When you lose narrative drive, you lose your reader's curiosity and concern. And these are two essential ingredients for engagement. Without it, your story is gonna stall, the pacing is gonna drag, and the reader may put the book down and never pick it back up again. Welcome to the Write It Scared podcast. I'm your host, Stacey Fraser, a formerly repressed creative soul, turned fiction writer, story editor, and author accelerator certified fiction book coach. At Write It Scared, we tell the truth about why writing a novel is so hard by acknowledging that most writers grapple with two stories: the one they want to put on the page to the best of their ability, and the often subconscious internal story that prevents them from doing it. This show is designed to help you identify and rewrite the internal narrative holding you back while you discover and write the story you want to tell and learn all the tools to help you do that successfully. Join me each week for a new episode where we'll talk about writing to deepen our understanding of the craft and of ourselves as writers. Writing a novel is an inside job that we do not do alone. Welcome to Red It Scared. I'm glad you're here. Let's dive in. Hey, hey, writer. Welcome back to the Red It Scared podcast. I'm your host, Stacey Fraser, and this is where we talk about the brave and messy acts of writing our novels so that we can do it with more clarity and more confidence. And today we are digging into a craft topic. This is one of those slippery craft concepts that can make or break your book, and it's narrative drive. Narrative drive is what keeps readers hooked, worried about your character, and turning the pages because they have to know what happens next. This came up when I was a guest on the Fiction Lounge podcast with Hannah Magnus and Jessica Collins a couple of months ago. And seriously, if you haven't listened to the Fiction Lounge podcast, go check them out. They are amazing hosts. They have great topics of conversation there. But our conversation that day got me thinking about how often narrative drive is kind of the missing piece in the manuscripts that I edit and in the books that writers struggle to finish. So today we're going to break it down. We're going to talk about what narrative drive really is, why it matters, and how you can use it to give your story momentum. So again, narrative drive is what makes readers invest in your character's plight, what makes them keep turning the pages to find out what happens next. And it's a mix of story momentum, character motivation, the emotional investment from the reader, plot and information management, and reader curiosity and concern. And it is a tough thing to learn to wield, at least in my opinion. But knowledge and practice are the keys to the kingdom. But in order to understand narrative drive, we've got to take a step back and look at how character development and conflict work together to create change. Because remember, change is the heartbeat of story. Story is just one big global change delivered through the accumulation of microchanges on the scene level. The main characters' external and internal drives, what they want, what they fear, what they care about, that is what pushes the story forward. And that all comes from who these characters are, what they believe and what they value. That's character development. Now, you don't need to know everything about your character before you start writing. I mean, lots of writers discover who their characters are as they draft. But eventually, you do need to circle back and define what your character wants? What's their goal, the concrete thing that they are going after that you can measure, you know, if they're getting closer or farther away from it. And why do they want that thing? Why do they value it? What do they care about? What do they fear? Or what lies are they telling themselves? And what's the motivation behind all of that? So for me, character development is foundational. Uh, I have to dig into that first because it drives everything else for me. Not everybody's like that. So, but do circle back to it. And it's okay if it takes a few drafts or even more to get clear on who these folks are. For myself, I'm a big fan of the way Michael Haig and Robert McKee break down character development. And essentially what they say in a nutshell is start with who the character is on the outside. How do they present to the world and then explore what vulnerability that persona is protecting? How do they start the story? What emotional place do they start the story? And what external goal do they have in mind? And where do they end? So, what did the journey teach them about living this messy human experience? Did they change, or did the world about them change because they actually stayed the same? Remember, if there's no meaningful change in either the character or the world, there isn't a story. Now, the thing that forces change is conflict. You want to kind of think of this as Newton's first law, but with the lens of storytelling. And the first law says an object at rest will stay at rest unless it's acted upon by an outside force that is strong enough to overcome inertia. So what that means is your characters are not going to change to become whatever you want them to become unless they're forced. Now, all of this brings us into narrative drive. Narrative drive is the natural extension of character and conflict. It's the force that keeps readers asking, what is going to happen next? But there's more to it than that, and we're going to get to that in just a minute. I like what Robert McKee has to say about narrative drive. He says that narrative drive is the side effect of the mind's engagement with the story. So, really, narrative drive is about the relationship between the reader, the story, and the storyteller. And to wrap my head around it, I boil it down into what I call the three C's. Narrative drive is made up of concern, curiosity, and control of information. When these three things work together in a story, they build expectations and they build anticipation, which gives your story forward momentum. So let's talk about each of the each one of those, and then we'll pull it all back together for the takeaway. So, curiosity is your intellectual hook. It's the reason your reader is wondering what's going on here. Uh, so you might be planting questions that your reader wants the answer to, and big questions like who murdered the victim? Will the main character defeat the bad guy? Will the lovers make it work? Those big questions should take the whole book to answer. That's what we're reading for. Now, smaller questions for the reader to be curious about, those could be answered more quickly. But the payoff should always feel organic to the character in the plot. So ask yourself at this point in the story, what am I making my reader wonder about? Now, the next piece of wielding narrative drive is concern. So this is the emotional hook. Now, readers don't have to like your character, but they do need to care what happens to them and understand where that character's coming from. And you create this concern for the character by giving your readers enough context about what your character values, what they fear, what they believe, what they desire, and why. So in the draft, don't hold back on delivering emotional context. It's what makes the stakes real and allows the reader to understand what's motivating your character's behavior. So ask yourself, what am I making my reader feel right? Have I given the reader enough insight into my character's emotions and their decision-making process for them to understand the action that my character's taking and anticipate what they might do next. Now, the last factor in narrative drive is control of information. And this is one that I think it's hard to get a handle on, and it's a tool utilized probably best in revision. But control of information, this is how fast or slow you're going to reveal information and how that controls the tension and the suspense in the book. Now, tension and suspense are closely related terms in fiction, but they are not the same. And I did a podcast episode back in season one, episode 27. It was called How to Write Suspense and Tension in Your Fiction novel. If you want to go back and hear the difference between the two, I will link that podcast episode in the show notes. But here's just a nutshell way to look at it. If you plant a big story question in the beginning of the book and you answer it too soon, the suspense is gonna fizzle out. The desire to know is gone. So and the story can feel flat. If you delay paying off a question for too long when your character could reasonably be investigating the answers or should have put two and two together already, then you're gonna have a frustrated reader. Neither is a good situation. So you want to ask Am I rewarding reader curiosity in a way that builds momentum? And again, to me, this is one of the hardest things to learn. Uh, but genre can really help you here. So a thriller is going to be more fast-paced and it's going to have tightly controlled reveals, whereas a romance might be more slow burn uh with emotional connection and while kind of teases twists, or a historical or literary novel might take its time and but still layer tension through subtext and emotional mistakes. So, how do you build narrative drive in your story? Well, here are some concrete practical tips that you can apply today. You want to start with a character who wants something badly, give them an external goal and give them a plan to go after it. This will give your character agency, which is the ability to create change in their life. And that makes us root for them. Force that character to make hard choices. If they could say no to a choice in front of them and nothing happens, there's no consequence, rework it. Go back to the drawing board because that does not make a story. Show why the character values what they do, either in dialogue or with their action or through their interiority, through their thoughts and their feelings. This gives weight to their choices and to the consequences that they'll face. Plant story questions and pay them off in a way that continually builds tension and adds suspense. So think to yourself: well, I've answered this question, but that answer makes the reader ask an even bigger question, which builds into a single realization for the character and the reader, maybe a few pages or chapters later. Use cause and effect to link your scenes. Cause and effect means that because this either event, emotion, realization, action, or behavior occurred, it triggers the next event, emotion, action, realization, or behavior to occur versus a bunch of independent things happening together that are not interconnected, that don't create a chain reaction. And you want to use that cause and effect chain within your scenes, not just between them. Story is about action and reaction and action and reaction as the entire thing builds an intensity and tension. And finally, one of the most important things you can do to see if you're building narrative drive in your story is step back and ask yourself, am I making my reader anticipate anything? Another one of the best ways to learn how to wield narrative drive is to study stories that do it really well. So grab a book in the genre you're writing in, a book that made you say, holy hell, that was amazing, and then highlight the crap out of it. Ask, what's the character's goal? What are the stakes? What's the conflict they're facing? What choices do they have to make? And how do those choices move the story forward? What questions are planted along the way? How does the author make you care? How does the author make you worry about the character? How do they make you wonder what's going to happen next? And how are they controlling the flow of information? Now, this is probably a book you're going to have to read more than once to be able to pick things these things out. All right, writer, that was a lot, but that was narrative drive in a nutshell. The point: keep your readers curious, keep them caring, and manage what information you reveal to them. If you do that, you're gonna give the story the momentum it needs to carry the readers all the way through to the end. And if you want to hear more about this topic, go listen to my conversation with Hannah Magnus and Jessica Collins on the Fiction Loom podcast. They are a smart, fun, dynamic duo, and they go deep into a whole bunch of stuff that writers wrestle with, everything from craft a mindset. So definitely go give their podcast a listen. Remember, writing a story is not just about putting words on the page. It's about putting them on the page in the way that engages the reader and makes them feel. So your job as the author is to make your reader wonder, make them worry, and that will make them stay with you to the end. I will see you next week where I'll be back with a new guest. I can't wait. Thanks for tuning in. Have a great day. Thank you for listening to the Write It Scared podcast. 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