In a post on Lit Hub, Jonathan Escoffery offers advice on building trust with your readers.
For Escoffery, trust begins on the first page, when you show your reader that the time they plan to invest in your novel will be rewarded. “I think it’s useful to think of story in terms of managing reader anticipation,” he says. “This anticipation might be built in with implied questions, or questions that your narrator or characters explicitly ask, that readers will want to see answered through dramatization. But even with a gripping set of opening questions, readers come to the page wary that a story will drag on forever, and you can mitigate this by telling them exactly how long the story will take and even where there’ll spend that time.”
In one story in his recent collection, Escoffery frontloads his promise using the story title – “If He Suspected He’d Get Someone Killed This Morning, Delano Would Never Leave His Couch” – and his first line: “But Delano is not clairvoyant.” Even without knowing anything else about the main character or the story’s premise, the reader is probably sufficiently intrigued to see the story through the end. Like backstory, a glimpse of a future state or your character’s hopes can pull your reader into your story and get them rooting for your hero.
“When we’re certain we have our readers rapt attention, we have room to explore what led to our characters present conditions, and by the time they’re back in present action readers should be that much more invested in the present journey,” Escoffery says. “The part we writers sometimes forget is that we can tell readers how our heroes hope or expect things will go, so that when things don’t go that way (and they shouldn’t)—when we subvert both readers and our characters’ expectations—readers feel our characters’ pain and understand where they are on the storyboard.”
