take them literally:

“He quivered all over, like a nervous young hippopotamus facing his first big-game hunter.” (P.G. Wodehouse)

“She moved in my arms like heavy, oiled machinery.” (Derek Raymond)

“She looked like a beachball with legs.”

“... skin like a tortilla chip...”

For direct description, don’t try to get it all done in a single paragraph, but slip the details in bit by bit, as they become important to the story, e.g. as the various characters have reason to notice them.

Politics and Point-Making

You may lose your reader because you have very different views about how the world works (or should work) and you’re expressing your views in various ways in the story. It’s up to you how much you want to tone your views down in order to retain readers. A large part of your motivation for writing the story may be to illustrate certain points, and it’s perfectly valid to decide that a particular story is simply not intended for Group A or Group B.

It’s hard to be objective about your reactions to writing that has an agenda; are you pissed off with the writer because you disagree with her, or because she really has handled that point badly? Instead of trying to formulate any general guidelines, I’m going to describe a range of reactions that I have had as a standard-issue liberal feminist - and you can decide for yourself if there’s anything to be learned from them.

Political Writing I’ve Enjoyed

Ben Elton’s novels, particularly Stark. They’re overt polemics about environmental and social issues, but they never feel like an earnest lecture because the points he makes are original and helpful, and they’re full of excellent jokes. He’s taking up your time with his opinions (as well as with the story) but he’s earned the right to do this because he’s put in the effort to be inventive and entertaining.

The comic The Maxx by Sam Keith. Early on, he has a long, serious debate between two female characters about feminist politics, one supporting Gloria Steinem, and the other supporting Camille Paglia. They’re not making any original or humorous points, but it’s an interesting discussion because it reveals things about the characters that are relevant to the story as a whole. Keith himself doesn’t take sides, and the scene is unusual for showing the dynamic way in which people piece together their political views, change them over time, and use them as a tool for making decisions and dealing with other people. When the writing is this intelligent and thoughtful, I’ll stick around for a discussion of almost anything.

Political Writing I’ve Disliked

Point-making rather than traditional politics... Faye Kellerman’s detective novels about the police detective who fell in love with a Hasidic woman and is converting to Judaism. She doesn’t really make any secret of the fact that she’s set things up like this so that she can deliver lessons to gentile readers along with the detective story, but most of the lessons are interesting and integrated to some extent with the plot and characterisation, so it’s not a problem. However, with one lesson she lost me completely: she has the detective musing on dietary laws, and the fact that the law of keeping dairy and meat separate was a reaction to an ancient recipe in which a calf was cooked in its mother’s milk; she then says something like, “Now that he understood the compassion behind the law, he found it natural to keep it.” Well, I don’t think you can praise the law as a triumph of compassion, because the calf is just as dead either way - the most you can claim is victory over a grotesque lapse of taste. Kellerman is either unaware of the distinction (which makes her an idiot) or is assuming the reader won’t be able to make it (which makes her an openly contemptuous idiot). Either way, I lost all respect for her, and will never give her any more of my time.

Again, on point-making rather than politics... A story about a character who had grown up without a family, and was very preoccupied with the idea of families and with what she’d missed. Perfectly understandable for this character, but my problem with the story was that all of the people she met talked about their family in entirely positive terms. This has not been my experience of any randomly selected group of human beings, and I see this presentation as the writer lying about human nature in order to reduce the amount of work required to get his character from State-of-Mind A to State-of-Mind B. Although more subtle than Kellerman’s propaganda, it shows a similar contempt for the reader’s intelligence.

You may not be aware of the weaknesses in your case, and the distortions may not be deliberate. The best way of catching them is probably to use a hostile editor, although identifying her and then dealing with her comments may be difficult.

Part One: The Story as a Whole - Avoiding Reactions from Boredom through Outrage

Format Under Construction. My apologies for the current unsightly mess.
Because I Say So: My Literary Criticism Homepage	kelper@talk21.com
How to Keep the Reader’s Attention
Or: How to Avoid Alienating the Reader by Accident
by Fiona Clements
Part One: The Story as a Whole	This was written for a writing workshop at a media fandom convention in 1999, which was before fandom went well-and-truly online. I haven’t brought it up to date, so there are some assumptions in it that may seem bizarre - such as the assumption that the story is being written for publication in a zine.
Part Two: From Paragraph to Paragraph

Part Two: From Paragraph to Paragraph Avoiding Sighs of Exasperation

Grammar (and Spelling)
At their worst, the rules of grammar are an obstacle course for the unprepared. If there are weaknesses in your grammar, and the reader is sensitive to these weaknesses, she is going to be distracted by them. Not all readers have the same sensitivities. one reader might not notice anything, while another may give up on the story after a few pages.

Deciding if there are weaknesses in your grammar
Show some of your writing (e.g. 4-5 pages) to a person who you know has a solid grasp of grammar, and ask for detailed comments on this alone (not on other aspects of the story), with errors graded for severity. If her free time is scarce, ask her to find only the first ten errors instead of all of them.
This will give you an idea of how much effort you'll need to improve your grammar, and of where you should start work.

Correcting the errors with reference books and workbooks
In the long term, reference books are probably the most thorough and enjoyable way of improving your grammar. You can work at your own pace and in privacy, and the authors have usually had the time to find or devise useful examples.
Personal recommendations:
The Transitive Vampire by Karen Gordon (“a high-camp grammar textbook”). The level is basic and the range limited, but the examples, illustrations and introduction are delightful. Even if it doesn’t teach you much you didn’t already know, it might start you on the habit of reading grammar books for fun.
Fowler’s Modern English Usage. This is more advanced and is extremely comprehensive, and might be intimidating at first. It’s about writing clearly and directly - i.e. avoiding jargon and clichés - as much as it is about grammar, and makes its case with some examples of both good and bad writing that are often very entertaining
If you master every point in Fowler you will be: a) beyond criticism; b) unique. There are some points that almost no one is sensitive to these days, and there may be others where you simply cannot see what he is talking about, where Example A looks exactly the same to you as Example B. If you’re solid on the majority (say, 80% of Fowler), even those readers who are sensitive to your remaining weak points will probably just take them as elements of your personal style and will not get irritated and distracted.
Workbooks: I don’t know of any that are currently published, but I do know they can be helpful. Someone lent me her copy of an Open University workbook on “Writing Plain English” and the exercises and multiple-choice questions gave useful practice and feedback. There must be similar books aimed at students at different levels.

Correcting the errors with personal tuition
If you have no idea where to start with books, and can’t find any that tell you what you need, you should ask for help, possibly from the person you asked for the initial assessment.
I think this can be quite a tense and tiring experience, on both sides, unless your tutor is used to teaching adults. Take a little bit at a time, say by booking an hour’s session once a week. If you don’t limit the duration for each session, they might run on in such a way that you feel that your list of grammatical errors is endless, and this will be unnecessarily discouraging. Also, you and your tutor might find it harder to switch out of teaching mode back into friendship mode, which won’t help either the teaching or the friendship.
Keep on trying the books periodically, to see if they’ve started making sense to you. You should aim to become independent of your tutor as soon as possible, so that you’re not taking up any more of her unpaid time, and so that you can turn to the books to answer your questions when your tutor isn’t available.

Regional variations
There are the well-known differences between US and UK English spelling and terminology, but there are also differences in grammar, e.g. “types of car” vs. “types of cars”, “they hardly could believe”, and the subjunctive. And there are also regional differences within a nation.
If you’re writing stories set in another culture, it’s up to you to decide how much of that culture’s language you want to adopt, and how much effort you want to take to be authentic.
If you’re even slightly unsure, definitely ask a native speaker to read it for errors in the dialogue, so that you don’t have English characters referring to “eggplant” or “scallions” or to the department store Selfridges being on “Oxford” (should be “aubergine”, “spring onions”, and “Oxford Street”).
You may want to write the entire story in that language (not just the dialogue). There are books and websites that list differences between the languages - though mostly in spelling and terminology rather than grammar. You could get a grammar textbook in that language, but it will be tedious trawling through it looking for differences, and the “errors” in grammar are the errors least likely to annoy a native speaker. Do what you can with your reference sources, and then consult another native speaker who is strong on grammar and will be able to explain the differences to you.

Factual Errors
These can really throw the reader out of the story, so that the mistake is all she remembers about the story afterwards. There are different types of error, and different ways of avoiding them:
—	John Grisham, in The Chamber, gives a list of the places where his bomber has been active, including “Northern Ireland, Belfast...” - and it seems fairly clear that Grisham thinks that he's listed two completely unconnected places.
	This is general knowledge, and you’d think that any editor would have picked this up.
—	Michael Moorcock in Mother London, mentions that a character had studied French at Imperial College, London. She couldn’t have, because Imperial teaches science, engineering and medicine only.
	This is specialised knowledge. You can’t show the story to every possible specialist reader, so the best way of avoiding this is to take details like this from your personal experience as much as possible. If it’s important that the character had studied French/gone to Imperial, then choose someone you know who did, and use their university/discipline.
—	Elizabeth George, an American detective writer who sets her books in England, says of a particular black police officer in London that he was a member of the “Brixton Warriors” before joining the police force. So, George knows that Brixton is an area of London known for its large black population, but she doesn’t know that it doesn’t have gangs of the type that would call themselves the “Brixton Warriors”. A man who had been a part of the Brixton equivalent would be very unlikely to join the police force - neither his friends nor the police would accept it.
	This is a more subjective matter than the first two. Its not impossible that there are gangs of that type in Brixton, or that a former member might want and manage to join the force, but George’s handling of it feels wrong - far too casual given the combination of improbabilities. If the story is set in a culture that is not your own, you should ask a native to read for this kind of wrong note. If the errors that the reader reports aren’t important to the story, take them out straight away. If they are important to the story, or you don’t agree with the comments, try a second native reader, and if they both agree, make the changes.

Unnecessary Details and Explanations
Giving “Rules” for Magic
If you’re writing science fiction and fantasy (or a conspiracy thriller?), you might think you have it easy regarding factual errors, because there is no one who knows this world better than you do.
This is true, but you can also distract the reader if you mishandle the “facts” that you have invented about this world. It’s good to have your own picture of the world that is as rich as possible, but if you present the reader with all of the details directly, it may make the reader less convinced rather than more.
Example a friend gave from a computer game: in parts of this game you moved underwater, apparently sealed off from the water by some sort of bubble or force-field. My friend accepted this effect without question, as just another piece of “magic” along with the teleportation and talking animals - and then one day he looked at the book that came with the game, and found an elaborate description of the “microbes” that allowed the water to behave like that - and this started him thinking about and then criticising their “explanation”, and he's never enjoyed the game quite as much since.
If it isn’t important to the story, and if it’s close enough to the laws of physics to give the reader something to argue over, then take it out.
Sometimes it may be important to the story, if the characters have to work around these rules in order to solve a problem.

Hey! I've Got a New Hobby
In general, be careful about giving a lot of details that aren’t important to the plot. If you’ve just acquired a new hobby or skill, it’s easy to overestimate how much interest this activity holds for the rest of the world, and you can end up telling the reader far more about yourself than you realise.
Example: it was very easy to tell when Anne Rice first got a computer, because she made her heroine a “computer whiz”, and insisted on telling us the file name every time the heroine saved a new text file to disk - and writing and saving text files was all this “whiz” seemed to do.

Photofit Desctiptions
Solid paragraphs of literal, detailed description (of people, landscape, buildings ... ) rarely convey a vivid or useful image to the reader. It’s more likely that her eyes will glaze over and she will skip to the next paragraph - and you do not want her to get into the habit of skipping your paragraphs.
Example: detective writer Jonathan Kellerman introduces every new character with a long paragraph describing them from head to toe; you’d need the services of a police artist to construct anything meaningful out of this information. Fortunately, the characters become real when they start to speak, but Kellerman obviously doesn’t realise that he’s strong on dialogue, but weak on choosing telling visual details.
Similes are frequently more effective than direct description. They usually involve some exaggeration, which makes them memorable, but the reader knows not to take them literally:
“He quivered all over, like a nervous young hippopotamus facing his first big-game hunter.” (P.G. Wodehouse)
“She moved in my arms like heavy, oiled machinery.” (Derek Raymond)
“She looked like a beachball with legs.”
“... skin like a tortilla chip...”
For direct description, don’t try to get it all done in a single paragraph, but slip the details in bit by bit, as they become important to the story, e.g. as the various characters have reason to notice them.

Politics and Point-Making
You may lose your reader because you have very different views about how the world works (or should work) and you’re expressing your views in various ways in the story. It’s up to you how much you want to tone your views down in order to retain readers. A large part of your motivation for writing the story may be to illustrate certain points, and it’s perfectly valid to decide that a particular story is simply not intended for Group A or Group B.
It’s hard to be objective about your reactions to writing that has an agenda; are you pissed off with the writer because you disagree with her, or because she really has handled that point badly? Instead of trying to formulate any general guidelines, I’m going to describe a range of reactions that I have had as a standard-issue liberal feminist - and you can decide for yourself if there’s anything to be learned from them.

Political Writing I’ve Enjoyed
Ben Elton’s novels, particularly Stark. They’re overt polemics about environmental and social issues, but they never feel like an earnest lecture because the points he makes are original and helpful, and they’re full of excellent jokes. He’s taking up your time with his opinions (as well as with the story) but he’s earned the right to do this because he’s put in the effort to be inventive and entertaining.
The comic The Maxx by Sam Keith. Early on, he has a long, serious debate between two female characters about feminist politics, one supporting Gloria Steinem, and the other supporting Camille Paglia. They’re not making any original or humorous points, but it’s an interesting discussion because it reveals things about the characters that are relevant to the story as a whole. Keith himself doesn’t take sides, and the scene is unusual for showing the dynamic way in which people piece together their political views, change them over time, and use them as a tool for making decisions and dealing with other people. When the writing is this intelligent and thoughtful, I’ll stick around for a discussion of almost anything.

Political Writing I’ve Disliked
Point-making rather than traditional politics... Faye Kellerman’s detective novels about the police detective who fell in love with a Hasidic woman and is converting to Judaism. She doesn’t really make any secret of the fact that she’s set things up like this so that she can deliver lessons to gentile readers along with the detective story, but most of the lessons are interesting and integrated to some extent with the plot and characterisation, so it’s not a problem. However, with one lesson she lost me completely: she has the detective musing on dietary laws, and the fact that the law of keeping dairy and meat separate was a reaction to an ancient recipe in which a calf was cooked in its mother’s milk; she then says something like, “Now that he understood the compassion behind the law, he found it natural to keep it.” Well, I don’t think you can praise the law as a triumph of compassion, because the calf is just as dead either way - the most you can claim is victory over a grotesque lapse of taste. Kellerman is either unaware of the distinction (which makes her an idiot) or is assuming the reader won’t be able to make it (which makes her an openly contemptuous idiot). Either way, I lost all respect for her, and will never give her any more of my time.
Again, on point-making rather than politics... A story about a character who had grown up without a family, and was very preoccupied with the idea of families and with what she’d missed. Perfectly understandable for this character, but my problem with the story was that all of the people she met talked about their family in entirely positive terms. This has not been my experience of any randomly selected group of human beings, and I see this presentation as the writer lying about human nature in order to reduce the amount of work required to get his character from State-of-Mind A to State-of-Mind B. Although more subtle than Kellerman’s propaganda, it shows a similar contempt for the reader’s intelligence.
You may not be aware of the weaknesses in your case, and the distortions may not be deliberate. The best way of catching them is probably to use a hostile editor, although identifying her and then dealing with her comments may be difficult.

Part One: The Story as a Whole - Avoiding Reactions from Boredom through Outrage