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Ira Glass on Story and Surprise

ByJohn Brown

I found this a fascinating talk. It’s Ira Glass who is the executive producer of the This American Life radio program from Chicago Public Radio. It’s a show that merges true stories (and some short fiction) of everyday people, surprise, humor, and meaning. There’s a structure to the types of stories that they produce. It’s not a new thing. It’s used all the time in a venue many of us are familiar with. Maybe you’ll identify that venue immediately. If not, it doesn’t matter. Watch and listen. This is a fascinating talk and it highlights just how much humor, curiosity, and insight depend on surprise.

Ira Glass at Gel 2007 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

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  • Why stories follow patterns

    ByJohn Brown

    There is a lively discussion on The Passive Voice about Kris Rusch’s recent blog post which challenges the use of the term “churn out” to describe writers who write quickly. In the comments, someone said that folks also use “formula” or “formulaic” as a pejorative. Another commenter said that in computer design, they use design patterns, and suggested that’s probably a better word. Here’s my response.

    Design pattern is right.

    The people who decry familiar patterns are those that completely misunderstand one of the main purposes of fiction.

    Readers go to fiction to have an emotional experience–thrill, horror, dread, falling in love, mirth, wonder, wish-fulfillment, etc.

    Those emotions are not created out of nothing.

    They’re not created haphazardly.

    They are generated by a specific . . . pattern.

    1. You receive some stimulus–from your environment or your own thoughts or something you’re lead to think, such as via a book.

    2. You make an assessment about what’s going on and what might happen in the future and how that impacts you or someone else. There are two assessment systems. One is incredibly quick. Almost subconscious. The other is a bit slower. You can read about them in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and Jenefer Robinson’s Deeper Than Reason. Robinson even relates the science to fiction.

    3. If the assessment says it’s something that will affect you or someone you can sympathize with, you feel an emotion. The emotion focuses your attention. For example, if there’s a mountain lion stalking you, you don’t want to forget she’s there. It also prepares you to act–to pursue something desirable, avoid something that’s not, etc. It also writes that emotion on the face to communicate it to others to solicit help or warn (we are social animals).

    Okay, so certain cues or assessments are required to produce certain emotions. If the cues aren’t there, the emotion doesn’t arise.

    Certain stimuli lead to an assessment that there’s a threat. Other stimuli lead to assessments that there’s an opportunity, for love, money, sex, security, etc.

    Suspense, surprise, and curiosity have all been studied in experiments. There’s a certain structure required for each. If you take the same story, but simply change the structure, you end up with different reader effects. See more here.

    This means that a reader who wants to feel the experience of falling in love is going to have to be guided through the pattern of cues that produce the assessments that lead to the emotion.

    There are lots of variations in the pattern that will work. But we can’t give a reader the pattern for horror and expect them to feel romance.

    Duh.

    You can’t give a reader a downer ending and expect her to feel joy.

    Again, there are certain delights readers are going to certain genres for. Folks read romance after romance precisely because those romances do specific things to them. And they want to experience them again and again.

    For example, one thing romance readers love is the joy of a happily-ever-after (HEA) ending. So if that’s what they’re looking for, then that’s what the product must provide for them to be satisfied. We follow patterns, but change them enough so that the reader doesn’t get bored.

    So, yeah. Patterns. It’s like the very essence of what we’re doing.

    We are all working with patterns, whether we know it or know. And the sooner we learn what the general patterns are for the type of story we’re trying to tell, which could also be called the type of experience we’re trying to provide, the quicker we gain control over our writing.

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  • Indie Thoughts: The Kind of Competition Publishers Want

    ByJohn Brown

    David Gaughran puts it all into perspective.

    Since the huge shift to online purchasing and e-books, a common meme is that there is some kind of “discoverability” problem in publishing.

    The funny thing is readers don’t seem to have any problem finding books they love. Any readers I talk to have a time problem – reading lists a mile long and never enough hours in the day to read all the great books they are discovering.

    The real discoverability problem in publishing is that readers are discovering (and enjoying) books that don’t come from the large publishers. What these publishers have is a competition problem not a discoverability problem.

    They have reason to. I had a stab last year at estimating how much of the e-book market self-publishers have grabbed in the US, pegging it at around 25%. The much more rigorous Author Earnings reports have confirmed that estimate, showing that self-publishers had captured 30% of the unit sales on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

    * * * *

    So when large publishers say that the discoverability puzzle hasn’t been solved online, they are really expressing despair at retailers recommending books not published by them.

    And when large publishers say that online retailers haven’t matched the experience of buying in physical stores, they mean that they wish there was some way to relegate all that stuff from small publishers and self-publishers to the warehouse, and have tables piled high with James Patterson and Snooki.

    * * * *

    The fear-mongers always forget Amazon’s core philosophy: recommend the product the customer is most likely to purchase. It’s interesting to note that this is the exact opposite of traditional co-op: recommending the book that the publisher wants purchased.

    While it’s revealing to look at sites like Bookish and consider what Big Publishing would do with retail or discovery, we already know what it does with self-publishing. Exploitative vanity press Author Solutions runs self-publishing companies for HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Harlequin, is owned by Penguin Random House, and is now recommended by Publishers Weekly.

    Large publishers want to decide what gets published, what gets distributed, what gets recommended, what gets discovered, and what gets sold.

    Amazon – and the digital revolution it instigated – has made that impossible.

    Anyone can publish. Distribution has been blown wide open. Large publishers have lost power over what books get recommended and discovered too, with the agnostic approach of sites like Amazon, Goodreads, and BookBub. And large publishers have definitely lost control of what is getting sold: self-publishers have grabbed a huge chunk of the market, and more and more writers are beginning to realize they don’t need a publisher to reach readers and make money.

    This is the real reason why Big Publishing hates Amazon. Large publishers face real competition for the first time and they don’t like it one bit.

    More at Let’s Get Visible.

    Publishers have lost the barriers to entry that used to keep most of the competition out. Amazon set up a totally new distribution channel that has grabbed at least 41% of the book market.

    Forty freaking one percent!

    And of that 41% percent, it appears self-publishers have about as much of that channel as traditional publishers do.

    Think about that for a second.

    Almost half of book distribution is now out of publisher control. With no barriers, the hordes are running in to sell their books, pushing publisher books out of the good spots. The number of competitors is growing. And the publishers can’t get Amazon to relegate the riffraff to the back rooms. Can’t get them to feature only their books.

    Worse still, it appears lots of readers don’t mind that at all.

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  • A Great Post on Writing by Mette Harrison

    ByJohn Brown

    Author Mette Harrison writes a column on writing for Orson Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. I think you can read them without a subscription. This month’s column had some great insights. Here’s one fab example.

    I also recommend that if you want to write a book that readers will not be able to put down, focus on one really good story (more on this next month). I am not saying that you can’t have sub plots or minor characters. You can. But I urge you to make sure that your page count does not obscure which characters are the main ones or what their main goal is. If you have lots of different characters who are in different parts of your world, that is fine. But make sure that they are all working at different ends of the same thread, that they all end up being part of the same story. If you cannot figure out which character is the one you want your readers to care the most about, to root for most desperately, you may have too many characters.

    Good advice. There’s more.

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  • World-building the history of a place

    ByJohn Brown

    writing-excuses-the-guys2-300x139The Writing Excuses guys have posted another good podcast: this one on world-building a history.

    I wanted to add a few comments. You’ll notice that a lot of the blurbs for my novel mention my world-building, so I guess it’s a strength in my writing. However, I don’t write huge world building documents in the pre-draft stage. I do write some history, of course. But I don’t think it would take up more than a few pages. A lot of world-building happens in draft.

    It seems to me there are two levels of “history” and a lot of it can be done on-the-fly.

    1. There are small hints of CHANGE in places and people.

    Dave Wolverton taught me this one. You come upon an orchard in the woods that’s gone wild and is overgrown. It takes two lines to describe it and it gives a strong feel of past. The reader wonders who was there, what happened. Maybe you tell them. Maybe you don’t. You mention that the village Knight used to be fat but is wasting or vice versa. I find I can do these types of things usually on-the-fly as I’m writing. And I don’t need to know much about them. I just ask myself if anything has changed with the location or characters in the current scene.

    A few touches of CHANGE throughout the novel give a strong sense of history.

    2. There are events, groups, and individuals who impact or impacted your characters and their community in large ways.

    There was a war with a neighboring country not five years ago. Your characters have to travel through that land, or maybe half the male population went to war and never came back. Or perhaps your character lost his sister in a drowning he could have prevented. Or he lost her to slavers. Or perhaps there is a secret police (like the Roman couriers) who arrived two years ago.

    Again, many of these things can be thought up on the fly as you look for conflict and the stories of a place and community. However, I’ve found that it helps to ask a few key questions in the pre-draft stage to lay some (NEVER ALL) the groundwork.

    — What kind of conflicts do these nations and groups have?
    — What events have had a large impact on my character and his community? They can be terrible or wonderful events.
    — Who in the community are my characters friends and enemies? What’s the history?
    — What are the local and regional stories of events (or people) that were eccentric, odd, mysterious, dangerous, or revolutionary?

    I never get all my answers up front. But I will get some. And then as I write I just keep in mind that it’s neat to indicate change every once in a while and to briefly bring up stories from the past that relate to the current matter at hand in the present story.

    Finally, I really like the idea the Writing Excuses guys brought up of sharing multiple explanations for an event (multiple histories) when it fits and to include more than one cause, although I’m pretty sure the 80/20 rule applies to causation.

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