Strong Openings to Overcome Reader Impatience

By Jennifer Slattery, @Jenslattery

Reader patience. If my personal reading habits are any indication, it's getting thinner and thinner. The more books that pile on my bedside table and fill my Kindle, the less time I’ll give each one to grab me.

In other words, if the opening pages don’t compel me to turn the page, chances are I won’t.

I hate to admit it. I am part of the grab-me-or-lose-me generation. Part of the very generation I bemoan. But we’re here to say, if not increase, so perhaps my inner writer should learn some things from my inner reader.

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Making Flawed Characters More Palatable

Jennifer Slattery writes soul-stirring fiction for New Hope Publishers, a publishing house passionate about bringing God’s healing grace and truth to the hopeless. She also writes for Crosswalk.com, Internet Café Devotions, and the group blog, Faith-filled Friends. When not writing, Jennifer loves going on mall dates with her adult daughter and coffee dates with her hilariously fun husband. Visit with Jennifer online at JenniferSlatteryLivesOutLoud and connect with her on Facebook.

Making Flawed Characters More Palatable

Our characters must be authentic, but there’s a fine line between real and palatable, especially when dealing with bitterness and anger. We all act like jerks at one point or another, and so will our characters. The trick is to balance their more abrasive side with likeability. 

This was my challenge with Tammy Kuhn, the heroine in Intertwined. Abandoned by her husband for another woman, she was angry and left scrambling to hold on to her career while raising her children by herself. Plus, his behavior toward her and their children throughout the novel was less than honorable.

If in her situation, most of us would react… strongly. But in my effort to make Tammy real, I also made her unlikable. Because understanding why a character does something and admiring them are entirely different things. Strong characters need flaws and heroic attributes.

Give your flawed characters someone to care for

For Intertwined, this came naturally as my main character was a mother who loved her children fiercely. The trick was making her bitter less self-focused and more protective. Readers have more grace for a yelling Mama-bear than they do for a screaming, embittered woman.

Another example is Katniss from the Hunger Games. Had Suzanne Collins created a surface level character, we’d be left with a self-defending killer. And the series would’ve tanked, because though most of understand why someone would kill to survive, such behavior isn’t admirable. However, because she fought to save her sister and the people in her district, Katniss became a hero. The author gave Katniss hero qualities in the beginning, before we’d developed distaste for the character.

Show the emotions behind the behavior

This is where an author needs to dig until they uncover the vulnerable and good, revealing this in a way readers understand. Show a character’s interpretations, thoughts, and perceptions, in an authentic way—that’s where the challenge arises. Most of us react without understanding why. But regardless of how self-aware your characters are, you know. By placing clues throughout the novel, you can help your reader decipher motivations as well. 

Use secondary characters to reveal POV’s psyche

 My main character in When Dawn Breaks responded to fear and pain by lashing out internally. He called certain adults names in his head. The social worker who ripped him and his sister away from his mother became Ferret Face. The woman in charge of the group home he was sent to became Skin Flapper. I did this because teenagers reveal sorrow through anger.

Unfortunately, one of my early readers didn’t understand and developed negative feelings toward this character. I knew I needed to find a way to reveal the why, but I had to do it in a way that was authentic. So I had the character slip with his tongue and call the social worker, an adult trained to understand childhood trauma and behavior, a name. When he apologized, she said she understood he was merely hurting and lashing out at those he believed to be causing his pain. This gave context and meaning to his harsh behavior.

In both stories, I was able to use present authentic yet unpleasant behaviors without causing my reader to turn on me.

What are your thoughts on this subject? What are some ways you create authentic characters will realistic flaws and struggles without losing their likeability? Share your thoughts in the comments below, because we can all learn from each other!    

Intertwined

Abandoned by her husband for another woman, Tammy Kuhn, an organ procurement coordinator often finds herself in tense and bitter moments. After an altercation with a doctor, she is fighting to keep her job and her sanity when one late night she encounters her old flame Nick. She walks right into his moment of facing an unthinkable tragedy. Because they both have learned to find eternal purposes in every event and encounter, it doesn’t take long to discover that their lives are intertwined but the ICU is no place for romance….or is it? Could this be where life begins again? 

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How to Keep Your Head in Your Story by Jennifer Slattery

Jennifer Slattery writes soul-stirring fiction for New Hope Publishers, a publishing house passionate about bringing God’s healing grace and truth to the hopeless. She also writes for Crosswalk.com, Internet Café Devotions, and the group blog, Faith-filled Friends. When not writing, Jennifer loves going on mall dates with her teenage daughter and coffee dates with her handsome railroader husband.

They say, to write the best tales, writers must become completely immersed in storyworld. This is great when the house is quiet, the kids are gone, and the rest of your world stops. But how we stay in the story when life pulls us from it?

It happens to me every story. 50K or so words in, I encounter something unexpected that steals my time and keeps me from my work-in-progress. When this happens, the plot I’d just begun to immerse myself in begins to disintegrate. The longer I’m away, the more it fades until I’m left with a looming deadline and a bunch of random ideas on Post-it notes.  

The longer I’m away from my keyboard, the harder it is to write. Perhaps you can relate. If so, the next time life pulls you from your computer, try the following to keep your head in the game:

Work on your story daily even if for only ten minutes.

I can already hear your retorts: “I don’t have time. Life got crazy, remember?”

My counter: I doubt that any of us truly don’t have ten minutes to write, revise, or read our work-in-progress. Ten minutes.

We can all do that, right?

Steal a few moments during commercials, maybe? Revise the last page you wrote while you’re waiting for noodles to boil? Or maybe all you do is jot down some random brainstorming ideas on a notepad. What you do isn’t as important as the doing.

We all have lots of hidden moments sprinkled throughout our day, moments wasted mindlessly. So why don’t we use them to further our stories? I suspect the answers to that question are:

1.     We haven’t developed the habit of making the most of every moment and therefore live a chunk of our life on autopilot.

2.     We assume our time is only valuable when we produce something. For example, we might dismiss the idea of doing anything writing related while watching television, convinced we haven’t enough time to write anything of value. But during times of chaos, we should alter our goal from production to caring for our muse.

Don’t have access to your computer? That doesn’t mean you have to leave storyworld completely. Simply print your novel out and set it by your bedside table—on top of your remote. Ah-ha! Are you rethinking your availability? Then read it for ten to fifteen minutes before going to bed.

Here’s why it works: Our brains are amazing, slightly obsessive machines that love to camp out on whatever is dominating our lives at any given moment. When chaos comes, that chaos fights to occupy our every thought, stealing our creativity and making it all the harder to rekindle it. But if we’d but find ways throughout our day to think dig into our story, we’ll find our brain will have a tendency to stay there, working out details and visualizing scenes. Then, when we return to our keyboards, not only will the plot and characters be fresh, but they may have even deepened as they’ve had time to percolate.

What are your thoughts? Have you ever tried any of the above, and if so, what were the results? What do you do to stay in the story when life gets crazy? Share your thoughts with us; we can all learn from one another. 

Visit with Jennifer online at JenniferSlatteryLivesOutLoud. 

When Dawn Breaks:

 

As the hurricane forces Jacqueline to evacuate, her need for purpose and restitution motivate her to head north to her estranged and embittered daughter and into the arms of a handsome new friend. However, he’s dealing with a potential conspiracy at work, one that could cost him everything, and Jacqueline isn’t sure if he will be the one she can lean on during the difficult days ahead. And then there are the three orphans to consider, especially Gavin. Must she relinquish her chance at having love again in order to be restored?

Read a free, 36-page excerpt here: http://issuu.com/newhopedigital/docs/slattery_sampler/1

You can buy a copy here:

On Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/When-Dawn-Breaks-A-Novel/dp/1596694238/

On Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/when-dawn-breaks-a-novel-jennifer-slattery/1120694122?ean=9781596694231

On CBD: http://www.christianbook.com/when-dawn-breaks-a-novel/jennifer-slattery/9781596694231/pd/694231

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