Reading Between The Lines

One of the key things which, as a writer, you have to do, is to form some kind of a relationship with your reader.  There are a number of tactics you can use: if your story affirms their own experience of life they will warm towards it and you.  Another ploy is to set them to work:  if you do everything for them, they will have less reason to engage with your story, but if you make them unpick various different knots, then your book will stay in their heads long after they had finished reading it.  One way of doing this is to make sure that they have to read between the lines of what you have written in order to get the full picture.

Have a go at writing a piece in which one world, or a version of it, exists on the written page, while another lurks just out of reach.  You can do this as a plot-based exercise, or have a go at characterisation, for example, you could have one character describing another in fulsome terms, but with just enough edge and bite to suggest a whole other secret, risque side of the person's nature too. Whatever that you decide upon, make sure you give your reader a rigorous work out, as that will get their intellectual endorphins flowing.