: Are chapters with a single character inherently more difficult for an average reader to connect with? (And do you have any tips.) On the topic of keeping a reader engaged: Dialog is a great

I suspect you don't have tension; in the sense that the readers are not wondering "what happens next?"

Your character may be cold and scared and (loves being alone? That kind of doesn't fit here), and maybe he needs to get to the stream, but he's not doing anything but plodding to the stream, and that is boring.

If that is all it is, then skip six hours, and he finally reached the stream.

An analogy for this is a sex scene: IRL sex is exciting throughout, but narrated, it is repetitive as hell, and quickly boring, because there are only so many different ways to describe sensations without getting absolutely comical. So yes, walking on the shattered ankle is excruciating. Agonizing. That's it, don't go through the whole thesaurus coming up with ways to say the same thing again and again and again. Skip time to the interesting part.

He sees the stream! Seeing it, tears come to his eyes, he's almost done.

He *reaches the stream, and falls to the ground and pulls himself forward to take a drink. His leg is throbbing, but he shouts in victory.

As for thoughts: I use italicized thoughts all the time; I keep them to the nature of actual thoughts (mine at least), a few words at most.

"The guy with the hat, who was that?"

Alvin. Can't tell him that.

"I don't remember. You mean Richard?"

Other longer thoughts, I narrate in prose, 3rd person limited.

Barry was thinking, if they took the second train, they'd still make it to Rochester with time to spare, but he'd get ninety minutes alone with Sharon, and that might be enough. He just needed a good excuse for Charlie.

Narrating a long continuing state is boring, you need to find the "turning points," what the reader knows will happen next. Think of it as a series of "mindsets" for the hero. Describe the mindset, jump time, describe the new mindset or decision or feeling, jump time, describe the next mindset.

I've described twenty-four straight hours of hard labor in a paragraph, because the mindset didn't change. Then my character was so tired they couldn't go on, and that was a new mindset.

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I think you may be trying too hard.

If you really want to keep flashbacks in there, go ahead, but in general, when people are put into a survival type situation, their focus becomes very immediate, very concrete, and very practical for obvious reasons. I spent 3 years in combat without an ounce of time for reflection as an example. You just don't have a lot of time and energy for flashbacks when you are trying to survive.

I would recommend the novel Hatchet as a great way to describe a wilderness survival type situation. The majority of this novel takes place with one character alone, trying to survive in the wild.

Spend some time just being in nature. I think a lot of people are so urbanized and hyper-socialized that they think life is a giant sitcom. There is actually a whole lot going on in the quiet places that have no dialogue whatsoever. Many novels have captured the beauty of the wild, the bloody taste of striving to survive against the odds, the inner growth that can come from solitude. These things are part of human nature just as much as social interaction. You can use the "quietness" of the wilderness chapter as a juxtaposition from the busyness of the chapters with lots of characters in them. Try reading Hemingway. Not only is it always a good idea to read great writing when trying to write good writing, but he was a master of capturing man versus nature and man versus himself and juxtaposing wild pursuits in nature against complex social drama (Sun Also Rises comes to mind).

Focus on using simple descriptions of the character's actions to convey what they are feeling and thinking. It is challenging but incredibly rewarding if you do it right. Think of a 1970s naturalist movie: we have a wild expanse, we have a protagonist portrayed very realistically, we gain no artificial insight into what they think or feel except what we can directly observe. This kind of storytelling requires patience but can be very powerful.

Imagine putting this kind of thing into prose:

Character has survived plane crash but clearly can't walk.

Spends an hour crafting a splint from a sapling with a pocket knife.

Crawls down a steep ravine with an empty jerry can.

Fills the can at a stream, then slowly, agonizingly starts crawling back up the ravine wall.

Gets to the top, collapses, grabs the can, and pulls himself back toward the wrecked plane.

Character reaches toward plane where some baggage is still hanging in the upside down fuselage.

Character dislodges the plane and it suddenly slides down the ravine, setting off a minor avalanche that buries it in rock at the bottom of the ravine.

Character puts his forehead to the ground and gently cries.

You don't need to be told what is going on in his head. You can imagine it. It becomes that much more powerful because the reader goes through the agony and the frustration with the character. Again, there are many, many ways to convey things without using two characters in dialogue to explain them to your reader. Even if you don't want to go to the extreme of staying firmly "external" to the character's thoughts, you can use a different pace of storytelling intentionally as a bridge or counterpoint in the story as a whole. This is a great way to have character development and maturation take place and make it believable.

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Have you tried converting the internal dialog to the one character talking to him/herself? Or even talking to the internal monalog? Talking to yourself does not mean you are a crazy person... lots of people will do this when alone as sometimes, you need to hear your thoughts vocalized and the reason you don't think those thoughts would work.

It is essentially what happens in the Dr. Who story that was suggested to you (you'll need some serious background to get to the point where you can understand it), but that is essentially all the Doctor does, is talk to himself or personifying an object. Another great series that uses it much more frequently is Archer, where several characters will have to hold a scene all on their own, and must talk there way through it (Archer and Lana often get these scenes... Pam has minor ones... Malory has a whole episode where she has one line of dialog with another actual human... and she's speaking in the numerous scenes she is in... and yes, it is awesome.). If you want a single movie, try Cast Away, in which Tom Hanks is alone and isolated from humans for several years and bounces ideas off of Wilson... a soccer ball with a painted face on it, for much of the movie... and can get some viewers very emotionally invested in Wilson's well being. Apparently, Wilson has a "script" where all his responses are given, so Tom Hanks could know what his character is supposed to be reacting too, but this half of the conversation is never portrayed on screen.

The trick in all of these is they manifest in typically two sided question/answer sections. If talking to yourself, you ask and answer the question, essentially debating yourself in every action. It shows how your character prioritizes the situation. If you're talking to a stand in for a human, that doesn't speak, this can manifest in distinct voices in spoken dialog that the human does... or can equally manifest in the human explaining his actions to the object, with occasional emotional responses to what the human percieves as the the object mouthing off. I tend to write dialog on the fly, so my trick with this is to write out both sides of the conversation, but give my beta readers an edited cut where I removed the object's dialog.

Often, this develops a "relationship" where a rational and emotional side of the character evolves... there's a famous saying that "Character is what you are in the dark". Basically, everything the character is, is best revealed when no one is watching... this is your time to shine and establish your character's driving emotions and logical examination... typically the emotional aspects get the vocalization if the speaker is logical, and can easily get to the point in the self-argument that his reactions to the logical's correct assertions can be wonderful scene ending gags... Imagine a vocal emotional telling the silent logical that fearing bears in the cave he is going to camp in was silly... only for a roar to issue from somewhere in the cave and the emotional to quip about how the silent logical better not say "I told you so" or some other appropriate surrender or defeat of his argument. It's funny, it's silly, but it also relatable as hell... Who loves being told they're wrong? Especially hearing it from your self.

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Are chapters with a single character inherently more difficult for an average reader to connect with?

And why that should be?
I mean, I don't have the average reader preferences (nobody has, probably, and we could discuss who is your average reader depending on the genre and the demographics) but there is no reason why single-character scenes should be more difficult.

You are absolutely right when mentioning dialog: it is a great way of keeping a scene dinamic and interesting. When done right.

But ultimately you have to be good at writing dialog and dialog must be consistent with your character to work out well. A poorly written dialog can be perceived as stiff, useless or just unimportant, and the "average" reader will bore through it anyway.
So, your question can be turned around completely: isn't a well built, single-character scene easier to write?

My point is that for both things there are requirements to meet and pitfalls to avoid, depending on the plot points, the situation and the characters involved. It also tends to depend on the kind of writer you are: someone is more apt to dialog scenes, where someone else is more prone to long single-character scenes and descriptions (I remember someone mentioning H.P. Lovercraft as one of the latter kind of writers).

There are differences in readers too, of course. Some will enjoy your single-character scenes as your protagonist struggle in the wilderness. There is no point in forcing dialog in a scene if you, as writer of the story, feel no need to.

You have to trust your internal narrator telling you that's the way the scene is meant to go.

On a side note, regarding your problem with your feedback-givers not feeling attached with the main character, I'd give it time. That's not exactly a sign of lacking a dialog scene. Personally, I rarely grow fond of a character overnight, so unless your chapters are 50 pages long each, I wouldn't lose my mind over it.

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A chapter generally needs a miniature conflict and arc of its own, and as such must have some kind of tension. As you pointed out, having multiple characters makes it somewhat easy, but a character that's alone seemingly can't bring a conflict or arc about.

Here, one has to shift the focus to internal conflict. In the novel I'm writing, I've recently come across such a dilemma, as a couple of chapters of the novel is covering a young girl who's smuggled herself out of her city in a crate... well, sitting around in a crate and scavenging for food and drink when she knows she won't be seen leaving said crate.

She doesn't say a word, however, what she does do is wrestle between regretting her bid for freedom and standing by it, reflecting on the irony of pursuing freedom by trapping herself in a box, thinking about her sister (who was the only part of her home that she truly loved) and dreaming of what she thinks her destination is (setting her up for a payoff when she ends up anywhere but where she intended).

So yes, either shift to internal conflicts, or as I alluded to in the last example, use the alone time to demonstrate the characters' expectations of the future in order to set up future conflict.

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Without reading the results I have no idea if you disjointed things trying to compensate for a lack of inter-character interactions, I do know you can have quite successful narratives without including multiple characters mainly by including the "internal dialog" of the character you do have. You're doing that but using a tense that I find really problematic, I think that to foster reader engagement with the character the reader needs to understand what the character is going through, as they are going through it. In short I would look closely at a present tense personal approach to these chapters, I feel this will increase the intensity and immediacy of the character's experiences as seen by the reader and increase character engagement.

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Without the text, it's hard to judge. However, I think your problem come from a lack of feeling. Having internal thoughts, flashbacks and descriptive behavior (not necessarily swearing out loud) of the protagonist is good. But you need the reader to connect to the character and the best way to do that is to use emotions. The stronger the emotion, the better.

The best way to make people care about your character is to make the reader feel for him/her. Make your character suffer, being sad, scared or in pain. Make the reader understand why the character feel this way. Use the empathy of your reader. Empathy connect people and it also work for book character.

Don't be afraid of overdoing it. It's harder to connect to people through words, so be precise and use details. If your character goes through a blizzard, he's not just cold. He is frozen, his fingers are burning, and although he is happy to no longer feel the pain in his feet, he is worried that he no longuer feel anything in his feet. He his scared and lonely, the dusk would be there soon and it would be impossible for him to find his way in the dark. If he doesn't find a shelter before then, he will probably freeze to death.

I hope this last paragraph help you understand what I mean. I'm french so I'm sure you could do better but it was just to illustrate my point.

Edit in response to comment:

If you already did all that and people still doesn't care, try adding a reason to why he wants/needs to go home. Is someone waiting for him? Is someone sick/young/unable needing him? Does he have a mission to accomplish? Dreams to fulfil? Why can't he stop here and die? Why must he survive?

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