Member Class: How to Make Your Book Compulsively Readable

Ever finish a novel and think, I could not put that thing down, and not quite know why? That’s not an accident. That’s craft, and it has rules.

In this webinar, Jonathan Baker, our resident narrative drive obsessive (his words, and he means it, he counts plot turns in movie theaters), spends an hour taking apart exactly what makes a book compulsively readable. This is the class that MFA programs skip, because it’s genuinely hard to teach in a twelve-person workshop. So we brought in someone who thinks about it, by his own admission, all day long.

You’ll walk away understanding why stakes are a multiplication problem, not an addition problem, and why a rubber ball on a rich person’s carpet has no narrative power at all. You’ll learn the Lee Child trick that turns a boring scene into a page-turner just by asking a question and making your reader wait for the answer. You’ll watch Jonathan Baker take apart The Godfather link by link to show you what real causality looks like, versus the “and then, and then, and then” plotting that makes readers quietly close a book and never come back.

Then Jonathan Baker opens it up for questions, and the back half is just as good as the lecture: how to write dramatic irony in first person, why your character doesn’t need to be likable, and what Severance is doing right that most prestige TV gets wrong.

If you write anything with a plot, literary or genre, this is an hour well spent. Grab a notebook.