Episode Eleven: What does it mean to give readers a great experience?
I talk about crafting a great experience for readers ALL THE TIME. But what does that even mean? In this episode, I’m breaking down three things fiction writers need to do to craft a great experience for their readers: meet their genre’s expectations, make readers care, and immerse us in the story.
You can listen to the full epsiode here. Or, watch here.
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Transcript
Please Note: This is an automatically generated transcript that has not been edited.
Olivia Bedford (00:00)
Welcome to episode number 11 of the Better Writer podcast. I am so excited to be here talking to you again for another week. I know this episode is a little bit delayed. I usually try to get episodes scheduled ahead of time so they come out right at midnight, the Monday that they're releasing. Unfortunately, I got a little bit delayed this week. I've been working really hard on my new revision course and that has been taking up a lot of my time, but I still wanted to get this episode out. It's still Monday, so I haven't missed it yet. And today I just wanted to talk about what it means to give readers a great experience.
I talk a lot about reader experience in my teaching, in my editing, in the new course that I'm creating. I know that I've also mentioned it on this podcast. So I decided to talk about what that actually means. What does it mean to give readers an amazing experience? How do we actually do that? What does it look like?
This is going to be a very short, sweet introduction to this topic, so I'm definitely not going to go into all of the detail and nuance of what it really means to give readers a fantastic experience because, as we all know, novels are complicated. It's not something I can give you in 15 minutes, but I am going to try to give you the very high-level overview, something that you can take and work with going forward. All right.
As an editor, I see a lot of manuscripts that are not quite giving readers a fantastic experience or ones that are super, super close. And based on that work, I would say that there are three main things that you need to do to give your readers a fantastic
Number one, and this is something that I will shout from the rooftops over and over and over again, you have to meet the expectations of your genre. That is number one, and it is really non-negotiable. You could have written the best book in the world. Say you have written the best cozy mystery that has ever been written. If you market that book as a police procedural, if you market that book as a romance, it is going to fall flat. It will completely fail, even if it is technically well written.
Even if the story is coherent and logical and has great conflict, if you mislabel that book, if you present it as something that it's not, it is going to fail. And more importantly, it's going to disappoint readers in a major way. When you give your book a genre label, it is not just a meaningless title. It's not just saying, you know, this is where we're going to be in the bookshelf. It's not an opportunity for you to cash in on a really popular genre.
When you label your book with a certain genre title, you are making a promise to readers. You are telling them something about what is going to be in that book and you need to deliver. So the number one thing that you need to do as a writer is A, get clear on what your genre actually is. If you are newer to writing fiction and you're not sure that you really know all the genres that are out there, do your research. Make sure you are accurately labeling your book from the start so you don't run into any problems.
The other thing that you really need to do is make sure you understand the expectations for your genre. Do your research. Even if you have accurately categorized your book, you need to know what it is that readers are actually looking for. What do they want when they pick up that type of book? What kind of experience are they looking for? Are there certain plot elements that you need to hit? Are there certain tropes, conventions, things like that that are essential to your genre? And when I say this, I don't mean that your book needs to be identical to other books in the market. There are always going to be a million different ways to meet the same genre conventions, you just need to make sure that whatever those essential elements are for your genre, you have included them in some way in your book.
All right, number two, you need to make us care. And there are a couple of different ways that you can do that in your writing, but you have to give readers a reason to keep going through your story. Why are we compelled to keep going after page one and find out what is going to happen next? And like I said, there are a couple of different ways to do this, and it will vary based on the situation, based on your genre. But one thing you can do is give us a question that we want answered. Introduce a mystery. Introduce a conflict that is mysterious, something that we don't yet understand, but we want to know what is going on.
And you don't have to introduce just one question throughout your narrative. You are going to introduce and answer multiple questions over the course of your story. If you're writing a series, you might have questions that remain unanswered by the end that you're going to answer in book two or book three or beyond. So yeah, there are going to be multiple questions, but you need to give us something to wonder about, something to be curious about so that we have a reason to keep moving forward. The other thing you can do is give us characters that we care about.
Create characters that we love, that we're rooting for. Make us worry about them. Make us want to see how their story ends up. Whether they're making good choices or bad choices, if we care about the character, we're going to want to see the outcome and we're going to be motivated to keep reading because we need to know what happens to this person. We want to see them succeed. Or maybe if it's a character that we love to hate, we want to see them fail, whatever it is, just make sure you have given us a reason to follow your character and want to see where they end up.
You also need conflict and meaningful stakes. And again, that's going to vary for every single genre. There is no one set standard for what is high stakes in a story. High stakes in a romance could be the family bakery closing down, versus high stakes in a thriller could be a third of the world's population is going to die if the super virus gets released.
Very different scale, very different scope of that conflict. It just depends on your genre and the scope of the story that you're trying to tell. And the other thing to note here is that just because the stakes are high doesn't mean that they're meaningful. They usually need to mean something to your character in particular. For example, in that romance example, if the family bakery is closing down,
We need to know why that family bakery is so meaningful to your main character. Is it the place that they grew up? Is it wrapped up in all of the memories of their family? Was it their childhood dream to take over and they're going to feel like a failure for the rest of their life if the bakery closes on their watch? There are many different ways you can go about it. It's just going to depend on your character, how you've developed them, their backstory, all those kinds of things. And the same thing goes for the thriller Why does your main character care? Why is this their responsibility to deal with?
And how can you put something that they love that they care about specifically in danger in addition to having the entire world be in danger?
All right, and then finally, number three, you need to immerse readers in the story. And again, there is not one right way to do this. There's not one single way to do this. You'll often hear show don't tell as a writing rule. I am a big fan of show, don't tell. However, I think a lot of people talk about it the wrong way. A lot of times when you hear about show, don't tell, it's kind of presented as one technique. It's just this one thing that you do. In reality, showing is the combined effect of multiple techniques working together, such as writing in scenes, giving us moment by moment real time narration, being specific. All of those things work together to create the effect that we refer to as showing versus telling. So in your story, a) I do recommend writing in scenes. My specialty is genre fiction. so
This might not apply if you are doing something more literary or more experimental, but for genre fiction in general, I recommend writing your story in scenes. And those scenes need to be happening in real time. The conflict needs to be developed on the page. We need to see these things happening. We don't want them summarized by characters after the fact. The other thing that you need to do is get super, super specific. Generalizations are going to take readers out of the story because they don't let us visualize or imagine what's going on on the page.
The other thing that you're going to want to do is make sure you are getting into characters' heads in some way. There is definitely still room for objective narration, but we need to have some way to find out what each event of the story means to your character. there are multiple ways to make that happen, but we do need some sort of window into why the conflict matters to them, how it's affecting them, and how they are being changed or influenced as a result of the things happening around them.
Another great option for immersing readers in your story is creating a distinct voice for your characters or for your narrator. If you can fully immerse us in a unique and compelling perspective, readers will be along for the ride, even if you're not strictly showing things on the page. You can do a lot of telling if you make that telling interesting by giving your narrator a specific, unique, and interesting perspective. So again, like I said at the beginning, there is not one single way to create a great experience for readers. There's not one single way to immerse readers in your story.
That is part of what makes writing fiction so much fun. There is so much room for creativity and experimentation and play. However, that is also what makes it super difficult because when there are a million ways to do something right, there are also a million ways to do it incorrectly as well. So in my opinion, the entire process of learning to write is just learning how to master these techniques that will create an amazing experience for your future readers. So consider this your starting point. If you heard me say a term or mention something and you have no idea what I'm talking about, consider this your invitation to start researching, to start exploring. Hit me up on Instagram with your questions. You can email me with questions. Reach out and I would love to help you continue this journey.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the Better Writer podcast. I just really appreciate you being here listening to me. This was definitely a shorter episode, but I hope you got something out of it, learned something, and I will definitely be following up with more insight into how you can create a great experience for your readers. If you found this podcast helpful, I would also appreciate it if you shared it with a friend so that they can learn something too. All right. Thank you again for listening. Have a wonderful week and keep writing. Keep getting better one word at a time. See ya.
