I’ve experienced yet again the miracle of manure, of starting from scratch, and following the zing.
This last week I’ve been rewriting a beginning to a novel. It’s a bit tricky because I can’t just rewrite it without constraint. Such a rewrite would cause massive changes to everything else in the book. In fact, a complete, unfettered rewrite of a beginning might end up requiring a totally different book. But Tor bought the book in hand. Besides, I don’t have time for a total rewrite even if they did want one. So the new beginning had to fit into the rest of the current story.
At three different spots where this beginning needed significant changes I have had to write a pile of cow crap because it’s all I had in me at the time. I knew I couldn’t use those plops when I finished them. But there they were.
The problem was compounded by my reading the recent Time article about Stephenie Meyer and starting to listen to Empire by Card. I have a weakness for comparing myself to others, and this time the comparison yeilded some depressing results.
Then I asked myself what wasn’t working and how I might meet the goals of those scenes a bit better. I followed my heart. But in all three cases I had to stop trying to use the brilliant words I had written originally. Not the cow crap revision, but the original stuff.
I’m not talking about the general prescription that we writers need to “murder our darlings” because the darlings are usually bad writing. I find general prescriptions to be wrong much of the time and that one in particular to make no sense at all.
In this case one of the things I had to jettison was a beginning segment that had compelled 90% of the readers who glanced at it to read more. A beginning page that snagged agents and editors. A beginning page I still loved, even after reading it as many times as I had.
But it just wouldn’t fit, couldn’t fit with the new structure. When I tried to hang onto it, I wrote crap. Which was fine. There was some good stuff in the crap. But I eventually had to trust myself and come up with something else completely.
And while I don’t know if it’s going to suck readers in like the original, I think it’s pretty dang good. Back before Card’s boot camp I would have never made it to this point. I would have given up. But this is just the process for me now. It took some time to learn and trust it. But now I know that while sometimes I can write hot. There’s no reason to despair if I don’t. Sometimes it takes a few tries before I get to the good stuff.
As for Meyer and Card, well, it’s not my goal to be a one-trick pony, now, is it. 🙂
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.
The Incredibles
The Good Guy by Dean Koontz
Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
The Sound of Music
Runelords by David Farland
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.
Almost everyone reading this knows what they like in a car. We know what we want a car to do. We can talk about acceleration, voom-voom styling, and handling. Some of us could talk about how engines and transmissions and tires all work together to create those things. We could get really technical.
But how many of us could then go manufacture a tire? Or the paint we’re going to put on the car? How about a windshield?
No?
Well, what about one little bolt? Just a little bolt. Can you do it?
There’s a difference between knowing what a thing is supposed to do, how it works, and actually building it. A lot of people can talk about the first two topics and have no idea at all about the third.
It’s the same with stories.
There are three things we have to learn to write killer stories.
What a story is supposed to do.
How the 5 parts of story—character, setting, problem, plot, and text–do that
How to come up with and develop a story idea in the first place
We authors talk a lot about the second thing. You have books and blogs galore on dialogue, plot, characters, structure, grammar, world-building, setting—you name it. Heck, the big series I wrote last year about the key conditions for reader suspense was all about how story works.
Some of us talk about the first thing. And really there’s no point in blathering on about the how-to’s if we don’t know the what-for’s, which is why I tried to highlight one of the core what-for’s in my series on suspense.
But as important as those two things are, none of it matters if we don’t know how to put it to use. We’re not reviewers or editors. We’re creators. We’re writers—the ones that invent the story in the first place. And let me tell you, knowing how a story works and how to invent one are two very different things.
I didn’t know the principles of invention when I was first starting out. And that gap in my knowledge was one of the things that held me back for years. In fact, I almost gave up my dream of writing stories because of it.
Very early in my attempts to start a career I wrote a story that won an award and $2,000. I was flown out to Cocoa Beach, Florida for a week-long workshop with amazing pros. Was published. And then I went home, finished another story (yea!), and proceeded not be able to finish another thing for five years.
Five years.
FIVE. YEARS!
And I tried.
After five years of failure you begin to wonder if maybe you didn’t get the wrong memo (what am I doing at this empty warehouse?). Your family begins to wonder that as well. You realize life is short and there are a lot of other things you could be spending your time on. You begin to think that only an idiot would spend more time on this. And you’d probably be right.
Unless, of course, you realize that what’s keeping you back isn’t a manifestation of cosmic will. Rather, it’s just a lack of understanding.
That’s what happened in my case. Just a few days before I gave up on all my dreams, the light was turned on for me. I learned some key, but simple, principles of invention that I hadn’t known. You can read the whole story here. After I learned these principles, my production took off like a rocket.
And so what I want to do in this series is share those principles with you. Hopefully, this will unleash your abilities. You might find a huge audience for your stories. You might find only the family dog will stick around to listen to them. The popularity of your stories is a separate matter. But you can’t even find out how big your audience will be if you don’t know how to finish.
So let’s start. A lot of people think that creativity is about passion. When they think of creativity, they think of someone like this.
Look at him. Brushed velvet jacket. Beard. Rakish devil-may-care hair. And that gaze. Look at that gaze! It’s full of passion. It’s coming off him in waves. In fact, we all know his inner world is a vast tempestuous sea of passion that sends ideas crashing in great surges onto the rocky beaches of his soul. And those earthly forces cannot be contained. No, he must write them, write them, write them. That’s the face of a man who will channel fire onto the written page because if he didn’t, he would surely burn.
Or maybe not.
Maybe creativity is about being like this guy.
Hello, Malcolm Gladwell. Look at him. There are so many ideas in that great blaze of brains they trip over themselves trying to get out. There are so many they kinked his hair with their electric heat. Oh, fecund mind!
Or maybe not.
Maybe creativity is all a function of being blessed.
Or maybe it’s about alcohol (or some other chemical). After all, isn’t that how Ernest Hemmingway did it?
Booze Makes Ernie Reel Smart
Or it’s about being mentally unstable.
Or it’s about having the right personality type. I remember the day of woe when I learned that I was an ENFJ but that the “natural” writers were all ISFPs!
Alas, me being a blockhead was all scientific
Or it’s about being eccentric.
Patrick Rothfuss shows us the key is crazy beardage and an Alice in Wonderland chair
Or it’s none of that. It’s about being born to it.
I wrote my first novel when I was six
Right? All of those things are what creativity is about. And if, as so clearly demonstrated by those pictures, you don’t have passionate hair, well then, forget about it. Except here’s Larry Correia, a New York Times bestseller, who has no passionate hair whatsoever.
I keep guns in my basement
Huh?!
How could that be?
Here’s how. All those ideas above about creativity–they’re rubbish. Creativity has nothing to do with passion or hair or whether you wear Argyle socks.
Nothing.
Let me show you the face of creativity.
That is Warren Ellis. Warren is my brother-in-law, except when he’s not (do not ask me to explain this). One day our fridge started to drip. The freezer would cycle through its normal thawing, and all the water would drip down into the fridge and soak up our egg cartons and pool in the vegetable crispers. It was a mess.
We defrosted the freezer we weren’t supposed to ever have to defrost, but the problem persisted. So we called Warren because he fixes things.
Warren came to our house, looked the fridge over. He declared that the freezer’s drain tube was plugged. We thought up a few ideas for cleaning it out, none of which were any good, then Warren asked if we had an air compressor. We did and hauled it in.
Warren plugged it in, let it build up the pressure, and then held the compressor nozzle to the bottom end of the tube. The compressed air went in. The obstruction flew up and out and landed on the counter. The obstruction was a fat fly that had crawled in there, gotten stuck, and died.
We poured a quart of water into that freezer, and it all flowed down into the catch pan at the bottom. Warren fixed our freezer with an air compressor.
Folks, that is creativity.
What did Warren have? He didn’t have passionate hair; I can tell you that. No. He had an objective. He knew basically how fridges worked. And he came up with a couple of options to fix the issue.
Let’s look at another example. Here’s Ed Smylie.
Ed was like Warren. He ran into some problems. Actually, the astronauts in Apollo 13 ran into some problems. Ed was tasked to help solve them. One of those problems was the fact that the astronauts were running out of air.
Ed and the others designed the solution in two days. The ground crew relayed the instructions to the flight crew. The lunar module’s CO2 scrubbers started working again, saving the lives of the three astronauts on board. Of the experience, Ed said that he knew the problem was solvable when it was confirmed that duct tape was on the spacecraft. “I felt like we were home free”, he said. “One thing a Southern boy will never say is: I don’t think duct tape will fix it.”
Ed and his crew saved the day. The made a round peg fit into a square hole. How did he come up with such a creative solution?
Ed had an objective. He knew how the CO2 scrubbers and the shuttle worked. He knew about duct tape. He came up with options.
Let’s look at a few more examples of this. I know you’ve seen some of these.
That is creativity. So is this.
And this . . .
And this . . .
Or this, if you don’t need to go so fast . . .
Smaller size, for trolling
And this . . .
And this, which is officially called a Bumper Dumper . . .
Do you really want to dig?
These fine folks had a goal. They knew the basics of how things worked. They came up with some solutions.
That’s all there is to creativity. Three things. You need to have an idea of what you’re trying to do. You need to have a basic knowledge of how things work. And you have to know how to come up with some solutions to meet your objective.
Not so mystical, is it?
But I can hear some of you complaining. Writing is different. It’s a whole other world. It’s Fiction, which is so significant we must capitalize it. It’s passion. It IS mystical. This is a matter of the heart. It’s not a fridge or space ship or some dumb hotdog roast. You cannot compare these things.
Except I can because they’re the same. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to invent a different recipe like the folks at Cook’s Illustrated, or decorate your house, or come up with a way to keep the squirrels out of your bird feeders, or make people weep in a movie theater.
What I’ve found is that when we have troubles coming up with ideas, we probably don’t know what our objectives are. Or we probably lack some understanding of how fiction works. Or we don’t know the principles of generating options.
And so we conclude it’s a mystery. It’s arcane lore.
But it just ain’t so. Can you create a redneck toilet? Then you can write a story.
Now, it’s true that a lot of people feel their way through this. They don’t know what they’re doing, but they do it. I did that. Remember: I won an award. But then I couldn’t repeat it. Couldn’t find that groove I’d stumbled into.
I don’t want to stumble around hoping to get lucky. I want to make a living at this. And if I’m going to make a living, I need to produce. Regularly. I can’t be bumbling around, hoping to create something by accident.
The good news is that we don’t have to create by accident. We can create on purpose. There are principles to invention. When we learn them, our productivity will shoot through the roof.
Finding a solution to Apollo 13’s issues might seem impossible to us. But they weren’t impossible to Ed Smylie because Ed had an objective; he knew how things worked up there; and knew how to come up with options.
My intent is that when you finish this series, you’ll know what Ed Smylie knew, except for stories.
I was invited to present a master class at the 2022 StoryMakers conference in Provo, Utah.
We all want to develop plots that delight readers. Maybe we have ideas for the characters. Maybe we have ideas for the setting. Maybe we even have a couple of scenes.
But a novel needs 40, 50, 60 or more scenes.
How do you figure out what happens next, and do it in a way readers love?
There’s one tool that can help.
Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and The Da Vinci Code all had it. So did Star Wars, Raider of the Lost Ark (1, 2, and 3), Taken, James Bond, The Wheel of Time, and thousands of other stories, TV episodes, and films.
It’s what I call the wanted object, sometimes known as the MacGuffin.
A good MacGuffin will not only make your plotting easier, it can also inject a wow factor into your story that readers love.
In this session, the writers learned what a MacGuffin really is and how you can use it to propel the plot and keep readers turning the page.
One comment that stood out was Brandon’s conscious choice to leave some explaining to chapter 6 of Mistborn. Not only did it make the beginning more accessible, but it actually created a sense of mystery about Kelsier. I wanted to know more.
Although, I would caution new writers that when Rothfuss talks about withholding, he’s talking about setting. He’s not talking about keeping the story from the reader. You can’t build suspense if you hide what’s going on, the dangers, etc. You can build a bit of curiosity, but that only holds the reader’s attention for a short time. Give information for suspense. Withhold for curiosity. They are two different things.
Take a book you love, get a colored pencil or crayon, then begin reading. When you find a passage of descrition/setting, draw a line along the side. After 30 or so pages of doing this you’ll begin to see how much setting the author puts in and how he goes about doing it. Do this with a few stories you love and you’ll begin to see patterns.
You can do the same thing with character. In fact, I just finished FEAR NOTHING by Dean Koontz. Loved how he did his characters. So I’ve got a used copy and a copy of VELOCITY and am marking them up. I’ve gotten a number of very interesting insights.
I think there are a few facets to the question posed in the title. But before we get to that, I think we need to define what a villain is.
A villain is a type of antagonist. Every story has an antagonist, someone or something that opposes the hero or heroine, even if it’s the setting as in Jack London’s “To Build A Fire” or the hero himself as in Jim Carrey’s Liar Liar. But usually the antagonist is another character in the story.
Antagonists vary in many ways. One way that’s important to the story is how sympathetic they are. The spectrum runs all the way from those who generate fear and loathing to those who generate just a little less sympathy than the hero. Note: we can never feel more sympathy for the antagonist; the moment we do, they become the hero in our eyes. The definition of the antagonist is the person we’re rooting against, the person who is working against the person we’re rooting for.
So a villain is a species of antagonist that generates fear and loathing in the reader. It doesn’t matter if they think they have good reasons for their acts. We still feel they are evil and dangerous. Examples include: Darth Vader, Sauron, the kidnapper in Mel Gibson’s Ransom, Commodus in Gladiator, or the Joker in The Dark Knight.
So here’s what I’ve noticed about effective villains.
VILLAINS & STRUCTURE
1) In a villain/hero story situation, the villain is key because the hero is reacting to the villain’s plan. It’s a total threat/danger plot.
2) So the villain has to be active. He’s the one who WANTS something. He’s the one that starts the whole story. A weak villain isn’t going after this thing whole-hog or doesn’t have the power to do it or has no urgency and will.
3) Strong villains are ruthless AND powerful. Villains also need to have some brains–we need to be worried for the hero, remember? We have to know that they’re they type of person that will take you out if you get in their way. Even if they have a well-spun way of making themselves sound ethical. But villains go beyond other antagonists in that we fear and hate them. They are evil.
4) The hero needs to be the underdog in the relationship, meaning less powerful, two steps behind, not as easily ruthless etc. The bigger the plan the more high stakes and high concept the story becomes. But it’s the villain’s plan that drives it. And they will be taking steps to counter the hero, will probably be two steps ahead most of the story.
5) As always, as with any character, the villain’s plan and motives have to be believable. Even if they are evil. The minute a villain becomes too far-fetched, they lose their power.
CHARACTER INTEREST
In addition to the role villains play in the story, there are a number of other things that make them interesting. However, these things are not anything new or different. They’re the same things that make any character (or person) interesting.
– Larger-Than-Life Attributes (as in experience, power, skill, success, position, or behavior)
– Eccentricities and Particularities
– Outrageousness
– Humor
– Beauty
– Surprise (as in against type details, reactions, motivations, or backstory)
– Inner Conflicts (as in the “ethical” dilemmas they find themselves in)
While danger and threat draws the attention, rouses interest, and can be sufficient to make a villain memorable, I think the factors mentioned above have a wonderful effect.
THE CORE QUESTION
The root question when considering villains is what pushes readers toward the fear and hate of others?
Of course, it’s relative. But there are qualities that engender these feelings in us. Selfishness, brutality, sadism, madness, cruelty, a complete disregard for others AND the power to carry their wishes out. It’s someone who poses huge, immediate, specific threats to me or those I care about and does it without any concern or with relish. The more intense these factors, I think the more we move along the spectrum towards fear and hate.
So people say the best villains are those who are the hero’s of their own story and with whom we can empathize. I don’t think this is accurate. The Joker in the Dark Knight was a great villain and may have been the hero of his own story, but never in a million years would I empathize with him. It’s true we can smpathize more with people who agonize and resist horrible acts. And some antagonists do show scruples. But not every story demands that type of antagonist. Sometimes what’s needed is someone who kills grandma horribly and says “so what” or “it was fun”–and engenders fear and hate.
One last point. “Villain” is a reader attributed characteristic, i.e. the reader is the one who labels the character. This means the person has to be a villain in the READER’S eyes, not necessarily a villain in the eyes of the culture in the story. For example, In Not Without My Daughter the hero subverted and violated the dominant story culture, and I cheered for her. The guy who was sustaining the moral order of the story culture was the villain.
ROOTING
From what I can tell, all rooting response is based on some innate sense of justice, of what’s appropriate in a situation. For whatever reason, we feel discomfort when undesireable things happen to good or innocent people. We also feel discomfort when desireable things happen to bad people. The reason why we root for someone is because they have a lack of happiness or a threat to their happiness AND we belive they deserve better. I can’t see anything else we based that deservingness upon except some inner sense of justice.
It doesn’t mean the deserving person is a goodie two-shoes. It just means that in the context of the story and what’s happening, we think the scales of justice tip, if only slightly, to the hero’s side.
Some may argue this, but I don’t think it’s possible to root for someone or against someone without a moral judgment. It’s true that not every antagonist needs to or does act immorally. In fact, the antagonist might be doing the right thing, the moral thing, in his or her particular situation, and it just happens to oppose the hero’s desires. The key however, is that the story guides the reader to feel the hero should win at the antagonist’s expense. And that it’s right for the hero to do so. That “rightness” is based on a moral stance of what’s good and desireable in the given situation. The farther along the spectrum of antagonists we move towards villany, the more clear that moral stance becomes.
Here, watch this book trailer for Scott Westerfield’s Leviathan.
Yeah, I know you want to–go ahead, watch it again.
Miller looks at book trailers, sees that the vast majority of them are lame, lame, lame (actually, this is the FIRST I’ve seen that’s any good). Sees that they reach no markets and then concludes that all trailers are silly. It’s true: lame trailers ARE a waste of time and money. But ANY advertisement (print, video, audio, whatever) that’s lame is a waste of time and money. Making killer trailers that nobody sees is an even bigger waste of time and money. But that’s true of ANY killer advertisement that nobody sees.
Look. I’ve never read Westerfield. Don’t know much about him or his books. But I saw that clip and now want to read that book. Hum, trailer worked for me. I AM a reptoid mutant, but I suspect there are others out there like me. I mean, come on. Good gravy, woman–“Do you oil your war machines? Or do you feed them?” Killer!
Movie trailers, book trailers–any advertisement–isn’t about delivering what the person is going to experience on the spot. If that were the case, then you’d never show a print ad of a meal at Olive Garden because it doesn’t deliver the goods right there on page 10 of Woman’s Day. Nope, all you’d do is go around giving out samples in places with Italian mood.
Miller’s error is not understanding the difference between making an offer and delivering on one. What an ad is supposed to do is make the offer. Let you know this thing is available. Because you’re not delivering the actual experience, you can make the offer via all sorts of media. Now, if you can give them a taste, that’s great. But you don’t need to deliver the full deal right there.
So what do you need in an offer? You need the offer to say, “Hey, I’ll deliver this type of experience.” It needs to call to some action, either directly or by implication–“buy this” or “be here.” You also need it to say, “You can trust this will be worth it” and make the consumer believe that’s likely to be true. It communicates this last bit by being a quality piece of work.
Making an offer is exactly what book covers do–they make the offer and give the consumer a little taste. And book covers matter. This has been proven over and over. Just like most people, when I see a cool cover, I pick up the book and check it out. When I see a lame one, or one that offers something I’m not interested in, you’re going to have to threaten me to pick that book up. Or it better dang well have some righteous word of mouth. It’s that simple. We all judge books by their covers because the cover is making an offer. And lame offers don’t get very many takers.
Book trailers are nothing more than deluxe book covers. The cool thing about them is the cool thing about movie trailers–you can make the offer by providing a little taste. You do that by giving the audience the story situation, the pitch. You do it by communicating the feel of the experience and raising curiosity. You do it by making it a pro job. The good ones make you laugh, say cool!, or raise curiosity and expectation.
And that Westerfield trailer does that.
Dang, “Do you oil your machines? Or do you feed them?”
Run that on TV. Run it on the radio. Put it up on sites where people are likely to see and click. Confirm it in print. Make the offer to real people. Get it infront of young readers. I’ll stake my eyebrows that ad can sell as many books as a good movie trailer can sell movie tickets.
Very effective advertising for the book. I think the content of the book is crap, but that trailer made me pick it up just to see what it was all about.
Do you notice that this one and the Westerfield one combine extreme professionalism AND they make the pitch in a clear and grabbing way? The pitch for both was what the book was about. For fiction it’s the concept. For non-fiction how to it’s the promise.
So many of the book trailers lack one or more of those things. For example, look at the book award finalist for THE FALLEN: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsLE6bNaIrk. I don’t know what the heck the book is even about after a long 2 minutes. They’re trying to make a movie.
Something else. On both of these you have a voice over PITCHING the book to you just as someone might do it in person or to an editor. It’s a powerful method, I think.
Notice also how short the Westerfield one is. Just over a minute. Westerfield’s really is like a query pitch or cover copy–in just a few lines tell me what your story is about. We get genre, setting, character, and the story problem or concept.
