What makes a novel a "page-turner"? For me, it happens when the story poses a question to which I'd like to have the answer, and I have to read on to discover it. If the novel delivers in an entertaining way, raising another question in the process, then I'm hooked.
That's the quality I'm striving for in my novel(s).
I mentioned in an earlier blog entry that Zelazny does this well in the
Chronicles of Amber series, but I was just re-reading
The Guns of Avalon last night and I was a bit disappointed in one scene. Here, he uses an "unreliable narrator" to avoid answering questions he's raised in the reader's mind...and the narrator's
intentionally unreliable. Corwin says something to the effect of, "But I knew something they didn't," and doesn't deign to share this information with the reader yet, leaving him more in the dark than the protag. I don't want to do this myself, because as I mentioned yesterday, I depend on a kinship between the reader and the protag, which this sort of technique tends to destroy.
What I've done in my NaNoWriMo novel this year—and what I've also done in
200 PC, as well as several short stories—is to immediately introduce a whole slew of questions that
both the reader and the protag want answers to. Then the reader learns along with the protag. But I think I'm pretty good at setting up situations where the following happens:
- Protag asks about or investigates two or three of his questions.
- He gets an answer to one or two of these, but in the process two or three other questions are raised.
- He may also get an answer to a question he didn't even know he had.
- He finishes the scene at approximately parity with respect to what he doesn't know.
Of course, eventually, we have to wrap up all the loose ends. But I love the technique of continuing to expand a story's mysteries and mystique while still allowing the protagonist and the reader to enjoy the process of discovery.