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I often say that good story is like a roller coaster, full of ups and downs and twists and turns, but never standing still.

That last feature, steady narrative forward movement, is called momentum, and it’s what moves your story forward and propels readers through it. Many times—certainly in my own reading habits—if a reader loses interest or puts down a book it’s because it lost momentum, whether within the story itself or in the reader’s drive to continue to follow it.

Effective story hooks readers, but then it keeps moving them along the narrative throughline: pushing, pulling, enticing, or otherwise propelling them along the characters’ journey.

Some stories fail to launch, like your thirty-something son who is still living in your basement, never grabbing the reader or thrusting them into the action even from the beginning. Some lose steam partway in—the dreaded mushy middle—losing propulsion as the story develops. Perhaps most frustrating of all are the ones that gradually trickle to a halt, hobbling across the finish line and ending not with a bang, but a whimper.

But as with all storytelling elements, momentum doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s connected to many other elements of good story, and looking at these possible causes can help you diagnose why your story (or your reader!) is no longer moving forward.

Elements of momentum

1.     Character’s pursuit of goal (agency and drive)

The quickest way to bring your story to a screeching halt is for its protagonist to take their foot off the gas pedal.

Because they are the ones who should be pressing it—if your characters aren’t driving the story, then that thing isn’t moving (or it’s careening randomly around, rather than propulsively forward). One of the most common and likeliest causes of stalled momentum is a lack or loss of character drive and agency.

Drive means readers need to see (and feel, but we’ll get to that in a moment) what your character wants and how they’re trying to get it. A character working as an assistant to a big-shot movie producer who is privy to all the sordid inner workings of Hollywood? That’s a situation. But if they’re doing it to expose that dirty underbelly, or climb the ladder, or get revenge? Now you have a story.

Agency means that what’s happening in the story is a direct result of something the character does or doesn’t do—that they have a material effect on how the action unspools. Otherwise they’re just bit players in someone else’s story—a witness, a passive bystander, a victim, etc.—and you’ve lost your main source of story propulsion. Readers want to see your characters’ ingenuity, cleverness, resourcefulness, determination, persistence in chasing after the thing they desperately want—not how they are carried along by forces beyond their influence.

Imagine if the Formula 1 circuit featured a fleet of self-driving cars; it’s unlikely fans would show up in droves to cheer them on. What makes story exciting and engaging isn’t just about the movement of the vehicle; it’s the action of the driver.

Read more: “Deepen Character Goal and Motivation: The Longing and the Lack”

2. Cause and effect action

Propulsive story starts with the character objective and that action they take in pursuit of it. As a direct result of their efforts in moving toward that goal, something happens: They succeed and move closer to it; they fall short and experience a setback or delay. Do or do not, Yoda-style: Did they achieve their immediate goal or did they fail to? “Try” on its own isn’t enough in propulsive story—readers need to see the outcome of the effort and its effect on what happens next.

So what do they do in response? That’s your next cause-and-effect building block. Maybe they move on to the next step in their plan to reach their particular goal line; maybe they have to rejigger their strategy if their last effort failed to move them closer to it. Maybe they reassess what they want and the goalposts shift. Whatever that reaction is, it sparks their next objective and the action they take to achieve it, which sets off the next cause-and-effect chain in pursuit of the ultimate goal.

It’s a Rube Goldberg machine, where every movement impacts the next, creating a complex and cohesive set of actions toward the final result: want -> action -> shift, step by step all the way to the end of the journey.

Otherwise you risk a story that’s episodic, skipping from one event to another but without that crucial connectivity that lets readers see how each action impacts the next and propels the story forward—a series of static snapshots, rather than a fluid, cohesive movie.

Read more: “Cohesion: The Key to Powerful Story”

3. Ups and downs/levels

Want to bore your readers and bring your story to a dull halt? Keep the character on a single trajectory—triumph after triumph or setback after setback. That structure grows tedious and repetitive, and we lose the excitement and engagement of vibrant, variable story.

The most celebrated sports games in history aren’t the ones where one team creams the other one. They’re the nail-biters, the down-to-the-wires, the ones where each team is always on the verge of winning—or losing—it all. Imagine the winter Olympics if every single athlete came out and totally killed it—or totally blew it. How exciting would they be?

Remember that roller coaster: How fun would the ride be if it were all uphills, or downhills, or worst of all flat? What makes the ride thrilling is the ups and downs, painstakingly climbing toward the top and then plunging back to the bottom. If you want to keep your story moving forward, then make sure we see your characters face those fluctuations: making progress and facing setbacks, all the way through to the end.

Read more: “Lucky Breaks and Tough Shakes”

4. Urgency and immediacy of stakes

If you want to move the reader forward in the story, you first have to convince them to come along for the ride. The journey doesn’t mean much to readers if it isn’t fiercely important to your protagonist—meaning what’s at stake for them.

But just establishing rewards/consequences isn’t enough to create strong momentum. We need to see that this goal has to be achieved now, and that it’s profoundly personal and impactful to the main character(s).

That means vague, amorphous stakes aren’t enough to drive your story: “The character wants love”; “He’s striving to find his truest self.” That’s like plopping the protagonist into the driver’s seat and instructing them, “Go somewhere great!” There’s no finding that on a map, and we’ve got no way of knowing for sure when he’s there. Readers need specificity and meaning: “Get to Disneyland because that’s where the lost love that got away works—and win her back.”

And it means showing why the journey matters at this moment. If the character could chase their goal anytime then it matters a lot less, which means it doesn’t propulsively fuel the journey: “Go now, go whenevs, whatever…” You know that lack of momentum you feel when you’re plugging away at a story with no firm deadline or finish line in sight? That.

Readers need pressure and urgency (just as writers do, to a degree…watch how motivated your writing gets if you set concrete mile markers and deadlines): “Get to Disneyland to win back your love because your rival is already there trying to lock it down.” Now we’ve got a sense of imperativeness and immediacy that pushes the protagonist and the story compellingly forward.

Read more: “Character Stakes: The Key to Making Readers Care”

5. Uncertainties, unknowns, questions

Do you want to know the secret to creating irresistibly propulsive story?

See what I did there? The answer is suspense, the same kind of seductive tease of information of that first sentence in this section. Want to make your reader hungrily turn pages? Keep them guessing; humans are innately curious and we crave certainty, answers, resolution. Use that in your favor to create and sustain that powerful forward momentum.

Give us pieces of a puzzle to put together, a trail of breadcrumbs to follow, a dangling thread to trace back to its source. No matter your genre, suspense is a potent tool that fires up your story’s engine.

The trick is to balance questions and answers. Too much mystery means readers don’t have enough info to orient and invest us; too little means we already know what’s going to happen, or worse, just don’t care to find out.

Suspense isn’t always about the outcome itself. If we’re reading a romance we have a pretty good idea the hero and heroine will end up together; if we’re reading a series centered around a character we can probably guess she’s not going to die (or at least not until the last one!). Often it’s about the how: how the characters overcome the obstacles between them and their goal, and all the many things that can go wrong along the way (those ups and downs we talked about earlier).

We want to be surprised—but that surprise has to feel organically paved in and supported by the story events and character actions. Otherwise it’s like thrusting a jack-in-the-box at someone who’s in the middle of something else and never cranked the handle—that’s bad surprise.

Readers want to figure out the mysteries—but we can’t do it if you don’t pave in the clues. We want to feverishly seek the answers—but we have to know what the question is and understand why it matters (stakes, from above—story is a web and everything is connected).

Read more: “Analysis: How Storytelling Makes the Story”

Authors make many promises to readers at the beginning of a story, but the main one is this: “Get on board and let me take you for a great ride.” Keep them moving along the journey and you’re much more likely to maintain their interest, engagement, and investment throughout.

Want to learn more about building compelling, propulsive story? Join me (with Jane Friedman) Wednesday, March 18, at 1pm ET for my brand-new course, “Story Structure and Momentum” ($25/$35, recording available for registrants).

Authors, how do you orchestrate your story to ensure readers are moving steadily forward through it along with your characters? Are you conscious of creating momentum as you write, and if so, what techniques and tools do you use to do it? What propels you through a story when you’re reading?

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