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That Certain Something, Part II
Nov. 7th, 2007 | 06:44 am
That craving part is the key in this entry. A good story is compelling; we already know that. Once you start reading, you're so wrapped up in the characters or problems or experience that you don't want to stop. But recently I'm coming to think consciously also about a story being attractive.
Here's what I mean: what would you say to a really well-written story with sympathetic characters, about a plumber trying to get enough customers to stay in business? Let's pretend that this hypothetical story is well-written in every respect: the characters are interesting and believable, the plumber's plight in trying to earn enough money to keep his family from falling apart constitutes meaningful stakes, the description is sharp and evocative ... still not interested? Well, maybe you are (in which case, it's a bad example), but I'm not. This might be a story that, after you've read the first 1,000 words, you can't put down because you've gotten so involved with the characters, but where it might fail is in getting you to start reading it in the first place, and then once you've read it in having delivered such a singular experience that you recommend it to all your friends. Because even if the story keeps you interested, who wants to spend their time wallowing in a plumber's financial woes? (Someone, surely, but not many people.)
So the thing that's lacking in that hypothetically brilliantly-written story is the element of the attractive. The story needs to offer something that readers know they want.
It might be wish-fulfillment: a down-on-his-luck plumber comes up with a new kind of faucet that makes him a millionaire overnight.
It might be a certain emotional experience: A plumber who has become cold-hearted from years with a badly-suited wife begins to remember what made life worth living for him when he befriends a deaf teenager.
Or it might be a mystery or a puzzle: A plumber whose business is on the verge of failing finds a human finger in a customer's drain pipe, and has to figure out who the murderer is and who the victim is before the murderer realizes what he knows.
It might even be an entertaining voice, or a setting that makes people happy, or any of a number of other things.
How is this different from what I was saying in my earlier entry? The earlier entry was about what makes your story not just good, but remarkable. This entry is about what makes your story not just remarkable, but attractive.
So a lot of things that can make a story remarkable can serve as an attractive element, but not everything that's remarkable is necessarily attractive, and not everything that's attractive to you is necessarily attractive to a wide range of readers.
The test for an attractive element is to imagine a casual reader getting a friend interested in the story. If someone were enthusing about the story to a friend, what would they realistically have to enthuse about? This is similar to a logline, a one-line movie pitch, but it's not about summarizing the story; it's about summarizing what makes the story worth reading. Here are some examples:
"I just read this story about this plumber, and the character kept saying these crazy things ... it made me laugh so hard I almost threw up."
or
"I read this beautiful story ... it's really painful at the beginning, but by the end I felt so uplifted I was practically dancing."
or
"Hey, you have to read this story I read about this plumber who finds a finger in a drain, and there's this complete murderfest going on, and he has to be like, this detective to find out who's doing it before they kill him and chop him up and, like, shove him down a drain. It's really gross, but it also like, makes you completely tense and paranoid until you get to the end."
Probably not all of these appeal to you, but I hope that even if the examples fall short, the point is making it across: if you can't realistically imagine someone getting another friend excited about the story with a simple explanation of what they liked, then maybe there is no attractive element to your story.
You might notice the similarity of these enthusiastic recommendations to cover blurbs, and this is not coincidence: cover blurbs are an attempt to simulate a recommendation from a friend by having a (one hopes) well-known and revered person enthusing about your story on the cover of the book. There are few things that can sell a book or get a reader to read a story as well as having someone whose taste you trust recommend it to you with a reason you find meaningful.
There are some attractive elements over which you have no control. For example, a really good picture of a vampire on the cover is enough to sell a book to some readers, but very often authors have no control over the presentation of the book. Having the following as an author is also sometimes enough in itself to sell a book (think Stephen King or John Grisham), but for your name to have that effect, you have to attract a lot of readers and please them in the first place.
The attractive element is particularly hard to find because if you get someone to actually read your story, they may find that they like it a lot, that it's really good. But since you're putting your story in their hand and they're reading it because you wrote it and gave it to them, they aren't like normal readers. Normal readers might give your book or story a second or two of consideration, and if they don't find something that they really want, they will generally just move on. If your story has an attractive element that appeals to them, and if they get some glimpse of that attractive element, there's a good chance you will have snared them and get them to read the story, which if it follows through on its promises and is compelling, might get them to start telling their friends.
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Lux Desiderata of Titling
Apr. 29th, 2007 | 05:10 pm
Titles can benefit a story in as many as five meaningful ways, only one of which is based on having read the story already. Therefore it tends to be a bad idea to use a title that becomes interesting only after reading the story (e.g. "Charlie"). In no particular order, titles can (and arguably should):
1. Intrigue someone into being curious about the story ("Something Wicked This Way Comes," The Da Vinci Code).
2. Give the reader an immediate and accurate sense of what kind of story is coming in terms of genre, mood etc. (I, Robot, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).
3. Serve as an easily-remembered and easily-communicated label for the book when telling others about it (Dune, The Hobbit). An easily-communicated title is easy to remember, spell, and say, and is strongly connected to the story itself. It stands out: you remember it specifically rather than something like it.
4. Lend a sense of authority or poetry ("To the East, a Bright Star," The Once and Future King).
5. Be unlikely to be confused with other titles. This particularly makes one-word titles problematic unless the word is extremely unusual (Xenocide).
Caveats:
These rules don't apply in the same way to movies, in part because there are only a very limited number of movies out at a given time and most interested consumers are exposed to a poster and/or trailer for each, making the title less important except for item #3.
Also, many very successful books have "broken" these rules, because of course the book itself is more important than the title.
And of course it's debatable how many people will actually be influenced in any way by a title if they don't have another recommendation for the book. That said, some readers are intrigued by titles, and a title can be the difference between your book being looked at on a shelf or within online search results or disregarded with the all the other books the reader has never heard of.
Many writers, from beginners to established pros, seem to want to come up with titles that cleverly cap off or sum up the story. They'll write a story about a magical cape and call it "The Cape," or a story in which the secret is that the protagonist is really dead and call it "Unsettled." These types of titles often lose the opportunity to ensnare the reader's interest and advertise what they're about.
Titles are much more important for books than for short stories, since a person who is browsing for a book online or in a bookstore, or who glimpses the title in a list, has the opportunity to find out about the book and perhaps buy it. Short stories, by contrast, are usually available only in groups within magazines, anthologies, and collections, and so individual titles are unlikely to have much opportunity to attract readers to buy the work.
In terms of learning to write good titles, I highly recommend exercising this part of your brain wherever possible by using good titles for e-mail subjects, forum discussion titles, boring reports you put together for work, etc. It's a rare situation where anyone will be bothered by you slapping a magnificent title on an otherwise dull report or a quick e-mail, and the more you work to come up with titles the stronger that facility will be.