How To Use Mystery To Hook Your Readers With Jonah Lehrer

How can you use elements of mystery to hook your readers, regardless of the genre you write? How can you make sure your writing process prevents errors or plagiarism? Jonah Lehrer covers these aspects and more. In the intro, KDP Print available in hardback; Bookvolts book-specific NFT platform [Medium]; Books for writers in the NaNoWriMo Storybundle; ALLi self-publishing conference; Tomb of Relics. Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with Scrivener, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent, or publisher. Check it out for free or get 25% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna Jonah Lehrer is a New York Times bestselling author of non-fiction and a journalist. His latest book is Mystery: A Seduction, A Strategy, A Solution. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes * How children’s Surprise Egg YouTube videos inspired the book* How do we know when an idea is big enough for a book?* Practical ways of bringing mystery into any story* How spoilers aren’t always bad* Using the rules of mystery in non-fiction* Recovering from a career-changing writing mistake, and how it has changed Jonah's writing process You can find Jonah Lehrer at JonahLehrer.com. Transcript of Interview with Jonah Lehrer Joanna: Jonah Lehrer is a New York Times bestselling author of non-fiction and a journalist. His latest book is Mystery: A Seduction, A Strategy, A Solution. Welcome, Jonah. Jonah: Thank you so much for having me. Joanna: Oh, I'm excited to talk to you. So, let's get right into it. Why a book about mystery? What was it that drew you to write about this topic? Jonah: The book is full of examples drawn from the canon, from great works of literature, from ‘Hamlet' to Emily Dickinson, but what actually inspired me to write this book was watching my son watch YouTube videos. He fell down the rabbit hole, this specific genre of kids YouTube video called ‘Surprise Eggs,' which, to make a long story short, if you haven't had the pleasure of watching these inane videos, it's essentially parents make these giant paper mache eggs and stuff th...