—that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
?Samuel Taylor Coleridge
What makes a story gripping, so that it is almost impossible to put it down? It is not merely sufficient to have a series of interesting or entertaining events, or an important and engaging theme. So what is it that not only hooks the reader and makes them want to learn more?
When Aristotle said that a story that is whole has a beginning, middle, and an end, he didn’t mean to state the obvious; what he meant is, that within the story everything must be a necessary consequence of some action of the story, contained between the beginning, which starts the chain, and the end, which resolves it.
Another insight of Aristotle’s is, that “the plot, being an imitation of an action, must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed.” Or, to put it somewhat less elegantly, a story should hang together and contain nothing that is not part of the story.
But this is only the structure of the story, it is not alone sufficient to make a story good. The main ingredients in any story are the characters. We the readers are human; it is people we are interested in: their actions, feelings, and ideas. Even if the story is about something other than a human being, it still reflects humanity.
Your character doesn’t need to likeable; Tom Ripley is a conniving murderer without a conscience, but an engaging character nevertheless. We want to follow his progress and see how far he will go to get what he wants, and will he get away with it. Most importantly, he is a convincing character, with complex motives and fears. If the character’s traits seem contrived, the story fails to grip us.
The characters are central to the unfolding of your story; everything should follow from the actions and choices of your characters. This is harder to do than it sounds. Those actions must be consistent with the character. If the character does something without an apparent reason, the reader is at best puzzled, at worst throws your story away in disgust. But as long as the character’s motivation has been established, it doesn’t matter whether he is trying to find out who stole the Brasher Doubloon, or abduct Lord Emsworth’s prize pig, the reader is willing to suspend disbelief.
A story is a work of fiction, an imitation of an action, a semblance of truth. For a story to be engaging, it must ring true, when it isn’t. It is not enough for the reader to believe in the world of the story: You, the writer, must believe in it as well.
