: Do people keep reading because of what's ahead or what's behind? What's behind: the reader feels invested in the characters, the reader likes the tone so far, the reader likes the premise. What's

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Neither. People keep reading because they enjoy what I would call the assisted imagination of reading. Or watching the show or movie, or playing the role playing game, all of these are forms of assisted imagination.

When the assistant (the authors of such products) are poor at their job, the imagined reality is poor too. It doesn't make internal sense or seems arbitrary. It doesn't feel like it follows rules, so expectations are not met. It stops being interesting or surprising. Then the process (reading, writing, playing your role in the game) becomes a bore, or actively disliked, and that is no fun.

Few readers / viewers actually want the story to end, but clearly it must, and in the course of 50,000 years of story telling some standard satisfying ideas of how to tell it and end it have been discovered, so the audience is entertained and not too disappointed at the end.

Even then, the trick is usually to end the story at a new beginning: The villain was discovered, fought, and defeated, then a new phase of life begins. Or the girl was discovered, pursued, and finally consented to marry, then a new phase of life begins.

Stories (verbal, in print, in video) help us imagine an alternate reality that most people simply could not imagine on their own. But it is fun to do. They don't keep reading because of the fun they had, and they don't keep reading just to finish (if the imagined reality is really fun they don't want it to ever finish, which is how franchises like 007 or Harry Potter come to be), they keep reading because the reading is fun.

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