How To Keep A Reader Interested During Slower Parts Of The Story

How to Keep a Reader Interested During Slower Parts of the Story

A writing guide requested by galaxys–end

While the main plot is building, as a writer you still must keep the reader interested.

Expand your subplots.

Consider character relationships. Is your MC fighting with their best friend? Are the siblings having a break through?

Consider romantic relationships.

When achieving their goal becomes slow, does your character lose faith? Focus? Hope? What is their mental state like?

Does your character have a good support system? Are they lonely? Can your character motivate themselves, even when times get tough?

How is your character dealing with what’s going on in their life emotionally?

Are they happy? Grieving? Depressed? How are they coping? Do they have support from those in their life?

Is your character physically well?

Stress can have detrimental affects on health. Is your character run down? How is the character’s health in relation to their goal?

Consider reworking the plot. If the other aspects of your story can’t uphold a reader’s attention, maybe you should change how the plot works.

You’re trapped in a room with 9 people. Every five minutes the lights in this room temporarily shuts off for roughly 30 seconds. Each time the lights come back on you and the others are greeted by a fresh corpse of one of the other people.

Your new girlfriend has almost everything in common with you. One day, you learn that she’s your female clone

just an hour into an international flight the pilot announces there’s a sick woman on the plane and that there will be an emergency landing at the closest airport. The plane lands and connects to the jetway, but rather than a few paramedics, an entirely different kind of squad enters the plane.

You go in for a job interview and the address is an abandoned building. Inside you find a young woman tied to a chair and blindfolded…

Where are the fic where the super-slick super-spy is thwarted by their seduction target’s complete lack of self-esteem and inability to believe for one second that someone that hot wants to fuck them?