Readers want questions that they’ll get answers to.

They want to be hooked along.

They want to unwrap the answer the way people unwrap a birthday present.

That’s what Robert Prince says, anyway, writing in his class at the University of Alaska, ”The key to understanding what audiences really want in a story is to understand that the audience doesn’t want to know everything they need to know when they need to know it! They want questions that get answered later. Questions are what intrigue audiences and keep them sticking around because they care about the answers. Every time you answer a question in your story, you better quickly come up with a new question or already have others that need answering.

“Consider Christmas or birthday parties, for example. Why do we wrap the presents? That’s ridiculous. It’s a lot of extra work, you have to buy this paper that you only throw away, and it gets ripped off almost immediately after the person sees it! Spock would have a heck of a time figuring out why we do that. We do it because we love questions. We love questions. We love questions. Few things fascinate us more than an unanswered question. Heck, they basically named a long-running, rebooted TV series after this: Unsolved Mysteries. They could have just as well called it “Unanswered Questions” but it doesn’t have the same dramatic appeal. We wrap presents because the wrapping paper turns a Lego set into a question and a question is more fun than a Lego set, believe it or not. The wrapping paper makes us ask, “What could be in there? Is it what I asked for? Is it something else? Is it cool? It could be almost anything!””

We talk about this today in the podcast. Plus, a random thought and the below dog tip.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Find a good question to snuggle with.

RANDOM THOUGHT

Our random thoughts about the Kentucky Meat Shower of 1876 are sourced from here and here.

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!