Your Readers Don't Like to Read

No, I'm serious.

This is perhaps the most important rule I've learned in my writing journey. It can also be stated as "do your best to not bore your readers."

Despite being a writer, I believe writing is the most inefficient way to tell a story. In comics or manga, the images can do all the heavy lifting of the descriptions and the amount of dialogue can be minimized to be as efficient as possible. In oral or audio storytelling, the words of the narrator flow into your mind seamlessly, just as easily as if you were talking with someone. That is the reason why many people prefer listening to podcasts or audiobooks instead of reading the corresponding text. And with theater, film, or TV shows, both aspects are combined to create in my opinion the most efficient way to deliver a story.

In comparison, at least for me, there's always a sort of inherent "friction" when reading anything. There's a sort of potential boredom in reading that doesn't exist in other forms of storytelling.

Imagine reading like traveling in a car; the sentences are the pavement. No matter the type of pavement, there is always friction between the car and the road. But the pavement can be smoother or bumpier, and that affects the experience of the rider. If the road is too bumpy, they might decide they had too much and will stop the car.

That's what you don't want to happen. Likewise, any small mistake on the part of the author creates and amplifies this friction, until the point where the reader becomes bored and stops reading your book. Thus, it's your job as a writer, first and foremost, to minimize this friction as much as possible. There is, however, something else you can do, and that's to increase engagement. The more engaging a book is, the more than "counteracts" that inherent friction.

This isn't to say that books don't have their advantages over other forms of storytelling. The strength of books, for me, is twofold: it's the way you can minimize this friction and increase engagement, which varies from writer to writer; and the stimulation of the imagination of your readers, which is often put aside in other forms of media in favor of the ease of communication.

So how exactly do we go about accomplishing this "reduction of friction" and "increase in engagement"? There are several techniques I use and constantly keep in mind when writing. Some are more universal, others more specific. Some counteract "friction" while others increase engagement. Some do both.

Grammar

Let's start with the most obvious one, and probably the biggest thing you can do to improve your writing: grammar. Simply put, any grammar mistake you do will increase friction. No two ways about it. And also no excuses.

If you're thinking "oh, editors will correct my grammar mistakes so it's fine."

Don't.

Publishers will not accept a manuscript full of grammar mistakes, no matter how good the story is. You can have limited vocabulary or "bad writing" (like not explaining your plot very well) and still have a chance, but bad grammar is inexcusable.

If you're thinking "oh, I'll just self-publish then. I don't need an editor!"

Don't.

Yes, you can publish any ol' text online these days, but if it's filled with grammar mistakes, readers will not go further than the first pages and they might abandon your book entirely (or at least I hope they do).

Your writing needs to be 99.9% spotless when having anyone else other than you reading it. If you have trouble with grammar (for example, if you're not a native English speaker like me) then I recommend exposing yourself to as much English material as possible. Books, podcasts, videos, you name it. And study grammar if you feel like you needed. Don't make simple mistakes like confusing verb tenses, using the wrong abbreviations ("you're" vs "your", "it's" vs "its"), or confusing words ("affect" vs "effect" for example).

There's another category of mistakes I have to raise particular attention to because I see a lot of people doing this. It's called a runoff sentence.

The big dog was running towards its owner, he seemed very happy while he ran.

This is a runoff sentence - basically, it's when you join two independent clauses together using a comma. This is wrong and drives me up the wall. I once had the founder of a writers' group I participated in do this all the time in his manuscript and it was excruciating to read. The way to fix this problem is to separate the clauses with an "and" or, better yet, make them two separate sentences.

Minimizing friction, increasing engagement

Ok, let's say you have perfect grammar. Problem solved, right?

Wrong.

When you have grammar mastered is when you can start working on minimizing other sources of friction. As an example, I wrote the following scene involving friends Josh (the narrator) and Sarah, who are secretly into each other:

It was a nice day with no clouds in the sky. I was jogging in the park. I saw a woman by the lakefront. She looked beautiful. I waved at the woman and approached her.
"Hi Sarah," I said
"Hi Josh," Sarah said.
She was wearing a breezy white dress.
"Nice weather we are having today," I said.
"It is quite nice, especially after all the rain. I don't see you around these parts very often. Are you out for a jog?" She asked.
I laughed. "Yes. This is a bit embarassing, but I'm trying to get a bit more fit," I replied.
"It's not embarassing at all. It's a very good goal to have," she said.
"Thank you. And you? What are you doing here?" I asked.
"Just enjoying the scenery," Sarah said.
A breeze blew past us. Her hat almost blew off. She looked beautiful holding her hat. I gain the courage to ask her something.
"If you aren't busy, would you like to come with me and eat some ice cream? I heard the ice cream from the nearby stand is really good." I say.
"Wouldn't that ruin the point of all the exercise?" She says.
"Just this one time," I say.
"Ok. I would love to," she replies.
That was how my wife and I had our first date.

Now, this text is grammatically correct. There are no mistakes in the sentences. And yet, doesn't it feel kinda... boring? Repetitive? Without a soul? That's because I purposefully forced myself to write it as boringly as possible. And with a text that doesn't engage you, the natural friction of reading will rear its ugly head and make you start to get bored and thus stop reading.

Now, you must be thinking "this is stupid, I don't write this poorly!" And you're probably right (if, on the other hand, you think there's nothing wrong with writing like this, then I highly recommend you continue reading). But using the worst possible text is a great way to deconstruct why it doesn't work and explain what you can do to improve it. Here are a few things to improve:

Alternate long and short sentences.

If you have a massive sentence with 4 clauses back to back, readers will probably struggle to keep it all in mind and will get bored. However, the inverse is also true. If you have 4 short sentences in a row, with a single clause each, readers will ALSO get bored of it. It's useful to remember to alternate long (2+ clauses) sentences with shorter ones. However, any good rule is there to be broken and give more "spice" to your text. Using short sentences back to back can be used to give more "strength" to your text. And very long sentences can also be sparingly used sometimes, out of necessity or otherwise.

In the example, the beginning description of the scene is just 4 short sentences back to back, which is a great way to bore your reader to death.

Avoid using sentences starting with the same pronouns back-to-back.

This is more relevant in 1st person than in 3rd person, but it's big enough in 1st person to warrant a special mention. The biggest mistake you can do when writing in 1st person is to use sentences starting with "I" back-to-back. Avoid this at all costs by rewriting sentences. Again, this rule isn't ironclad: there are some situations where it's unavoidable to have sentences starting with the same pronoun back to back. You can also do it on purpose to add "spice". But don't abuse it.

In the example, you have 3 sentences starting with "I" back-to-back, which is atrocious.

Write alternative sentences to give your text some variety.

This is a generalization of the previous point and it's a catch-all term for a variety of ways you can communicate the same information using different styles of sentences. It doesn't always have to be two "subject-verb-object" (SVO) clauses joined together. For example, clauses can be inverted: "The bus was full because of the rain" becomes "because of the rain, the bus was full." Sentences can be inverted: "The Barrier Islands lie off the coast of North Carolina" becomes "Off the coast of North Carolina lie the Barrier Islands." You can only really start to incorporate and remember these techniques as you read more and more. Do anything in your power to avoid having too many "SVO" sentences back to back. The beginning of the example is all short sentences with SVO structure, which makes them incredibly boring to read.

Emphasize text with alternate fonts and em dashes

I don't mean using a different typeface for different parts of your text. In this context, font means the "application" of a typeface and, in general, you're limited to using italic and bold text to emphasize certain parts of your writing.

Of these two, the most common and versatile is definitely the italic, which you can use for almost everything, from emphasizing that a certain word was said in a different way from the rest of the dialogue (e.g. "Martha really knew what she was getting into when she got involved with that guy.") to indicating thoughts or otherwise to distinguish text from the rest.

Bold is, well, bolder; it's quite hard to find situations to use it, and personally, I never did. But it's good to have this "trump card" up my sleeve and you should have it too. If you're feeling really spicy, you can always change the size of the text, but uses like this are very non-standard and your editor might look at you sideways if you try to use it in your manuscript. I'd reserve these uses for "looser" writing where you don't intend to adhere to strict rules. But don't think breaking rules willy-nilly will somehow make you a writing genius. Rules exist to be mostly followed and occasionally broken if you are sure of what you are doing.

I decided to include em dashes — these long dashes that often appear in text — in this section because their purpose is much the same as using italic or bold: emphasize a portion of the text and thus break the monotony of reading. They work much like commas, parentheses, colons, or semicolons. Like italic and bold, they should be used sparingly so as to not lose their effect.

Use dialogue tags to break up sentences and add engaging information.

Dialogue tags are those little pieces of text near dialogue that help identify who's speaking, but they can be much, much more than that. Trust me, they are your best friend. Why? Because even dialogue can be boring and monotonous if there's no variety in it. Dialogue tags are perfect to break up dialogue blocks and make them more engaging to read.

You can use them to add information about the speaker themselves, their movement, reactions, or even their emotions and thoughts if you're writing in 3rd person. They can also be used to separate clauses in long dialogues to make them less monotonous. However, they also aren't always needed, especially in dialogue with only two characters and if the only information you would be adding was "he said, she said".

In the example, I didn't use dialogue tags for anything other than indicating who spoke, which is a missed opportunity.

Use dialogue to convey a character's personality, their emotions and make it more natural.

Dialogue is a fundamental tool to convey how your character is feeling and what their personality is like. Simple things like word choice are fundamental (a character with a posh background will speak differently than a commoner, for example), but there's a lot more you can do beyond that. If your character has some exaggerated or unrealistic features, you can change the dialogue accordingly; for example, a cat girl might end her sentences with "nyaa" or use cat puns. But even for realistic characters, you can do a lot to spice up your dialogue. For example, adding stutters, mistakes in words, or merely interjections like "ah" or "oh" and laughing in text go a long way to make dialogue more palatable.

Fair to say I didn't do any of this in my example, so the dialogue just feels like a boring trade of words between two flat characters with no personality.

Learn how to use paragraphs

This is a problem I don't see a lot of people suffering from, but it is important enough to warrant a mention. Paragraphs are used to separate different topics from one another. But from a reading perspective, they serve another very important role: to break up the text and make it more easily "digestible" to the reader. Try to avoid having very long paragraphs as best you can so readers don't get lost in them.

There's another use for paragraphs that I don't see too often: punctuate specific sentences to give them more weight. Even if those sentences all belong to the same topic, if you separate them using paragraphs, you are giving those sentences more weight than they would otherwise have if they were all bunched up together in the same paragraph. This is a technique to be used sparingly (once or twice per book perhaps) so it doesn't lose its effectiveness.

Adequately paint a scene.

This is perhaps one of the most difficult things to get right. When writing, there's a near-infinite amount of detail you can add to a scene so you can paint the exact picture you want in the reader's mind. If you describe a scene with too few words, it becomes ambiguous and not interesting for the reader. But this comes at a great cost: the more words you add, even if they follow all the other guidelines I mentioned before, the more likely you are to lose your reader.

There's this infamous Portuguese book that's mandatory reading in high school. Its infamy stems from the very beginning, where the author spent 20 pages describing a big house. Granted, it's an important setpiece of the book and 17-year-olds aren't exactly known to be patient, but it's one of the reasons the book is often not even read by said teenagers. I'd argue the house in this case is described in too much detail, and that loses a lot of readers right away on an otherwise very interesting story.

Finding an adequate balance between concise descriptions and important details is fundamental to creating an interesting scene and constructing a book out of those scenes. Each writer has their own sensibilities and style, but be careful to not fall into either camp.

In my example, I chose to describe the scene with as few details as possible. We know it's a nice day, that Josh is jogging in a park, and that Sarah is close to the lakefront. But that's about it. The image in your mind is probably somewhat fuzzy, so the scene isn't particularly interesting. This won't capture your reader's attention enough and so they might decide to stop reading before you even get to the dialogue.

Synonyms are your friend

Sometimes, it's just impossible to avoid describing the same scene as "nice" or the protagonist's love interest as "beautiful". However, using the same word multiple times in a row is a cardinal sin and readers will notice it. There's an easy solution to this: use a synonym. There are many thesauruses(?) you can use online, so look for the perfect word to replace that pesky repetition. Sometimes though, it's just impossible to find an exact synonym. In that case, my recommendation is to rewrite the sentence entirely or even describe the meaning of the word in a different way.

In my example, I used the word "beautiful" twice in close succession. No bueno.

Sentence flow

Here's a problem that might be unique to me: the way sentences flow into one another to create a single unified text is crucial. If you suddenly jump from one sentence to the next without explaining how the characters moved, for example, it can be jarring to the reader. Often, it's necessary to add words like "suddenly", "then", "as I did X" to sentences to allow the scene to flow better.

I didn't use any of these techniques in the example, so that's why it reads somewhat "jumpy".

Don't use meta-information as a crutch

This is an issue more specific to books with a lot of illustrations, like light novels, but it can also be applied to any book with a cover, which is pretty much every book out there.

Basically, as a general rule, you shouldn't use meta-information as an excuse or crutch to not describe things properly in your text. I'm defining "meta-information" as anything associated with the text that isn't the text itself; for example, cover art, insert illustrations, or character designs. There are a couple of reasons to avoid this.

First, not every potential form of your story will have this meta-information available. For example, imagine someone is using an app to read your books for them; or maybe, in the future, your book might become an audiobook. In those scenarios, the listeners will not have access to the character designs or cover art, so when it comes time to describe these things in your text, the listeners will feel like you're not giving them enough information. It's also a matter of accessibility: you might have a blind reader in the future, who will not have the same experience as someone who's able to see the associated art.

Second, although a visual medium is very good at conveying information, there are things you cannot properly communicate with images alone. The way characters describe another person or a location can tell you a lot about their personality and the things they value, for example. Even if your narrator is in 3rd person objective POV (where you don't get inside your characters' heads), I would argue that it's important to give your readers some "wiggle room" to let them imagine characters and scenes in their own head, at least for a while, instead of making them run back to the back of the book to see the character designs.

Third and final reason: it's very likely that you won't be able to have supplementary material for every character and location in your story. So if you describe things you do have material for lightly, and the rest you describe in more detail, you're going to end up with an unbalanced text. And readers will notice.

More isn't always worse.

At this point, you might be thinking "but wouldn't all this stuff greatly increase the length of the text? Won't take make it MORE boring?"And yes, you do run that risk if you exaggerate a lot on the amount of detail and "extras" you use. But here's my final piece of advice: more isn't always worse, because adding more words correctly leads to a smoother reading experience compared to using fewer words poorly. You have to be very careful to not be overly verbose and add details where they don't matter, so my advice is to do the minimum possible that will improve the reading experience without boring the reader.

And with that said, let's correct the example from before and make it palatable. Here's how I would rewrite this scene:

It was nice morning without a single cloud in the sky. The pleasant weather — despite the slight breeze — was too good to waste staying at home, so I decided to go jog for a bit in the park. Turns out I wasn't alone in thinking this; the park was full of other joggers.
As I jogged my heart out, I suddenly saw a familiar profile by the lakefront. 
She's beautiful...
Her long brown hair and hairband was unmistakable. I slowed down and approached the woman carefully, waving enthusiastically.
"Hi Sarah!" I said with a big grin.
She turned around to face me. "Oh, is that you, Josh?"
As she turned around, I could finally see her breezy white dress that fit her very well.
"Right-o. Quite nice weather we're having today, huh?"
"Yeah, especially after all that rain... By the way, I don't see you around these parts very often. Have you been... jogging?" She asked with genuine curiosity.
"Ahaha, yeah. It's a bit embarassing to admit but I'm trying to lose a bit of weight."
"That's not embarassing at all!" She said with a pout." I think it's a very good goal to have."
"Ahaha, thanks. And you? What are you doing here?"
"Well, just enjoying the scenery I guess. Getting some fresh air."
A breeze blew past us, ruffling her long dress and almost sending her hat flying off. Somehow, that scene entranced me. Something came over me and I suddenly gained the courage to finally ask what I had on my mind.
"H-Hey, if you aren't busy, would you like to come with me and eat some ice cream? I heard the ice cream in that stand nearby is very good," I ask, a bit shyly.
"Wouldn't that ruin the point of your exercise though?" She said teasingly, but with a slight smile.
"Just this one time! I promise!" I said, pleading with my hands in a prayer.
"Ok, ok. I would love to go with you," she said with a enchanting smile.
And that is how my wife and I had our first "date".

Despite being 35% longer and containing roughly the same basic information, the rewrite reads much better than the original, doesn't it? That's because I applied almost all the techniques I described before and tried to make the reading experience as seamless as possible. Try to compare both texts and see where each technique was applied (but I didn't use all of them!). You might disagree with how I apply these rules and how important they are to make you a better writer, but I firmly believe that to improve your writing and be successful, you should at least be thinking about the #1 rule: your readers don't actually like to read.

I hope this was helpful to someone!