I’ve never been a person to garner much attention, and most efforts at such feel like being the desperate person at the party. With any luck my fiction is compelling, although most agents disagree. I find it compelling for what it is worth.

And I find your blog compelling. Usually when I come by here to read one post, I end up reading three. And a few I read more than once.

I must admit to be a huge fan, particularly of her more lengthy novels. Her character development, trueness to period of history and place, and use of dialogue and narrative all make for compelling reading. I find that early on in this novel I developed a keen thirst for more information about the characters. I think that JCO sets up this intrigue at the start of the novel by revealing the personal narrative and personality of the main character in the opening scene. The author steadily adds small details like fine stiches to assemble a character of real richness and depth. For example in the Gravediggers daughter she describes the smell of the main character’s scalp!
She is a literary genius and a prolific writer and I am in awe of the amount of research she would have to conduct for this type of novel. I never took history in school, but I would have loved it to be presented in this way and I think it would make history come to life.

I like that — “the story has an endgame.” I had a conversation with James Cameron once (sat next to him at a dinner) and he made exactly that point, stressing that a lot of filmmakers don’t know how to *end* things well (he prides himself on his own endings).

a story should not only have something at stake, the stakes should probably evolve in some way — change, get higher, etc.

“permission to matter” — I like that too.

Basically, I have to identify somehow with the characters. It doesn’t have to be the main character, but it helps. And identifying merely means that I have to understand why the characters behave as they do.

There is definitely something else, though; some other aspect to a book that keeps me engaged and makes me feel that the real world is the imagined one, and the world I’m reading about is the real one. It’s not description, as I tend to skip long paragraphs of description. I think it’s the writing style. Something fairly conversational seems to be my preference – so that I feel like the author is just telling me this great story that he or she cares about, watching my face to see if I’m smiling at the right places, enjoying my reaction to the surprises.

Yes, that’s got to be it – the feeling of kinship with the narrator, even if the narration is not in first person point of view.

However, the book that has held my attention for years, that I have reread several times, and has not received the attention it deserves is called “Lincoln’s Dreams,” the story of a contemporary woman who appears to be having Robert E. Lee’s dreams. (Odd that both of these books are period pieces, a genre that does not draw me.)

Both of these novels seem to be much less than they are, and deal with important questions about existence while moving along clippity clip through engrossing plots.

Compelling fiction gives its characters permission to matter, meaning actions have consequences. Otherwise you have no stakes, which is something else compelling fiction has. There has to be something to gain and something to lose.

Compelling fiction also resolves, meaning the story has an endgame. A way for the storyteller to say, “I’m done.” At some point your narrative ammo is going to run out and you’ll be stuck with false tension and saw tooth storytelling.