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Fiction Writing Made Easy
#12: 3 Ways to Create Narrative Drive in Your Story
Jun 2, 2020
Discover the three methods for creating narrative drive in your story - mystery, dramatic irony, and suspense. Learn how these methods evoke curiosity and concern in readers by controlling information and keeping them engaged. Understand the impact of narrative drive on reader engagement and curiosity. Explore how suspense, in particular, gives readers the same information as the characters, evoking both curiosity and concern.
12:37
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Quick takeaways
- Narrative drive in a story is created by playing on the reader's curiosity and concern, which can be evoked through mystery, dramatic irony, and suspense.
- Understanding and utilizing narrative drive is crucial for writers to create compelling stories that engage readers and maintain momentum throughout the story.
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Understanding Narrative Drive
Narrative drive is what gives a story its forward momentum and hooks the reader. It is created by playing on the reader's curiosity and concern. Curiosity is the intellectual need to find answers to questions, while concern is the emotional need to experience positive outcomes. Depending on the genre, a story will evoke different levels of curiosity and concern. There are three main ways to evoke these feelings: mystery, dramatic irony, and suspense. Mystery evokes curiosity by withholding information from the reader. Dramatic irony evokes concern by giving the reader more information than the characters. Suspense evokes both curiosity and concern by providing the same information to the reader and the characters. Most commercial fiction uses suspense as its main form of narrative drive. Each story has a main question that it answers by the end, determining the character's goal and what the reader wants to know. Every scene should contribute to this global question and answer pairing.
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