Creating a Promise to Your Reader
When readers first start reading those crucial first chapters of your story, you are setting a promise of expectations. Brandon Sanderson famously lays out his idea of Promise, Progress, and Payoffs in his writing. I tend to agree with this concept. Those first chapters set so much of the tone, expectations, characters, etc. that it is vital to nail these. After all, if you lose the reader in the opening chapters, then what is to keep them engaged until the end?
The Promise is responsible for several things. First is the opening tone of your story. If you are writing a serious epic that will be riddled with confronting the dark side of humanity, interjecting humorous quips will be setting up a false promise of what to expect tonally. Additionally, the promise needs to establish the character arcs of the main cast. For example, if your story is about a girl who is trying to reunite with her family after being separated, what is the character motivation for growth? The plot motivation is her reuniting with her family, but the character motivation might be a coming-of-age tale, where she has to overcome some type of obstacle. These character motivations may very well also tie in with whatever plot hints you drop to the reader to indicate where the story will go.
Using Progress to Develop what was Established in the Promise
The best way to summarize Progress is with the simple phrase: "What makes your reader turn the page?". You can have an interesting promise, but if the progress toward that promise is lacking, then you are likely to disappoint readers and have them feel unfulfilled. Your characters should be growing, the plot progressing, and the world evolving to act on that opening promise.
Sometimes, during the progress of our story, we also make Little Promises. These smaller promises are perhaps just a chapter or two long, or they span over the mini-arc of a part of the story. Either way, I like to use these Little Promises to help foreshadow what is to come. For example, if two characters meet and it is obvious they have some chemistry, then the Little Promise might be that those two characters are going to end up with each other.
Satisfying the Reader with Payoff
You've reach the climax of the story. The reader turns the final page and...do they feel satisfied? To answer this, we need to revisit the promise given to the reader at the start of the story. Was the promise fulfilled? If it wasn't fulfilled, was there a reason why? Simply saying something like: well, that's what the sequel does, isn't enough. If you are writing a series, for example, you can have a Promise that works for the whole series, but you need to make sure you have a Promise that works for that book.
Readers don't want to feel like the story left them hanging. They want to feel satisfied, whether they like or dislike the story, at least the promise that you made with them at the beginning was answered.
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