Advice

A Writer’s View: Audience Interest

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr)

One of the things I always worry about my return to writing is “will people want to read my work?”  My friend Serdar has analyzed this in one of his blog posts (with the winning title “If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Novel“).  He focused on novel length in many cases, and asked himself why some large works are worth the time and others are not.

What’s interesting is his next book is 230k words.  “A Bridge To The Quiet Planet” is probably clocking in around 110K.  But we both ask ourselves “Why do people care.”

We have to make it worth their time (and money), it must engage them.  I can think of two ways we may do this off the top of my head:

Something To Care About

Serdar hits on one by noting:

. . . the trick, I guess, is to package them up and offer them in a way that other people can pick up on, in their own way, what the interesting things are. Anime and manga have whole subgenres that revolve around the mastery of a skill (a sport, a game) or the deep investigation of a mundane everyday occupation. They take something that to an outsider would be meaningless and they invest it with the urgency of The Great Work Of Life And Death. It makes a striking contrast to stories that involve casts of thousands and the fate of nations but evoke little more than a gurgling snore.

You have to write about stuff people care about or make them care by getting them invested in the characters, the setting, etc.  If you can connect people to the work (often through characters) then they will buy into it.  They will give a damn.

For my own example, let’s take Yuri On Ice, the gay romance men’s figure skating drama you didn’t know you wanted, and that is a runaway hit.  I have watched it twice because I like the characters, I like humor, and I like all the substories.  I felt like things were happening to people, and thus was engaged on a subject that I frankly didn’t care about – skating.

OK I didn’t like Chris, he’s a creep, but anyway.

Something To Learn

I am a very detail driven person – which makes sense as I write books on Worldbuilding.  I love bits of revelation and backstory as the world comes into focus, as we learn more about the characters.  Even if the details aren’t relevant to the story, they help you understand things.

You can also get interest if you’ve got plenty of things revealing and being found out and pace yourself.  If people keep learning, keep finding out new things – plot-related or not – they’ll be interested.  The best things of course are revelations that tie to the plot, but having fun little details also just makes the story and characters real.

An example I’ll give from this is the under-appreciated military-sf-horror film Spectral, which I strongly recommend (warning, link has spoilers).  You get slow revelations over time, and only truly get the full story in the last five minutes.  Each little bit, each finding about the horrors the characters face, each choice to fight back, each revelation as they try to out-think the forces against them, kept me hooked.

Keep People Engaged

You can make a 10 page short story a slog and make a 500 page novel that people loose track of time reading.  It’s all how you can get them engaged.  And it determines if it was worth their time.

(Remember I do all sorts of books on creativity to help you out!)

– Steve

Information Radiators, Refrigerators, And Hoses (My Agile Life)

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s LinkedIn, and Steve’s Tumblr)

More on my use of “Agile” and Scrum  in my life!  This one isn’t quite as “life-directed” as my others, but the insights come from my personal work to be more Agile.

Lately I’ve become obsessed with Information Radiators.  As I was once inspired by Failbetter game’s public posting of their sprints and my own desire to better chart workflow, that kind of fits.

If you’re not familiar with Information Radiators, the idea is that its something (a chart, a graph) that’s easily visible and communicates information. Ideally in, say, an office or a home it’d be posted somewhere so that everyone sees it and quickly gets updated. In a situation like mine it may be a weekly update or a web page with statuses.

The important thing is that Information Radiators are clear, visible, and accessible. These are very Agile.

The opposite is something I’ve heard called the Information Refrigerator, which I’m now stealing for use in any damn conversation I can use. The Information Refrigerator is a source of information you have to rummage around to find anything. I’m pretty sure you’ve encountered these from work to softwere requiring you to dig around in charts.

The Information Refrigerator is distinctly un-Agile. It’s also just annoying.

To all of this I’d like to add the Information Hose.

The Information Hose is not an easy chart, not something requiring digging, but a graph or report that just plain deluges you with informaiton to th epoint of being harmful. You’re flooded with information, soaked, and wondering what happened – and when you try to figure it out, everything is doused in data and you can’t make sense of anything.

The Information Hose is overload. it’s not Agile (though people may think it is), it’s aggression.

I’m realizing looking back at Information Refrigerators and Information Hoses, I’ve encountered way too many of them (and, sadly, built a few). They’re disruptive, unhelpful, and in a few cases just ways to avoid responsibility – dump all the info into a Refrigerator, or spray it and leave.

When you’ve got a project you want to communicate it. You make it as easy as possible, as clear as possible – and enough as possible but no more.

Yeah, I know, not as my-Agile-Life as it could be. But I wanted to share. Plus you have a great set of terms to tell people at work when they’re messing up reports!

(By the way I do plenty of books for coaching people to improve in various areas, which may also help you out!)

– Steve

A Writer’s Life: Cover Me II: Electric Boogaloo

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr)

Sorry for all the delays in actually posting on writing.  been a weird few weeks.  So I want to talk about Book Covers again – with an interesting exercise.

I was thinking about my future writing plans.

First, the covers for the new Way With Worlds books were OK, but I realized I didn’t have the skills/intuition to have made them jazzier.  In fact, I wasn’t sure they needed to be jazzier, and realized I lacked artistic insights.

Secondly, I’ve considered revising and updating some past books, and that would mean covers.  For some I didn’t want to go purchase new art, especially for more niche works.

Third, my “Big Books” usually have paid art.  But what of smaller books, or less “eventful” books?  Sure I could buy a cover, but I had some skills, so why couldn’t I make better covers?

Thus, I set myself a project – to build 30 covers in gimp (because I am cheap) before the end of the year if not earlier.  This way I’d at least have the skills to make a decent book cover, and more than enough skills for books that might not need something jazzier.

I did this by:

  1. Using the free photos at pixabay.com when I need them.
  2. Looking at various book covers and seeing what I could learn from them about what made them “work” – from classic sci-fi to cheese romance.
  3. Finding new gimp techniques and trying them out.
  4. Trying to duplicate different genres and feels.

You can see the results at my tumblr, and I think I’ve definitely gotten better.  In fact, the improvement rate has been pretty remarkable.

This is a great technique to improve anything – build a project with no “critical deliverable” but a goal and try it out.  It could be used for more than just covers – it could be for writing, cooking, and so on.  Take what you want to learn and make a fun project out of it.

However for you indie artists, this may be worth trying yourself.  All you need is the gimp and some photos.  If you build enough skills, then you’re just some time and maybe a royalty-free (or self-taken) photo away from a book cover.

 

– Steve