I’ve been taking seminars and professional development courses lately to better understand readers and how they react to different writing styles. Basically, what keeps a reader coming back for more. Then I ran across this article that pretty much sums up everything I’ve been learning. It made me think, what drives me insane as a reader?

I once read a book that on the first 50 pages only had one character. This character went around doing daily things… The author told us so… But she didn’t “show” the reader. There was no dialogue. There was no action. And by action, I don’t mean a shoot-out or someone having a heart attack. I just mean that there needed to be something more interesting than hearing how the heroine folded her laundry and picked corn over green beans for dinner.

When I stop and think about what makes me keep reading, I can think of 2 things:

 * the characters
* the plot 

If I read a character in a romance novel, and by the time she meets her love interest I want to scream “RUN!!! You don’t want this train wreck!!” it’s not a book I’m going to keep reading.

What keeps you interested in a story? What makes you put a book down and never finish it?