Writing Non-Page Turners

She read it with Grover's voice. Then, after straining her vocal chords, my mom usually lost her voice for a period afterward. (In fact, I'm not sure if my sister and I begged her to read the book because we loved the book or because we loved the after effects. Often, when she came to the end, we'd plead Read it again! Read it again! I see now how cruel we were.)

The book was about Grover not wanting to reach the end of the book because there was a monster at the end of the book! Oh, please, please, please don't turn the page, he'd say.

We'd turn it anyway.

You turned the page! he'd rant. We're not true friends. If we were true friends, we'd stop turning pages.

But no such argument worked on us. No sirree, Bob.

Grover resorted to other methods. He taped pages together. But we were too strong. He built a brick wall. Still, we broke through. Pages tore. We left a mess of shattered bricks and mortar. We were sadistic.

By the page before the last, Grover was in tears. Oh, his fear! What was going to happen to him when we reached the end of the book, when we came to the monster!

Then we'd discover that the monster was Grover. Loveable, furry old Grover. And Grover felt so embarrassed.

And here's the conundrum. The rules of writing say write a page-turner. If you don't write a page-turner, people won't want to read your book. It makes sense. If people don't care about what happens next, they'll probably turn off the light and go to sleep (or fall asleep drooling on your book, which is always humiliating).

But like Grover, I love non-page turners. I do. I want a book that I never want to reach the end. I cried when I finished Nobody's Fool by Richard Russo. What am I going to do now without Sully in my life? I thought. Anne of Green Gables (and the following books) is not so much about coming to the end, about finding out the happily-ever-after as it is about living with Anne. If I could read those books without turning pages, I would. I'd tape together the pages and build brick walls.

That's how I want to write. I want to write non-page turners. I want to write books that people want to live in, not get through. Now perhaps this falls under the plot-driven v. character-driven category. I don't know. I don't care. I want to delve so deeply into a person's life--both the person in my book (my character or characters) and the person reading the book--that they cry at the end of the book, that they turn immediately back to page one and start over, not caring that they know the whole story. I want to write a book that makes a person stop reading for just a little bit because for them, stepping into another character's life would be betrayal.

Maybe I should start putting monsters into my stories.