How to keep readers curious with questions and clues

1 The bottom line

Open a question early, plant the clues that answer it, and pay it off fairly. Readers keep going because they want the answer, and they trust you when the answer was on the page all along.

2 Key takeaways

• Imply a question early, even a small one. Readers stay to find out the answer.
  • After remote controls arrived, TV used trivia teasers such as "who was first choice for Dirty Harry?" to stop viewers switching channels Lee Child27:30.
• Plant the clue before the surprise. A twist feels fair when readers can trace it back.
  • In Murder on the Orient Express, a porter knocks on a coarse Chicago gangster's cabin and the gangster answers in French. Yann Martel23:00 says readers only see why it matters at the reveal.
• Answer questions in a way that opens bigger ones. Pure withholding frustrates readers, while answers that deepen the puzzle pull them on.
  • In The Boy from the Woods, Wild shows his father the DNA result in the first chapter, and the father's answer changes everything Harlan Coben1:00:49.
• End chapters on an open uncertainty, and pay it off soon. A wait that runs too long turns into a cheat.
  • Nick Bilton23:57 says answering a chapter-end question 200 pages later feels like a cheat.
• Pay off the promise your opening made. Readers feel let down when the answer never comes.
  • David Whyte50:00 says nothing disappoints more than a book that never answers the question it opened with.

You imply a question, doesn't matter what it is, doesn't matter how important it is, people will stick around to find out the answer.

Lee Child, Jack Reacher

2.1 Open a question early

A question, even a small one, is what carries a reader into the next sentence.

• Imply a question in your opening lines. Lee Child27:30 learned from 40,000 hours of television that humans are hardwired to want answers.
  • Pose one, and readers stay to find out.
  • He says this makes plotting far easier than people think.
• Ask of every sentence why anyone should care about the next one. Bill Browder3:54 tests every page this way, not just the first ten.
  • Write for the reader who is ready to lose interest and put the book on the pile.
  • He keeps a big stack of unread books by his bed because he got bored after ten pages.
• Open with a scene that can go several ways, then overturn the obvious reading. David Baldacci3:37 lets readers settle on the obvious answer, then picks the least likely one.
  • Once readers see their assumption was wrong, they stop second-guessing and hand control back to you.
  • In an Amos Decker book, two bodies in one house look like one killer's work, but the deaths are unrelated and have two separate killers.
• Give every paragraph a small hook and end it on a punchline. Michael Dean14:33 opens with a sentence that creates a little mystery and closes with the strongest example.
  • The punchline does not have to be funny. When editing, check each paragraph's first and last sentence.
  • A David Foster Wallace paragraph on lobsters opens by calling them giant sea insects and ends on "sometimes each other," which says cannibal without the word.

2.2 Plant the clues

Seed setups early, so the later surprise is fair and the reader trusts you.

• Once you know the surprise, go back and seed it. Andy Weir29:36 does this when he decides something must break late in a book.
  • He goes into the earlier chapters and seeds hints that it was acting up.
  • Writing out of order lets you set up what you only decided later.
  • In The Martian he wanted a piece of equipment to fail 80,000 words in, so he added early signs of trouble.
• Hide the key clue in a plain moment among red herrings. Yann Martel23:00 admires how artfully Agatha Christie plants clues.
  • She writes so smoothly that you do not notice the clue.
  • Martel says he has never solved one of her murder mysteries on a first reading.
• Put the facts a twist needs into the setup as plain information. Mark Normand20:18 sets up his WNBA joke with two ordinary facts, so nobody sees the answer coming.
  • A good twist is unexpected but makes sense once it lands.
  • If a payoff needs background the audience may lack, Robert Mac53:33 says to plant it before the punchline so it is already in their heads.
  • Mac's Notorious B.I.G. joke needs people to know he was also called Biggie Smalls and that a medium predicts the future.
• Make small setups that do not feel like setups. Patrick Radden Keefe27:59 plants little images early that he wants to pay off later.
  • In his Bourdain piece, Hanoi's scooters rush through intersections like floodwaters in the opening.
  • Late in the piece Bourdain takes him for a ride on a Vespa, and the earlier image makes it land as a moment of freedom.
  • Jack and Ryan of AJR31:18 seed a narrative in early songs. A final speech then makes the audience realise something from 45 minutes ago was an Easter egg.

2.3 Keep the question alive

Answer what you promised, and let each answer raise a bigger question.

• Answer quickly, and let the answer open a deeper question. Harlan Coben1:00:49 warns against withholding information in a frustrating way.
  • Make the answer feel like going down a rabbit hole.
  • He ends short chapters on a question in the same way.
• Make every beat make the reader want what comes next. Andrew Stanton35:05 cites William Archer: drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.
  • The mystery version is low-hanging fruit. The harder skill is writing a line so you are dying to hear the reply.
  • Two people talking become drama if an insistent tapping at the window keeps getting louder.
• Play with who knows what. Adrian Tchaikovsky53:20 treats knowledge as three-sided: what the author knows, what the characters know and what the reader knows.
  • A narrator can withhold, or the reader can know more than the character.
  • In Dogs of War, the reader sees that the likable dog Rex is committing war crimes while Rex thinks he is being a good dog.
• Aim for readers who are intrigued but not lost. Steven Johnson8:45 says boredom is knowing what comes next, and confusion is being too surprised.
  • In a book with several threads, plant signals in the prose that they will converge.
  • Ask early readers whether they felt lost in the first third or trusted it would come together.
  • Most early readers of Infernal Machine trusted that the Russian, French and New York threads would converge.

2.4 Let the wait build tension

Suspense lives in the anticipation, so leave room for it.

• Build suspense from the threat of change, not the change itself. Will Storr33:38 points to Hitchcock: there is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation.
  • The Jaws novel opens with the fish swimming.
  • The ghostly figure at the end of Blair Witch would mean little if shown alone.
• Leave space so the audience supplies the fear. Noah Hawley24:30 says to linger on a wide shot where the audience sees what the character cannot.
  • Leave silence, so a drawer sliding in the background can spike adrenaline.
  • He tests with live audiences, because he cannot feel suspense about his own work, and uses their reactions to time the wait.
• Tell events as the people living them saw them. David Grann43:36 writes chronologically, without the power of hindsight.
  • The reader then lives in the same suspense as the people in the story.
  • On the Wager, the crew did not know whether they would fall overboard or drown in the next hour.
• If you build a slow burn, earn it by making something happen constantly. Gillian Flynn38:20 built Gone Girl's long first half like the clicks of a roller coaster climb.
  • Small events pile up, so the twist lands harder.
  • Some readers nearly put the book down before the twist, yet it spent weeks at number one.

2.5 End each chapter on a pull

The last line of a chapter should point at the next one.

• Leave the reader with an uncertainty they want resolved. Bill Browder7:11 wants each chapter to end with a challenge or uncertainty, like episodes of a miniseries.
  • Inside the chapter, create a challenge that is overcome or partly overcome.
  • David Grann44:40 thinks about suspense at two levels: where the whole story ends and where each scene ends.
  • A chapter of The Wager closes on the ship alone at sea, left to its own destiny.
  • In a children's book, Tish Rabe18:39 paces the story so the page turn is a small cliffhanger. She also lets the art hint at what is coming.
• Ask the question, then seed it and pay it off before too long. Nick Bilton23:57 says a cliffhanger gives away enough to make readers want more, but not enough to reveal what happens.
  • American Kingpin has 58 short chapters, each with its own pull.
  • Hatching Twitter opens with Evan Williams vomiting into a bin before his firing speech, then jumps back and pays it off later.
• In nonfiction, use a gentle bridge. Mark Forsyth1:11:55 wants the last line of a chapter to look toward the next.
  • A line such as "which leads us on to what was happening in France" keeps the book flowing.
  • In his children's novel he overdid it with cliffhangers.
• Cut away at a peak, then come back. Mitch Albom59:56 ends scenes mid-tension, pins them and returns later, like his uncle telling a war story at the dinner table.
  • When jumping across time, end a chapter on a prompt, such as a look at a tombstone, so the next memory feels earned.
  • He also thinks about crescendo: do not peak too soon or save everything for the last chapter.

2.6 Pay off fairly

A payoff works when readers can see the clues were there and the answer matters to them.

• Check that a reader who looks back can find how they could have known. Gillian Flynn35:30 says a surprise out of nowhere feels like cheating.
  • She learned this as a child, feeling cheated by Agatha Christie-style stories that did not play fair.
  • Andy Weir51:35 likes a protagonist who solves a problem the reader did not see coming but could have. Make the character act proactively, not get rescued by outside events.
  • Weir cites the Breaking Bad scene where Walter White trades Jesse for his own life. It was proactive, made sense, and he did not think of it.
• Give every twist an emotional payoff. Harlan Coben50:04 says a twist that only surprises is a cheap trick.
  • A good one changes all the other cards, altering how you see the story and the characters.
  • Ask whether each twist has emotional resonance before you use it.
• Deliver the promise your opening made. Johnny Harris12:50 says every story is effectively a promise.
  • He does not answer the title question in the first ten seconds. Within the first minute he restates what the thumbnail promised.
  • The full answer arrives by the end.
  • Packaging that drifts from what the video delivers makes viewers feel betrayed.
  • David Whyte50:00 calls the beautiful question the axis of invitation in every piece. His example is the koan "A bird calls announcing the difference between heaven and hell."
• Plant early clues so a surprising true arc stays believable. Rob Henderson37:40 knew readers might not believe a kid in foster care ended up at Yale and Cambridge.
  • He included stories of not reading in second grade, then becoming a curious reader whose habit waxed and waned.
  • Without that connective tissue, he says, the jump would feel jarring, and people will not believe you even if it really happened.

2.7 Where writers disagree

Some writers tell readers everything, some hold back on purpose, and some tactics only fit certain forms.

• Whether to explain or leave a gap. Lee Child46:30 left information in plain sight without drawing the conclusion, and left a minor character's fate unstated.
  • Readers complained in both Reacher books. They wanted the writer to do the work and tell the story.
  • In contrast, Andrew Hunter Murray22:48 admires Mick Herron for never giving full access to Jackson Lamb's thinking.
  • Tim Mackie and Jon Collins49:45 say biblical authors preferred indirect communication to making everything crystal clear the first time. Wright Thompson46:56 keeps a driving question in mind but stopped posing it literally in the piece.
  • Murray says glimpses of why Lamb is the way he is are enough, and Herron has written nine Slow Horses novels without giving more.
• Whether to know the answer before you draft. Gillian Flynn34:00 finds out who did it as she writes, then rewrites to drop in clues.
  • She says she is only describing what works for her, not advising it for everyone.
  • In the first draft of Sharp Objects, the eventual murderer was not even a character.
• Whether a slow build and sudden shock suits your form. Morgan Housel1:02:00 loves how John Grisham grinds through slow chapters, then hits with something big in a single sentence.
  • He says this works better in fiction than nonfiction, where you must keep readers engaged because you are teaching them something.
  • He compares it to the slow build and plot twist in Parasite.