: Re: How do you earn the reader's trust? Recently, I have stumbled upon a problem. After releasing an issue, I think that I failed to earn the trust of my readers. My analysis is that they did

@Karen856

Given the phrase "After releasing an issue", I get the impression that you are releasing this story serially. I think is a significant part of the problem.

If you essentially ended this release of your story with this event, then the problem basically boils down to this. You had the main character do something wholly and completely out-of-character. By design, there is no in-story justification for it yet. So the reader has no idea what just happened.

In a book, where you can just turn to the next chapter and keep reading, this situation could be survivable. But even there, you would have a very limited number of pages to present some justification for this event.

But because there's no more of the story available for the time being, the reader is left to sit there and marinate on the event that just happened and how OOC it is. Without an obvious diagetic explanation, the only alternative... is that the author doesn't know what they're doing.

What happened is that you presented a cliffhanger incorrectly. The question a good cliffhanger needs to leave the audience with is "what is going to happen now?" Cliffhangers are about anticipation of a future resolution. The hero's strapped into a car driving to the edge of a cliff. That gives the audience something to speculate on.

The question you left your audience with is "... wait, what?" You've given the audience nothing to speculate on. The mechanism by which this event would be possible has not been established in your work. The possibility of the use of such a mechanism has not been established. Indeed, you even deny the audience the knowledge that the main character was under the influence of something by having all the characters assume that this was just something the main character did of their own free will.

All the audience has is OOC behavior. There is no anticipation of a resolution, merely complete confusion.

Worse still, you've introduced a mystery, but from how you describe the event, you don't treat it as a mystery. Nobody questions what happened; they accept it for what it appears to be. This encourages the reader to also not question what happened. So the fact that the main character was wholly and completely responsible will go unchallenged until finally it gets revealed (seemingly by revealing that there was a traitor all along).

And it will smell very much like retroactive continuity: back-fill intended to lionize the hero and justify something you did seemingly on a whim.

You're right that trust is an issue. But the problem ultimately comes from a seeming lack of trust on your part. You're not willing to trust your audience with more of the truth of the situation than the characters have.

So its not surprising that your audience would in turn trust the author less themselves.

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