Doubt is a Good Thing

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Doubt is the fat stepkid that everyone loves to kidney punch when no one's looking. It's negative. A downer. No one wants to embrace doubt.

But as a writer, creating doubt in a reader is your job. 

In order to keep a reader engaged, you've got to make them wonder how in the world you're going to pull off an amazing yet believable ending. Doubts such as:

• There's no way the hero will be able to save the girl who's tied onto the railroad tracks with a bullet train due in 5 seconds. How can he possibly pull off a rescue?
• The heroine just ate a poisoned apple, making her swoon, and oops...she's falling off the edge of a cliff. How will she live through the ordeal?
• Wearing a suicide vest, the villain races into the middle of a Vikings/Packer game and threatens to self-destruct unless he's given a bajillion dollars in gold. Will the game continue, and more importantly, will the Vikings win?

If you don't create doubt in a reader's mind, they're going to tune out, which is death to a novel. Up the stakes. Drop anvils on the heads of your characters until your reader wonders how they'll ever escape brain damage.

Just be sure when you scheme up your catastrophes that you also have plausible solutions for them. The victory doesn't need to be clearly predicted, but it does need to be clearly dealt with.