Page Turners

by Stephanie Black

What makes a book a page-turner—a book that prods you to ignore the piles of laundry and the fact that your family wants dinner today too (even though you just fed them yesterday, for pete’s sake), because you can’t bear to put that book down until you find out what happens? What elements make a book grab you in a stranglehold?

I always feel gleeful when a reader tells me one of my books kept him or her up until two in the morning (which makes me sound somewhat fiendish. I don’t normally go around disrupting people’s sleep on purpose. Okay, that’s a total lie. I disrupt people’s sleep all the time. Six A.M. and I’m flicking on the lights and making annoying ding-ding-ding- noises. “It’s Christmas!” I say sometimes, but my kids never fall for it). And truth be told, I’m thrilled to disrupt readers’ sleep, because if a reader wants to know what happens in my book badly enough to miss out on sleep, I know that something about that novel really worked for that reader. And that is very good news for an author.

Does a book have to be a page-turner to be enjoyable? Not at all. I’m currently reading a mystery that is a delightful read, and I’ll read more in the series, but I don’t have trouble setting it aside for a while. It’s the kind of book I can read a little at a time, and not feel a compulsion to pick it up every time I have a spare moment—or every time I don’t have a spare moment, in that condition known as Page-Turner Psychosis, when I push everything else in my life aside, ignoring the fact that the dirty dishes have created their own ecosystem, a child is sitting on my head, there’s no food in the house except stale Cheerios, the roof is falling in, and my daughter has dropped out of school to join a motorcycle gang—never mind all that; I have to FINISH THIS BOOK!

What makes a book a page-turner? The short answer is probably “different things for different readers.” Readers have widely differing tastes, and what one reader defines as a rollercoaster ride from page one, another reader finds dull and he gives up halfway through the book. Here are some elements that help make a book a page-turner for me:

*Characters I really care about who are in high-stakes situations. I want desperately to find out what’s going to happen to these people. I’m a suspense fan, so usually the high-stakes situations in the books I read involve life and death, but I’ve read Anne Tyler family dramas that are page-turners because I’m so riveted by the conflicts in the life of these characters and so eager to find out how they’ll be resolved.

*Multiple sources of tension, raising lots of story questions in the reader’s mind. When I was in the early stages of writing Fool Me Twice, the plot seemed too thin to me. I had my central story idea, but there wasn’t enough to it—not enough threads of tension. How could I increase the tension? What if I gave this other character her own sinister motives? What did she want and why? Things started clicking, and this new plot layer ended up being the foundation for the whole novel.

Mary Higgins Clark is a master at raising story questions, weaving multiple threads of tension that that keep a reader rapidly flipping pages.

*Pacing. No long, draggy portions where nothing happens. New developments and new information come often enough to keep the reader engaged, but the author doesn’t reveal too much too soon.

*A steady build-up to a satisfying climax. Things get worse. The protagonist is in more and more trouble. How will it all resolve?

*All-around solid writing. It might be an exciting story, but if I'm bugged by writing issues, I'll keep bouncing out of the story until I either give up or finish it with gritted teeth.

So have you read any page-turners lately? What makes a book un-put-downable for you?