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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

A Writer’s Life: Writing And The Models

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

My friend Serdar was discussing why we write and why it’s valuable.  If you haven’t read is stuff, scope it out, his Flight of the Vajra is one of my influences to write again.

He talks about why some writing fails at a point, and how writing is a way of modeling.

The tough part is for that model to be properly informed by real human behavior and real-world facts. Most of the bad writing I’ve encountered is either ignorant of the way the world works in its most mechanical aspects, or depicts models of human behavior that are either too flat or too ludicrious to pass for the real thing, or (worst of all) both of those things acting in concert.

 

He’s right on many flawed works – yet also we see flawed works be enjoyed by people.  All of us may enjoy some flawed or just outright shallow stuff – not in the MST3K/Rifftrax way – but we really enjoy them.  I know I’ve enjoyed my share of, let us be frank, pandering B.S.

I think some things appeal to people – even with flawed models of behavior and world – due to audience participation.

On the “lowest” level a story may be very flawed, but if it tickles our sweet spots, we enjoy it.  Perhaps there are many guilty pleasures here, but also things that may be profound at least in what they tell us, moments of artistic madness.  We bring these stories to life because they fit our desires.

Then there are stories that are very trope-filled. Because they’re familiar, we may enjoy them, even when they’re not exactly realistic or believable.  Our “suspension of disbelief” is a high-wire act, but because familiar themes are involved, we embrace them.  Cultural and media tropes bring these stories to life, and we power them with our belief.

Finally, there are stories and settings that come alive due to the way the creators work.  The things we “get” even if they may be alien or bizarre or unfamiliar.  These are rare and powerful works at their best.  They come to life because the creator makes something believable, even if we may have trouble relating to it, and we bring it to life because we “get” what’s going on.

Perhaps when writing, we should set goals for how we want the work to come to life.  Many of us may aspire to the last category, but there may be nothing wrong with a lot of tropes or some pandering if other ethical/personal concerns are addressed.

– Steve

A Writer’s View: The Best Is Both

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr – and hey, think this should go on the Sanctum too?)

In our semi-dialogue on writing, Serdar notes this over at Genjipress:

I’ve long felt that the best stories stood out not because they had the cleverest plots, but because they made the most compelling and thoughtful use of their material . . .

This brought me back to my concerns about complexity and simplicity in stories.  This is something I’ve wrestled with in my own fiction, and my return to straight-up writing as opposed to editing, consulting, and experimentation.  My storyline for “A Bridge To The Quiet Planet” would at times seem deep – and then shallow.  It’s a complex setting, but the plotline is more of a rolling Cohen Brothers/Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World clusterf*ck that I can sum up in a sentence, or even “Smart people do smart things for dumb reasons.”

It didn’t always seem as “clever” as I’d like, as complex.  Yet it felt right.

But when you get to the why and how, the character interactions, everything from pet cats to PTSD, it’s also insanely complex.  In fact one pre-reader noted that I needed to size chapters carefully as there’s almost too much to take in.  This is a world of internet-accessing gods, sorcerous space travel, and antigravity transports.

It’s all about the level you work on and how you make use of the material.  In fact a good story is both simple and deep/complex at the same time.

Any story must be relatable, and this requires part of it to be simple, straightforward, visceral, something to connect to.  If I can “get” a character in an expression, or see a vast sprawling epic in a single sentence (“Lord of the Rings: A mismatched group try to destroy a magical artifact to save the world”) then I can connect to something.  There’s an in, as simple as a doorway.

Yet, a story must be complex to be relatable.  We need to connect with the deeper meaning of a work, to see what it all means in context.  The hook or hooks that draws us in should be connected to a web that makes us wake up to the deepness and richness of the work.  A story must also engage us and take us over.

How can something be both simple and complex?

There’s two metaphors that I think help explain it:

  • One is a geodesic dome.  Geodesic domes are made from triangles.  A simple shape.  But these shapes link together to make strong structures.  In a good story any one piece is simple, but the fit of them makes the power and complexity.
  • The second is (forgive me) a fractal, that oft over-used metaphor.  A story is something where there’s many levels to it.  Any level could be summed up in general (like an outline of a fractal), yet if you look closer you can see complexity – that on its own could be summed up.  In addition, like a fractal, parts of a story reflect each other.

To be a good writer, you have to be able to see the parts of a story on many levels and how they relate.  Sometimes simple, sometimes complex, sometimes on their own, sometimes related.  A good writer can “zoom” in on the levels to understand them and how they connect, and bring richness to their work.  A good writer can also look at any part of a story and “get” it simply.

I think this is where two failures in writing become apparent:

  • Meaningless yet complex stories are ones where there’s no simplicity, everything is about and is presented as some giant mess that becomes unrelatable, often as there’s no hook or way to get into it.  If you can’t sum up a part of a tale simply it may really be just a pile of stuff, only complex as you’re playing conceptual Jenga.
  • Simple and shallow stories where there are hooks, but little depth.  There’s little connection or meaning, so there’s not a lot of “there” there.  In extreme cases its just a pile of tropes.

A good writer is complex and simple at the same time – no matter how complex or simple the subject actually is.

(Want to get complex and dive into worldbuilding? :et me suggest my worldbuilding books.)

– Steve