Write for the Reader Whose Power Just Went Out

Every rule about openings assumes the reader arrives once. Mine arrive four or five times, because the light goes at 21:40 and returns when it returns.

I read most books in pieces of about eleven minutes. That is not a complaint about my life. It is a fact about my reader, and I write for her, because she is me. She puts a book down mid-paragraph, never at a chapter break. When she picks it up she does not go back and reread. She scans the page for a place to rejoin, and if she cannot find one in three or four seconds she closes the book and sleeps.

So the craft question is not how to hold attention. Attention is going to be taken from you by something with a diesel engine. The question is what a page should look like if you assume the break will land at an arbitrary point and the reader will not do any work to recover.

The resume point

A resume point is a sentence a reader can land on cold and still follow. It has three properties, and they are cheap.

• It names its actor with a noun, not a pronoun.
• It states the present situation rather than modifying the previous one.
• It does not depend on a clause that ended two sentences ago.

Here is a paragraph with one resume point, its first sentence:

Obi had not slept. He knew what that meant for the morning, and he had decided already that it did not matter. It would be the third time. She would not say anything about it, which was worse, and he would spend the walk to the bus rehearsing the argument they were not going to have.

Land in the middle of that and you have he, it, the third time, she, and no way to resolve any of them. Now the same content with the pronouns spent differently:

Obi had not slept. A third bad night meant a bad morning, and he had decided the morning did not matter. His wife would say nothing about it, which was worse. Obi spent the walk to the bus rehearsing an argument they were never going to have.

Nothing has been simplified. The same information arrives in the same order at the same length. What changed is that a reader can now enter at sentence one, three, or four and be oriented inside a second. The paragraph went from one resume point to three.

Counting them

This is measurable, which is why I trust it more than most craft advice. Print a chapter. Read it as a stranger would, sentence by sentence, and put a mark beside every sentence you could start from with no memory of the page. Then count marks per page.

My own numbers, from a manuscript I was struggling with: the chapters readers described as gripping had four to six marks a page. The chapter three people abandoned had one, and it was the first line. That chapter was not badly written. It was a single continuous seventeen-hundred-word argument in which every sentence depended on its predecessor. It was built for a reader who would never be interrupted, and I do not know any of those.

The obvious objection

You could say this produces repetitive prose, a book that keeps reintroducing its own characters like a nervous host. That would be a fair worry if resume points were additions. They are not. A resume point is a substitution: a name where a pronoun was, an independent clause where a dependent one was. The word count does not move. What moves is where the sentence gets its meaning from, and pulling that inward is generally an improvement in prose that was leaning on context to do work the sentence should have done itself.

There is a real cost, though, and it is not repetition. It is momentum. Long dependent chains are how you build acceleration, and if every sentence stands alone your prose becomes a series of stops. So the density has to vary. Passages meant to be read fast, where the reader is unlikely to put the book down anyway, can drop to one resume point in a page. That is a decision, and the point of counting is to make it a decision instead of an accident.

What it changes upstream

The habit works backwards into structure. Once you accept that the reader leaves mid-paragraph, you stop putting load-bearing information in the last line of a scene, where an interrupted reader will never see it. You stop opening chapters with an unnamed pronoun to create mystery. You start treating a paragraph as an object that must be usable from any face, the way a public thing has to be, rather than as a run of prose with one legitimate entrance.

And it removes a bad excuse. When a reader abandons a book, the writer's instinct is to blame attention spans. Sometimes that is true. More often the reader did not abandon the book, the reader lost the thread during the eleven minutes the light was off, went looking for the way back in, and was not given one.