How inviting is your story world? Make your book a place readers want to sit down in and stay awhile.
By Hannah Mills
Pendleton Indiana. It has a small downtown reminiscent of the idealistic Small Town U.S.A., antique shops, old houses, a handful of churches, a few restaurants, and Gathering Grounds Coffee. While I don’t live here, I frequent this town a lot. The coffee shop is one of my favorite hangouts. My little corner of the world.
You wouldn’t think that this town is much to talk about. But on one of the coffee shop’s old brick walls is hanging a map of the world, and scattered over the map are a bunch of straight pins. The pins mark where out-of-towners are visiting from. There are two pins marking Australia, one in South Africa, several throughout Europe, and one or more in almost every state in America, to name a few.
So many people pass through this town, people from everywhere around the world. It strikes me as strange, this little coffee bar in this little town being a stopping point for people all over the globe. Indiana isn’t a notable state, our main claim to fame being the Indianapolis 500. Yet people still come here, and not just to Indianapolis or our other cities, but our farmlands and small towns.
All these people, experiencing my little corner of the world.
In writing, the same thing happens. You have your mind, your story-world, and when you allow other people to read your writing, it’s like travelers visiting a foreign place. It doesn’t have to be the next Narnia to attract visitors, just like Pendleton doesn’t have to be a junior Chicago.
Gathering Grounds, while small, is interesting. Folk, jazz, and oldies music plays in the background, the walls are old brick and covered with the work of local artists, and the owner and his wife are always friendly, interested in their customers and excellent at maintaining first-name relationships with the people that come through their doors. People come, and instead of leaving immediately, many slow down, take a seat, and spend some time relaxing. The atmosphere is one where you want to stay. The air smells of coffee, chai, and homemade baked goods, the furniture is comfortable, and a guitar sits in the corner, fair game for anyone with the know-how to play it.
Your story-world, that book’s corner of your mind, should be the same way if you want it to be a mental stopping-point for your readers. You have the opportunity to share something exciting, adventurous, introspective, life-altering, or maybe just fun. But in today’s world people have short attention spans. Not only is that opening bang important to gain their interest, but you have to give them a reason to stay. That doesn’t mean shoot-‘em-up action on every page, but it does require something that makes your book stand out from the rest, have more pull than the latest television show or the to-do list nagging at the back of their mind.
That “pull” can be any number of things, or better yet, a combination of things. What is your favorite place to hang out, and why? Is it the people?—populate your novel with interesting, relatable people your readers can connect with. Conversations, quirks, lessons passed from person to person, tension, relationships. Is it how the place looks?—fill your book with places described so well that they come to life. Sights, sounds, smells, textures, feelings.
In essence, make it come to life. Make it unique. Make it yours. Since it’s coming from your mind, which is entirely unique, it is going to have some level of originality. But since our brains can be lazy, we get tempted to not go into all the hard work necessary to create an interesting environment for our ideas. Don’t do that. Put in the work, just like someone designing a coffee bar puts in the work to make the place inviting, or like an architect designing a city destined for tourism. It doesn’t have to be a picture-perfect world. Your novel could be set in a back alley in the dirtiest street of New Orleans and still have the atmosphere needed to attract and hold readers. Make it a mental stopping-point, a place where people can put their troubles on a shelf and lose themselves in your story-world, and like the map in Gathering Grounds, visitors from many places and walks of life will stake a tiny claim on your world and make it their own. Essentially, readers are mental tourists. What kind of tourism do you want to garner? The kind where people stop by for gas and keep moving on, or the sort that invites them to stay for a while, enjoying what you have to offer?
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