How to make your readers care

I wish I had the answer for my title. It would be great if I had a magic solution for how to make readers care; I mean, they should care because somebody wrote it in the first place, right? Well. I don't always care when I pick up a book.

So, how do writers make me care? What engages me? What makes me wrinkle my nose and put a book down? Good questions to consider, when putting pen to paper. Or fingers to keyboard. When you put out a short story, or a novel, or a blog, it's your message in a bottle.

Imagine you're sending out your S.O.S. What makes people care? What makes them want to know what happens next? What makes them like your characters, or what makes the character interesting enough that people what to know what happens to them? I don't think characters should necessarily be "likeable". You might not want to be friends with certain people. They might not like the same things you like. Or people close to them might have a nasty habit of getting hurt. But damn, are they interesting, and you want to know what's going on in their lives.

For whatever reason, my writing classes in my various levels of schooling had some holes in them. Nobody talked about "filtering", nobody much mentioned "showing, not telling", nobody said anything about "negative negative form", or "passive voice".  Sometimes I fall into these things (As reflected by my very first post on the "Show Your Work" portion of the Absolute Write message board.

What I know about writing is mostly from reading. What I need to do, certainly, is practice my writing more, and that's been going pretty well this year, with a novel and two short stories completed, on the eve of yet another NaNoWriMo. I'm gearing up for a midnight start, as I've done in almost every year I've participated.

Are you ready?

Use of the word "That"

So, not only have I been remiss in blogging here, but I sort of dropped off the face of Absolute Write as well. That's all right, they probably don't miss me. Not because I've made myself a nuisance there; more because I haven't made a name for myself there yet either. No big.

But, one thing I keep in mind when I write, or think about writing or revising, is a thing that the Absolute Write-rs really try to hammer home when people are all "LOL, I have a first draft I just finished, will somebody read it for me?" is a very simple trick, really: look for instances in which you use the word "that". You can probably remove them safely, leaving the meanings of your sentences intact.

I'd never heard this before, and it boggled and intrigued me. I of course went to the anthology which I'm editing and hit "Find", and typed "that". Then I read every sentence which continued the word "that", and damn if they weren't right. Most of them, I could remove. Some I left intact, because really, that's how people talk. They say "that" all the time, sometimes twice in a row. I kind of like a colloquial voice, depending. It's once reason I enjoyed Stephen King for as long as I did, I think; the writing is very easy to read, which might draw you in.

I haven't tried counting the "that"s in published books I have laying around. I wonder if there will be fewer in fiction versus non fiction? Fewer in a classic versus a contemporary work? It's an interesting thing to have brought to your attention.

Do you have a community?

So, I finally joined an online writing forum, at Absolute Write.  There are a lot of people on there!

Some have been writing for a very long time. Some have been writing for a few weeks. Everybody has an opinion, but isn't that the way that goes?

In a way, the forum itself is a bit like Doberman Talk, but for writing. There are questions and criteria that the seasoned members have for whether an agent or publisher is legitimate, and the kinds of things we as writers should be looking at in contracts. There are discussions about grammar, and plot, and a suggestion to post your work or your queries for critiques. There are writing prompts and "off topic" forums (though is anything off topic, when you're a writer?)

Other than a few college classes, and two workshops since, I've never really been a part of a writer's community. I don't have people that I regularly share and swap work with. I have friends that will happily read my stories, but nobody that I get down to brass tacks with in quite the same way. I can get pretty thorny over critiques, but if you knew the critiques I had to deal with in college, I think you would have felt the same way. Nobody wants to read their story and have one of the only comments be "What does this word mean?" Everybody has a different vocabulary, I get that, but writers? I hold them to a higher standard. Especially if you're supposed to be offering criticism. I have a story somewhere (begging for rewrite) involving a mermaid and a fisherman's son, and the deals made. The comment I got? "This made me think of The Little Mermaid." Meaning, the Disney film. I could have cheerfully killed that peer reviewer with bare hands, especially because her story was about her first car, which was not bad idea in and of itself. But it was bad.

So, I've got hopes for this. They have a minimum post limit before you can share your work, which I agree with. They foster community, give and take. We'll see how it goes.