Getting your audience’s attention isn’t easy. Once you have it, keeping it isn’t easy either. People have time to be courteous, but not much more than that. They don’t have time to read your stuff, not unless they think it’s really important.
Of all the email forwards, how many do you read? Do you have time for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and a dozen other social networks? How many minutes do you have for reading blogs? You and everybody else have only enough time to handle what you think is most
A hundred years ago, people might read every page of the newspaper. They loved the words of Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In a week, they might finish the 200,000 words of Moby Dick and be back to the library looking for more. Endless descriptions, characterizations, and plot developments were a treasure. But not anymore. Movies and television changed all that.
The style of yesterday’s bestsellers aren’t likely to do well today.
If your opening paragraph isn’t captivating, readers may not make it to the end of the page. The first three pages must make them desperate to find out what comes next, or they’ll be sucked into the maybe-I’ll-read-this-later-when-I-have-time category, a black hole from which your message will be lost forever.
The beginning of your story is like a bookend, with just enough of the “before” to set the place and time and create interest in what comes next. Because it’s so short, and yet so important, it’s one of the hardest parts of storytelling.
The “meat” of your story is the middle, the “during” where your reader is an ever-changing character who is held hostage to a desperate need that demands a solution, which seems impossible, given the obstacles that he or she faces. The best narrative structure is simple, direct, and chronological in time and thought. No back story. No telling the future. Just the worries of the present, one moment at a time.
Who does the person behind bars represent? Is it you, the narrator? Could it be the main character, or is it the reader? You can tell your story in many different ways, so it could be any one of those. But in the ideal situation for most audiences, it will be all three.
The “after” is a short wrap-up that ties together loose ends and leaves readers anticipating what might come next. Romance must end in marriage. Tragedy ends in death. They mystery must be solved. Make readers laugh or cry, but never let them be bored.
