Last year I published four very long essays on my site in a series called “The Key Conditions for Reader Suspense.” The folks at SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) liked them and wanted to reprint them on their site. Of course, as I went through those essays I found things to revise and add. We published the revised essays in a twenty-seven part series. Read those more recent versions here.
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.
T.C. Boyle is one of my favorite writers. He saved me in my undergraduate program. I was buying the The Best American Short Story, Pushcart, and O’Henry anthologies. I was reading for my coursework. And so much of it bored me to death. And then one day I began reading “The Ape Lady in Retirement” and my eyes hung out because finally the text was interesting. Finally someone wrote a story I could read start to finish.
I immediately bought his anthologies–Greasy Lake, If The River Was Whiskey, Descent of Man. I was in heaven. Now, not all of his stories worked magic on me. But when I was having a hard time finding one story in a whole anthology, his books seemed like a treasure trove.
He didn’t do as well in his novels. Oh, the writing was just as good. The characters and descriptions just as odd and stunning. But he didn’t keep my interest. The problems never built into anything. Nevertheless, I loved him.
I’ve been having a brief conversation with him and the fan boy in me is delighted to finally talk to this guy. And after reading an interview with him, I realize why he probably spoke to me. While the other literary fiction authors were following the tastes of the fringe group, Boyle at least wanted to entertain.
In his interview he says.
Everybody has forgotten that literature, like all art, is, at root, entertainment. It is supposed to entertain you. It’s not supposed to be some conundrum to be resolved by some professors in the university. It’s not a game. It’s not masturbation. It’s art. And I think great art is great on all levels. But the first level on which it must be great is that it must be entertaining.
Amen, brother Boyle. Amen!
Here the full Boyle AWP interview.
However, I still think he misses the mark. In it he says about bestsellers:
But it’s mainly vampire books and Tom Clancy and all the rest of it. I don’t understand why we can’t make our books more available to everybody-not by compromising what we do, but by popularizing them, getting them out to the public.
I think that now we don’t have great editors. We have editors who are basically trying to hold on to their jobs and who publish good books once in a while. They’re basically cheerleaders for the books. They’re not editors, really. They’re incapable of being editors; they don’t need to be. Because editing is done-self-editing is done-through the apprenticeship in the writing programs. Nearly everyone from my generation on to your generation and beyond will have been through an MFA program. It’s just the way it is now. It’s a different world. It’s essential.
I’d like to suggest that Boyle, despite his love of entertainment, still misses the mark in his interview because you cannot popularize something that only appeals to a small market. The reason why Stephenie Meyer, Patterson, et al sell exponential circles around folks like Don DeLillo or Louise Erdrich is because Meyer and gang are very good at delivering what the largest portions of the reading public want. They deliver types of entertainment that DeLillo and Erdrich do not. (And I mean “entertainment” in a very broad sense.)
We could point at the Oprah effect (whether you like it or not, Mr. Cold Mountain) and say that’s not true. It’s all PR and marketing. But that assumes publisers are idiots. And while some of them may be, I think it’s an extreme assumption. Publishers are in it for the love AND money. And you can be sure that the board of directors is looking for smart, money people to lead the companies. You don’t make money, you’re fired.
Which means that IF the publishers found literary fiction sold like hotcakes they’d promote it like hotcakes. But literary fiction too often fails to entertain anybody but a handful of fringe readers. And so trying to popularize it can only have a limited effect. When people are thirsty, not many are going to pass up tall glasses of ice water for the pickled jalapenos at the end of the line.
Meyer, Clancy, Grisham, Roberts etc are masters of entertainment. And, like it or not, that’s the main reason the small portion of the public who actually read go to fiction.
I think it’s fine to cater to the fringe audience if that’s your pleasure. But I think it’s ridiculous to think such fare is better than what most people enjoy. Or that it deserves any special veneration. The MFA programs I’m familiar with seem, by and large, to miss the point. Instead of teaching the meat of fiction (entertainment) they focus on teaching students to serve up the parsley with great pomp. And when the customers go elsewhere to get the meat they crave (or the salad for you vegans), they respond by saying the customers are simply too dumb to get it or have no taste.
Now, I’m not saying the folks I work with in the MFA program are idiots. Or jerks. Almost everyone I’ve met has been extremely nice and smart. They have great insights. But there is a strong pressure in that culture, amost a moral pressure, to think about fiction this way. And it’s based on their tastes.
I think we all do this. 90% of what’s out there is crap. But it isn’t, really. The truth is that 90% of what’s out there simply doesn’t appeal to us. And so because it doesn’t deliver the goods, it’s crap to us. The problem is when we don’t realize the difference and begin to think that because we don’t have the taste for something that it’s garbage.
It’s not.
And that’s one thing the gentle and smart people in my program have shown me. I’m just as liable to make this mistake as anyone.
So what MFA programs need to do is teach fiction. The meat. As well as the parsley. They need to teach all the genres, not just one. Alas, for the meat you have to go to communications departments to even talk about it. And then hope you find someone like Dolf Zillman, Bryant Jennings, Jenefer Robinson, or Peter Vorderer.
Which leads me to the next point. Boyle is wrong about editors and writers. The majority of the authors that actually sell never set foot in an MFA program. MFA’s teach students to write for a small fringe market. And so they’ll dominate that fringe market, but not the big markets. Not what most people actually read.
Since I haven’t worked with any editors in that so-called golden age of editing, I cannot comment on the difference. But I do know that the editors I and other authors have worked with do many edits on the projects they oversee. They are thorough. They want it to be the best story it can be. It’s true they won’t take something that’s a complete mess and work on it. But why should they? There are so many better manuscripts out there it only makes sense.
Anyway, I love Boyle. Probably becasue he loves plot and story as much as language. His shorts saved me in my undergrad program. They were one of the few interesting things I read. I just am dismayed that these writing programs are so far off in the weeds.
It’s here. I finally figured out how to:
The course that’s open for applications is called Create Story Ideas That Beg to Be Written. It’s purpose is to transform you into a story idea machine.
And you can be there in six weeks. Before the end of the year.
I will be working with only a small set of people. I can’t accommodate more and give you the one-on-one feedback you need. And so you need to apply to get in.
The deadline for applications is midnight, October 27th. So contact me now to get the application instructions.
A cracking good story idea requires five critical elements. Until you have all five, you’ll struggle to plot. You’ll write a few scenes and run out of gas. You’ll feel like the story just isn’t going anywhere. And that’s because it isn’t. It can’t. A story isn’t a story without all five elements.
However, once you develop these five things, your story will suddenly roar to life. There are a few other elements that are important as well, but these five things form the core of the story setup.
In this course you’re not going to merely learn about all of those story elements. You’re going to go deep and learn what can only be learned by actually doing the work and developing story idea after story idea with personal one-on-one feedback from someone who knows what they’re doing.
When you finish, you won’t just know story theory. You will be a story idea machine. And you will be that because you have put in the work. The right work.
Again, this is not a course full of lectures and videos. This is a course where you’re going to work. And develop the insights and skills that only come from doing the work.
You’re actually going to:
It’s going to:
You are going to learn how to develop killer story ideas on purpose instead of on accident. Which means you’ll be able to do again and again. Reliably. Like clockwork.
Here are the details.
The focus of the class is not on learning about story, although you will do that. The majority of your time will be spent on developing stories.
You can’t become a carpenter by watching videos and reading books about it. You have to get out on the work site, cut wood, and pound nails. You have to make the mistakes all beginning carpenters make, get feedback, and improve. The same goes for writing. And you’re going to work in this class. You develop 21 story setups. In fact, you develop more because the 21 are just the ones you turn into me. And with each one your skills, insights, and abilities grow.
In the beginning, your setups will be bare bones. By the end, they’ll be fully developed setups that beg to be written. Setups you can use to immediately write the first draft of your novel, whether that’s in outline or chapter form.
Here’s what you do each week.
Week 1. November 2-7
Week 2. November 9-14
Week 3. November 16-21
Week 4. November 30-December 5
Week 5. December 7-12
Week 6. December 14-19
As you can see, in this class you develop story idea after story idea after story idea. I didn’t detail it above, but each week you will also be lifting the hood on your favorite stories and actually seeing how they work. Story after story after story. In this class, you are marinated in the work of developing characters, THOMs, goals, obstacles, settings, casts, and more. And because of that, each week will not only bring an explosion of insights, but new skills and abilities.
Every week you get two private, one-on-one, live sessions with me where you get encouragement and feedback on what you’ve developed. And then we’ll work as a group, applying the principles and brainstorming even MORE ideas for each other’s stories.
At first you might feel a bit shy and worried about your ideas and abilities. But you’ll soon get over that. By the end of the course you’ll be one of those people that can generate terrific ideas easily. And you’ll be able to do that because you will have put in the work to become a different writer.
The normal cost of the course is $899. But because this is the first time I’ll be running through it, and we’re likely to run into a few kinks that need to be worked out, I’ve dropped the price to $599. I personally guarantee my course. You’ll be totally oh-my-gosh-I’m-so-happy-I-took-that-class satisfied, or I’ll give you your money back. No questions asked.
Now’s your chance to stop spinning your wheels. I can’t tell you how much I wish I’d had something like this when I’d started:
When you finish, you will be a story idea machine.
You won’t know plotting. That’s a different course and set of skills. You won’t know how to write chapters. But you’ll know how to create the engine that powers all the rest of that. You’ll know how to create the core that makes awesome plots and chapters possible.
If you want to take this course, click the button below and contact me. I will tell you exactly how to apply.
I’m not going to be able to accept everyone who wants to take the class. I have a very strict limit on the number of students I can work with. So you need to get your application in before the deadline of midnight, October 27th.
Don’t wait!
I want you to think about Ed Smylie, who helped save the Apollo 13 astronauts with his duct tape contraption. What if the authorities had come to Ed, but instead of saying, “Look, we need to fit the round CO2 scrubbers into the holes for the square ones,” they’d said, “We want you to do something; it involves thinking.”
Ed would have blinked. Waited. “Yeah?”
“That’s it. Something. A lot is riding on this.” And then maybe they urged him on with a significant wave of their hands.
Can you see Ed at this point?
“Sure.” He’d say. “I’ll get right on that.” Then he’d wonder who put these guys up to this practical joke.
Do you see how impossible it is when you frame things that way?
To come up with solutions, you have to have a clue about what it is you’re trying to do. Even if it’s just a rough idea. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to fix a space ship, roast hotdogs, or write a story.
Once we have a rough idea of what we want to accomplish, the mind automatically kicks into gear to perform its wonders. Until we do that, we’re going to be like Ed in the example above—staring at a blank wall, wondering if our superiors aren’t a bit cuckoo.
So what are we trying to do?
Think about your reader. Is it a woman? A teen? A crazy dude? Do you remember my book tour with Larry Correia in 2009 and the guy who, during a booksigning / doughnut party at a Phoenix Barnes & Noble, proclaimed my book to be true? Aliens really were eating our souls and enslaving humanity. They were lizards living in the hollow portion of the earth.
The point is: what are your readers hoping your story provides them? In fact, since you’re the first audience, what do YOU want from your stories? Why do you read?
I want you to write down five stories you really like. Movies, TV shows, novels, short stories, plays—I don’t care the genre or type. Just write down five. Do it now. Here are five random stories I like.
This is going to be a powerful exercise for you. It was for me the first time I did it in a class on interior design.
A few years ago, Lovely Wife and I were building a house. We wanted to make our living space sing. We wanted our surroundings to make us happy, but we didn’t quite know how to go about doing that. So we took a class on interior design, hoping to learn the principles involved.
Except when we showed up in the first session and saw the many different design styles, it overwhelmed us. Some styles were ethnic (Southwestern, Asian, French, Gothic, Pygmy), some philosophical or religious (Zen, Feng Shui), many were artistic (Modern, Arts & Craft, Minimalist, Art Deco, College Room Mate ), a lot were mixtures. Some were about making statements and creating moods, some about practicality (here’s a taste of those styles). How in the world were we going to learn this?
Luckily, we had a very perceptive teacher. She knew that most of us were there, not to learn all the styles, but to decorate our own houses. So in our second session, she brought dozens of home magazines. She spread them out on the tables we were sitting at and told us we would go through the magazines. When we found a picture or image we liked, we were to rip that page out and put it in our personal stack. So for about 45 minutes we looked and ripped and looked and ripped. Lovely Wife and I each ended up with a pile of a few dozen pictures.
Then the teacher told us to spread our pictures out in front of us and look for things that the images had in common. Colors, features, design elements.
I spread my pictures out. Lovely Wife spread out hers. And it was like magic. Boom! Right there in front of us. I loved arches and eyebrow windows. Loved dark blues and purples mixed with creams and whites. Loved the color of blond wheat and a navy blue sky. I loved wood. Loved Arts & Craft with a few tweaks.
Lovely Wife’s pile was equally revealing.
The teacher then said, “This is your personal style. This is what’s going to make you happy.” She told us that when designing the rooms in our house, that we should think about their function and merge them with these elements. And if any of us were to work with clients, we’d do something similar with them and find out their wants and likes.
With our styles now beginning to be fleshed out, Lovely Wife and I went to work. Some of her elements and colors overlapped mine. Some didn’t, like her idea of sleeping bliss: a bed with sheer red drapes hanging from some lamp shade contraption in the middle.
I told her I didn’t know if I could keep my man card and sleep in that bed. She decided I should keep my man card, but said she couldn’t sleep in a plain-walled zen room. We compromised. She got textured red on the walls. I got a bed without too many frills. We came up with designs for our spaces that did what we wanted them to do.
But we couldn’t have done this if we hadn’t identified what we were after.
So I’ve adapted that visual art technique used in the design class for our purposes. It’s just as powerful with literary arts. Which is why I want you to write down five stories.
I want you to take a moment and identify what you’re after, in a big picture general way.
I can’t do this for you.
You and I are different. Just like Lovely Wife and I are different. While our tastes may overlap in some places, they’re going to diverge. You don’t want to write my stories. You want to write YOURS.
So write down five stories. Then write down what you really enjoyed, over all, about each of those five stories. You might do this on five pieces of paper. What did you enjoy with each of the main story elements—character, setting, problem, plot, and text? What kind of an experience did they give you? What drew you to them in the first place?
You don’t need to go all crazy detailed on me with this and do a twenty page report. Just hit the highlights. The stuff that will fit on one page without writing in four point font.
When you finish that, step back and look at all five pieces of paper side by side. What common elements do you see? Circle them.
This is your style. This is what, in general, you’re going for.
If you found the exercise insightful, do five more stories. Ten is such a nice number.
I’m going to predict that 99% of the things you identify have to do with what the story did to you. The stories made you laugh, smile, scream, want to fall in love again. They made you curious or jealous or feel some type of desire (be a Ninja king, strong, beautiful). Maybe they gave you insight. Maybe they affected you so profoundly that it changed, if even in a small way, how you decided to live your life.
Stories–the ones people pay money for; the ones people stay up until four a.m. reading with a flashlight; the ones people tell their friends about–make people feel things.
A while back I wrote about this in three parts. I believe the things you’ll read in those short posts, if you don’t know them already, will change how you think about stories. They did for me. And it all begins with lipstick.
Okay, I hope at this point you are getting a general idea of why readers pay money to read the stories we create. Why YOU pay money and spend countless hours reading what others write.
This is the first step in being able to produce on purpose, not on accident. This is the first step to becoming the Ed Smylie of fiction—understanding what you, as a writer, are trying to do.
This week, keep your eyes open. Notice what stories do to you. Notice how you feel about different characters and plots. If you feel like taking it farther, notice the effect of different beginnings and ends of novels, chapters, or scenes. Notice the effect of different ways authors describe characters, places, and actions.
Of course, while knowing these general objectives is critical, it’s not enough. You need to know what you’re reaching for with the current story, the current characters, the current plot. How do you translate all this general stuff to the specifics of the story in front of you? Do you have to define everything up front? And what if you don’t know what you want in the current project anyway? What if you are clueless and have nothing but a handful of random ideas that for some reason are generating electrical sparks? What do you do then?
In the next post, I’ll talk more about those questions and where the how-to’s fit into all of this, and then we’ll get into the principles of invention.
For more in this series, see How to Get and Develop Story Ideas
You can read the transcript of my remarks at the American Librarian Association (ALA) conference in Chicago on July 11 below as well as the supporting information.
I am so happy to be here. And I’m happy share some good news. David McCollough, the Pulitzer prize winning historian shared this fact in his commencement speech at the University of Utah this spring. “There are yet “more public libraries in America than there are McDonalds.” [Cheering]
We have not yet been assimilated!
Of course, this is due in a large part to you, the librarians who care for the collections and take care of the patrons. Which is why I think you deserve a big round of applause. Give yourselves a hand. [Applause]
I want to start my remarks with two quotes.
Ray Bradbury was recently interviewed in a NY Times article He said, “I don’t believe in colleges and universities.” This is what he said, “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries.” He said this because when he graduated from High School he didn’t have enough money to go to college. So he went to the library three days a week for ten years.
The next quote is from the great poet Dylan Thomas–“Do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light”–that guy. He said, “My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.”
If you look at Bradbury and Thomas, they read, not because there was some grade involved, not because someone went after them with a stick—they read from hunger. From thirst. They read with wild abandon because they found in reading something they couldn’t find elsewhere.
I want to suggest one thing they found was a drug. [Laughter] I’m not speaking in metaphor. I’m talking about real physical response. As real and physical as the response you get when you or I take aspirin, brandy, or crack. Well, I hope we’re not taking crack. [Laughter]
When we think about drugs we think about pills, smoke, injections. But those are simply one set of delivery mechanisms for chemicals that trigger a physical response. There are other delivery mechanisms. Other triggers. One of them is fiction.
Now I don’t have time today to detail how this works. But I will write it up on my website for those who are interested. The key thing to remember is that fiction, the kind of fiction we love, the kind that keeps us up at night sitting on the edge of the tub or locked in a closet with a light, the kind of fiction goes beyond cognition, beyond data and facts. We find it so pleasurable precisely because it triggers and guides a physical response.
So how does all of this apply to science fiction and fantasy? Here’s the deal. And here’s where we come to our topic. Science fiction and fantasy is, for our youth, one of the most powerful gateways drugs into the fictive experience. Of course, there are ideas in science fiction and fantasy that ripple out to the society. But even if there weren’t, the happy side-effect of an addiction to this drug is improved literacy. And we all know how much that impacts.
Now I know those of you who work with young adult circulation have seen this. But I thought it might be interesting to get some actual numbers so we can start to gauge the scope of the science fiction and fantasy effect.
My interest in this began when I saw the results of the latest NEA survey. They have this graph showing reading rates in all age groups dropping horribly since 1982. By 2002 the graph is taking a nose dive. Then in 2008 everything turns around. And among the young adults (18-24), we see the biggest increase—9%.
I saw they had a genre preference question in this survey. Of course, I wondered about science fiction and fantasy. So I contacted the NEA and dug into the details. It appears that 34% of the 18-24 group say they like to read science fiction and fantasy. That’s a big number. That’s 1 in 3.
Of course, I wanted another data pont, so I went to BookScan and asked for data on book sales. Because the wonderful people there love librarians and Tor Books, they said of course. We looked at juvenile fiction sales from 2004-2008. What we saw was that science fiction and fantasy grew 144% during that period. All the other genres only grew 23%. We also saw that science fiction and fantasy currently make up almost 30% of the juvenile fiction market. So about 1/3.
Now there are some problems with the BookScan data. Yes, it only cover 60-70% of the market. It’s not in Wal-mart, grocery stories, and a few other places. But what’s more problematic for this issue is that they don’t break up the juvenile sales by age. It includes everything for folks one month old to age eighteen. So I’ve got books like Go Dog, Go in the dataset along with Twilight and Go Dog, Go isn’t categorized as fantasy. [Laughter] My suspicion is that if we narrow it down to the middle grade and YA group, we’ll see more science fiction and fantasy.
So I needed someone who did break it up by age. Well, who does that? You do. Libraries do. Besides, a lot of youth don’t have the $ to buy lots of books. So I went to some libraries in Utah and Ohio and got their YA fiction circulation stats. Here’s what I found: 60-80% of the YA fiction circulation is science fiction and fantasy. This does not include graphic novels or magna. It’s text fiction.
Folks, this is a big drug. I don’t know what part science fiction and fantasy played in the rise in reading rates, that would require a larger and more rigorous study. But I can tell you this: We want to see the impact of science fiction and fantasy on our society? We’re seeing it right now.
This large effect makes sense because science fiction and fantasy deliver experiences that are intersting to and matter to youth. It’s chock full of and encounter with the strange, weird, and wonderful; adventure and danger; doing something meaningful; being someone special, someone desireable, someone wanted in the group. All that coming of age stuff. So no wonder it’s a huge gateway drug.
I know that it was in my case. I wasn’t a reader. I don’t think I read more than twenty or twenty-four book from kindergater to sixth grade. I look at the little fellows in my local school today and they read that many titles in the first six months of the first grade. But I didn’t. I wasn’t a reader. I do remember loving the look and feel of these small chubby books. [Laughter]
I would take them them up to the librarian to check them out. She’d look down at me. “Are you going to read all that?” she’d ask. “Yes,” I’d say. Of course, it was lie. [Laughter] It was a huge lie because I would take them home and put them up on my dresser and just look at them. Just loving the look and feel. And then when it was time to check them in, I’d take them back and give them to the librarian. “Did you read all that?”
“Yes,” I’d say. And that’s how I became an author–lying to librarians. [Laughter]
Now in sixth grade my sister, we were in the car, I had four sisters and we had one TV, and so you had to reserve the time for your programs. So my sister says, “I have to watch The Hobbit for school.” Now I don’t know anything about The Hobbit. It sounded like a romance. [Laughter] I protested. No, way–we’re not going to watch some dumb kissing thing.
“No,” she said. “It’s got dragons.”
“You’re lying,” I said.
I was convinced I was doomed. But it didn’t matter. We watched it. It had dragons. And I loved the experience so much I wanted another hit. Shortly thereafter my mother and father went on a business trip. I went over to my buddy’s house. So the first day we come up out of the basement to go to school and I said, “Oh, I’m feeling sick.” So my buddy went off to school and I went back down into the basement and played hookie for two days and read The Hobbit.
It was amazing. More amazing than the movie. I had to have that experience again. And so I read Ursula LeGuin, Patricia McKillip, Donaldson, Terry Brooks. I kept reading because it delivered a cognitive-physical experience I loved. Of course, I didn’t put it that way back then. It was more along the lines of, duuuude. [Laughter]
Now I got a BA in English and a Masters in Accounting. Those degress required a lot of reading. But I didn’t develop the requisite literacy skills in school. I developed them in science fiction and fantasy.
And so when I started to write I was naturally drawn to fantasy. Having experienced this wonderful thing, I wanted to produce that and share it with others. So this novel that’s coming out has the gosh-wow I still love. It’s set in a world were humans are ranched by beings of immense power. There’s a young man and young woman in terrible trouble. So it has monsters, magic, and mayhem. But I also found fantasy big enough to let me explore other things that have become more important to me as I’ve aged. Like family, sacrifice, and redemption. And I hope people enjoy all that. But ultimately, I hope this book does for someone else what The Hobbit did for me and opens a door to a wonderful addiction. And, of course, as a powerful side-effect, improves the literacy of some rascal or rascaless. [Laughter]
I want to end where we began with that Thomas quote.
“My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.”
That kind of wild abandon will happen when the drug takes effect. And for many of our youth, probably at least one in three, that’s going to be when they ingest a few ounces of SF & Fantasy.
Thank you.
[Applause]
Emotion is not a cognition, although cognition plays a part. It’s not just in your brain. It involves a physical response, which means it involves chemicals.
We sometimes forget that our bodies produce a staggering number of chemicals. Sometimes they produce in response to external stimuli—the sun triggers the creation of vitamin D, ingested sugar triggers the production of insulin, the sight of a ravening lion standing not five feet away with nothing between him and me produces, among other things, adrenaline.
Lots of these reactions, we don’t notice. But there’s a whole group of these physical responses that we do. We lump them together and call them emotions.
Jenefer Robinson in her wonderful book Deeper Than Reason, explains, “Emotions are our way of responding to events in the environment (either external or internal)” that matter to us. They are “physiological changes that register the event in a bodily way and get us ready to respond appropriately.” Fight, flight, pursue, woo, investigate. They focus our attention, get us ready to take action, and communicate all this to others.
So while I might not feel the production of vitamin D, I do feel the fear of the lion. Fear is a wonderful thing—it keeps us alive. It raises our heart rate, pumps us full of drugs that prepare us to flee or fight. The emotion writes itself on our faces in order to, among other things, communicate the situation to those around us, warning others and calling for help. It is a physical response. Yes, there are cognitions involved, but there are also chemicals.
The latest research on emotion shows that emotion is a process that involves three things. (1) An affective appraisal of our environment that signals something important to us—a threat or opportunity. (2) This triggers an immediate physical response (chemicals, galvanic skin response, accelerated heart rates, facial expressions, etc.). (3) At this point cognitive (conscious thought) appraisals kick in and help us monitor the situation and moderate the physical response.
For example, I go out to the yard and step on this thing that slithers through the grass. The sensory signals immediately trigger a physical response to get me ready to flee or fight–heart rate, adrenaline, etc. Then I notice the snake is far too long. I look closer. It’s the garden hose. My physical response changes. I laugh, feel relief. Research has shown that when we read text, the same process occurs. We do indeed have the same types of physical responses. In some cases they’re more intense.
Now here’s the thing. This physical response is triggered not just by threats and opportunities we perceive with our senses, things out there. It is also triggered by thought. Thoughts deliver a physical response just as surely as crack does. We have the research to prove it. In fact, sometimes thought delivers a more powerful physical response. Here’s but one example. Did you know that people with a phobia of snakes have a stronger reaction to reading a passage about snakes than they do to the actual critter?
This is where fiction comes in. As I stated in my speech, fiction, the kind of fiction we love, the kind that keeps us up at night sitting on the edge of the tub or locked in a closet with a light, the kind that lingers in the fabric of our clothes and our hair long after we close the book, that kind of fiction goes beyond cognition, beyond data and facts. That kind of fiction triggers a physical response.
It does this, and this is one difference from emotion triggered by our own thoughts or the sensory data we pick up from the world, because fiction, by its very nature, its very structure, is actually guiding our emotional response. Our physical response. This management of the response is in fact one of the things that we find so pleasurable about it.
To find out more, please read:
You may then want to search out texts by Dolf Zillmann, Jennings Bryant, and Peter Vorderer.
I think the workshop version 2.0 went very well. I had a wonderful time. Click on the “Writing” menu above AND the category link on the sidebar to see the many blog entries I’ve made about writing principles.
Remember the 10 to 20’s. I would love to hear your experience with them.
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…and a great series it is too! Wow, I wish I’d read it back in the late 80’s when I made my first pass at writing fiction. 🙂 Much thanks again!
Glad to hear you found it useful.
Great series of articles, John. I too have been collecting info about suspense creation over my long writing career, and just wanted to let you know that I’ve drawn upon several of your points (with acknowledgement, of course) in an article I wrote a little while back on my Books and Writing Blog.
http://ianirvine.blogspot.com/2011/09/41-ways-to-create-and-heighten-suspense_27.html