Reader Satisfaction

You've got your big idea, you've worked through a few scenarios in your head, you reckon you're starting to get an angle on your main characters, so, you're ready to sit down and either:

• start writing
• start planning out the story

Before you do, you still gotta ask yourself one question:

"Why am I writing this?"

Very very very very broadly speaking, I find three main reasons for writing, as follows:

• I wanna sell books and make some money
• I wanna write a great work of literature
• I wanna be a great author

These three are not mutually exclusive, but let's face it, if you mean to write a work of great literary fiction, even if you succeed in writing the next Alchemist or Captain Corelli, satisfying your readers is still elusive. No matter how many people declare that you have given them a new and special experience, there will always be plenty for whom your book just doesn't work. If you want to write literary fiction, please please do. There isn't enough of it out there. But you will find reader satisfaction very hard to plan for.

If you want to make money, you will have to give the reader an experience he already knows he likes. If you're really good, you can surprise and challenge him occasionally, but the readers who buy a lot of books (who are also the ones who buy the most literary fiction) mostly buy genre pulp.

Don't get me wrong – I love genre pulp. And indeed, book lovers love genre pulp. Only snobs and old school critics look down on it. More fool them. Graham Greene wrote pulp. Michael Moorcock wrote pulp. I bet you can think of more examples.

In genre pulp you can aim for reader satisfaction. Each genre has its conventions, its cliche tropes, but that isn't what I'm talking about. It's part of it. The part that the writers of television dramas trying to emulate Joss Whedon understand.

Writers of television drama want to squeeze as many episodes out of a good idea as they can, and keep the audience figures as high as possible for as long as possible. Sometimes the audience sticks with them a lot longer than they expect, and because they aren't Whedon, they run out of ideas and things either get silly (Lost) or endlessly reboot (Heroes).

And if you want to make a living out of writing, isn't that exactly what you want to do?

Where novel writing differs is that you aren't a faceless team of contracted writers. You're one writer, speculating. And inevitably, putting yourself into your work. And, I hope, caring about your readers and their satisfaction. You care what they think of you.

At the same time, you aren't beholden to studio execs and their shareholders. So when an idea has run its course, no matter how successful it is, you can let it go, and move on. Same if it doesn't work.

So you can produce pulp, but you can afford to care about it, to be personal, to be literary.

Great novels don't arise from great ideas. They arise from great stories.

In the same way, great pulp arises from complete stories. Stories that are "tight". A tight story is one whose narrative follows a strict path; nothing is missing, nothing is redundant. It need not always be clear to the reader, but by the end of his journey, the end of the experience, the reader must feel that not a single moment has been wasted; there have been no blind alleys, no tangents, no holes – no matter how often he might have thought something was a blind alley or a tangent or a hole; at the end, the reader has to realize the reason for it, and the reason must be part of the story.

Often, tangential episodes are justified by writers as "character establishment/development".

If you want reader satisfaction, character must be subordinate to story. Don't be lazy: tell the story through character development and develop character through the story.

Tight stories also don't have anything essential missing.

Identifying what's missing can be the hardest part of the literary editor's job, but more often than not, it consists of the following: somewhere between seven tenths and nine tenths of the way through, the crucial events of the book reach a sort of partial closure resembling an interlude: a big battle has been won, but the Big Bad is still at large; the terrorist plot has been thwarted but the corrupt politician behind it has yet to be unmasked; the party of adventurers have managed to get through the Fire Swamp, through the Maze of Death, across the Bottomless Gorge of Probable Doom, defeated the Dragon, but now they have to work out how to get all that treasure back home, and when they get there, they still have to depose the Wicked King who sent them on this suicide quest in the first place. You get the general idea.

At this point, time suddenly jumps forwards. Sometimes it does this through a nice neat plot device, like the protagonist spending a few days in hospital, or an Uneventful Journey™. You can get away with this from time to time. Not more than once every three books. Often, though, it happens in fits and starts throughout the last quarter of the book. I call this 'end in sight' syndrome. The author knows what happens at the end, and knows that he's on the home straight. And as everybody knows, the biggest rush and author can get is having written. If you did your word count for the day, you feel awesome. If you completed a book, you feel awesome for several days. Authors chase that high. I see them doing it, when I read the last four chapters. You skip merrily through, ticking off the checklist of what has to happen to make the end happen. And you sell the readers very short.

I sometimes think that authors should, when they have about 15% left to go, leave it, and start work on the sequel. They should then re-read everything, and write the ending slowly and carefully, maintaining the same pace and excitement that they had before.

Very few readers will like you if you rush the ending. Plan the ending for maximum reader satisfaction. Execute it with precision and care. Readers don't get their kicks from finishing a book. If they really like your book, they aren't in a hurry to see "the end". The increasingly common practice of putting the first chapter of another book as a promo at the end takes advantage of this; the reader who is enjoying himself wants to keep reading.

How do you go about planning for reader satisfaction?

That question is for a creative writing course, rather than a blog post. Possibly it's for an editing session; certainly it's for your writing club/group/whatnot. What you do depends on your genre and on your story idea.

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I give free advice on designing a story for better reader satisfaction. Send me your story outline via my website.

Politics - Gender Politics - Author responsibility

I've always found Rush Limbaugh creepy. And not funny. So I don't listen to his broadcasts. That's freedom, isn't it.

But I was raised a feminist. These days I believe that freedom is more important than equality, but fighting for equality is sometimes the same as fighting for freedom. The current Republican climate, though intensely silly seen from this side of the Atlantic, is also cause for concern, increasingly so, in the light of the Republican Party's current attitude to women.

I have chosen therefore to be mildly political with the excuse that an author should have a heightened awareness of the potential for his language to connote at the same time as it denotes; the potential for his language to be misunderstood or taken maliciously out of context; the potential (far more than most realize) to reveal the author's underlying attitudes and assumptions. When you write a story, you aren't taking a story out of yourself and putting it on the page. You are putting yourself on the page through a story.

On Feb. 29, Limbaugh said, "She [Fluke] wants to be paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex."

As I say, I don't think RL is funny, generally. So in criticizing him, I have to examine my bias very personally. If I had broadcast remarks like that, it would have been out of a desire to be funny, and I might not have seen how it might have made people feel bad; having said that, I would not have singled out one individual the way that he did. I would have generalized it to something like "these people want to be paid to have sex" - to me that still sounds unforgivably extremist; deliberately associating birth control with prostitution. 

Forget the ad hominem for a moment, and consider what you do when you say "paying for someone else's birth control is like paying them to have sex".


Women who take control of their own reproduction are being responsible. They are being adult. They are controlling their own selves and their own future. Women are denied birth control either by societies that can't afford to provide if for free (rare, but they do exist) or by societies where women do not have the same freedom of self determination that men do.

Women who are paid for sex are, in the vast majority of cases, abused, exploited and severely at risk of major harm. They are not free. They are not responsible. Does anyone think that women who are paid for sex are in control of their lives? That they think it is the best way to provide themselves with a secure future?

Apparently, this is what the Right wants at the moment. For women to feel disenfranchised. For women to have no control, no contribution to make. Associating birth control with prostitution goes straight down that line. Make women ashamed of the freedom they've fought for, so that they deny it to themselves. Same technique as preaching 'abstinence' ;  same technique as telling girls not to dress like sluts if they don't want to get raped. Shame is what keeps women subjugated even in countries where their equality and freedom is statutory.

So even without the ad hominem, this 'joke' reveals RL's attitude to birth control, and to female sexual freedom. His apology is not a change of attitude. It is of no value to his public. It is of less value still to Sandra Fluke. If he wants to apologise to her, he should damn well do it in person, so she can chuse to accept it or not. I would.

If you have political attitudes, and not everybody does, they will come out in your writing. You can't, and arguably, shouldn't, prevent it. You should, however, be aware of it. It doesn't matter if you are writing about Dragons, Spaceships, Vampires, Zombies, zombie-dragon-vampires-in-space, your politics will out, and they will offend someone.

I may be an outspoken defender of author freedom, but there is such a thing as right and wrong even in our apparently free and wildly creative domain. It is right to know how your own real world attitudes seep into your writing, how it manifests itself, what it reveals about you.

***

I know an author of heroic fantasy in whose work the only women you ever see are either black-and-midnight-hags or random corpses. I know a sci-fi author where the only women are occasional eye-candy. These may be extreme examples, but authors can learn to mitigate this. E.E. "Doc" Smith was well aware of his own inability to write convincing female dialogue, so he had his secretary write most of the dialogue. That may be an extreme case too, but a revealing one.


Me, I'm incapable of writing convincing all male dialogue. I also can't do those action sequences that I think of as the long big punch-up. That might sound a little like a boast but it really is a handicap. really. honest.

Weird Words #5: Checked / Checkered

This one is a personal favourite of mine, if only for the non-existent confusion it doesn't cause.

Everyone I've ever heard either says:

"A checked shirt."


or


"A checkered shirt." (I'll get to the spelling).


And they say it quite without thinking. Noone, to my knowledge, chuses between these two words, and rightly so. They mean the same thing. Their etymological path is intertwined:

Checker (often in UK 'chequer') is the earliest known English word for a chessboard, and may have been what chess was called in English originally. (The word "chess", that we also get via French, was a later arrival). This suggests that a checkered pattern is one that resembles a chessboard.

Check is a word associated with chess and chesslike situations, and may have been adopted to describe a pattern of squares independently of checker or as a shortening of checker. Either way, both have survived to the present day.

The spelling chequered is often favoured in the UK as it follows the rule that words "borrowed" from French preserve French spelling, though in this case it is a late normalization, and part of a deliberate and rather infantile attempt by the British to differentiate themselves from the colonials. Don't even get me started.

If you really really wanted to be really really fussy, you could argue that checkered ought to be reserved for fabrics that really resemble a chessboard, whereas checked can be used for anything using a regular pattern of squares. I don't think it's necessary.