No, not the report of a survey which reported that '36% of women prefer to have a tidy house to having sex' - done by a cleaning company, that's clearly biased! - but that I can do hooks, revelations, turning points - whatever is the preferred term for those things to insert in a novel to maintain the reader's interest.
In York, at the Festival of Writing, I heard the term 'reward reader's for their investment' for the first time. Their investment of both money and time, which has to be paid for with my providing them with interesting, entertaining, unputdownable characters. The best way to do this is to have the above-mentioned hooks etc. scattered judiciously throughout, adding a page-turning element.
Now, I know that my Prediction Fiction serials (Pages tabs above), which are only a hundred words long, more often than not end with a hook; which more than one commenter has referred to as a 'killer line'.
So why am I struggling so to scatter them throughout a novel? And have the plot hang together?
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