'Gas Stations'

I think when you’re learning to write creatively, when you’re concentrating on technique and sentence structure and avoiding clichés, it’s easy to forget one very important thing:

You have to keep the reader interested.

It sounds like the most obvious thing in the world. But when you’re working really hard to make your writing sound good, it’s surprisingly easy to forget that stories need a hook.

George Sanders wrote an essay called Rise, baby, Rise in which he talks about the concept of ‘gas stations’. ‘When I was a kid’, he writes, ‘I had one of those Hot Wheels devices designed to look like a little gas station. Inside the gas station were two spinning rubber wheels. One’s little car would weakly approach the gas station, then be sent forth by the spinning rubber wheels… A story can be thought of as a series of these little gas stations.’

In other words, a story needs a series of ‘gas stations’ that will keep the reader reading. Our aim as writers is to get the reader to the end of our story.

Gas stations can come in many different guises. Really beautiful writing or a really interesting character can be enough to make a reader want to carry on reading.

But, in a lot of cases, the best kind of gas station is intrigue. A question that your reader wants to find the answer to. A mystery they want to solve and the only way they can do it is to read to the end. I remember reading this essay and feeling a little tricked. I’ve spent the last three years attempting to learn how to write beautiful prose. And now this essay is telling me that all I really need to do is hoodwink my reader’s curiosity. Keep them guessing, manipulate them into thinking they need to keep reading by manufacturing some kind of mystery through ambiguity and tricky little hints.

Unfortunately though, it is true. No matter how well you write, no matter how well you’ve mastered technique, your story needs to be interesting enough to keep readers, the majority of whom are probably busy, working family members, reading. They need to really want to know whether the guy will get the girl at the end or what that mysterious bag is on the front doorstep. And you need to maintain the intrigue throughout the story by creating little ‘gas stations’ every now and then that will pique their interest.

I hope this is helpful to some of you and that you don’t think I’m merely stating the obvious.

Thanks for reading.