Tag Archives: readers

Passing the ‘So What?’ Test

Why should someone want to read what you write?  Say you’re a writer seeking to sell stories.  Obviously, you are pursuing readers, lots of them.  So how do you appeal to them?  What do they want to read?  Above all, you can’t have them asking “So what?” as they read through your story.

So let’s put ourselves in the mind of the reader.  Most of us like to think of ourselves as virtuous, unselfish, and caring.  But let’s face it, when we pick up a story to read, we’re set for a solely personal experience, a solo cruise.  Reading a story is not a chance to show the world our magnanimous side.  It’s just ourselves and the author’s work.  As readers, we have a choice of billions of stories to read and only a single lifetime, with several other things to do in it aside from reading.  So a reader wants a story that relates to her or his own life.

The writer G.K. Chesterton said, “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”  Please permit me to add my own ending to that quote—“A better novel tells us the truth about its reader.  The best novel tells us the truth about what the reader aspires to be.”  Or put another way, the closer your story’s point-of-view character matches the reader’s inner vision of herself or himself, the more appealing your story.

If we shift viewpoint now and look at the situation as a writer, we face a problem.  How are you supposed to know what all readers aspire to be?  How do you craft stories to appeal to so many unique inner desires of so many different people?  You won’t attract them all, but there are some common elements.

All of your readers are trying to struggle through life as best they can.  They all have conflicts and problems, bad relationships they wish were better, skills or character attributes they wish they had, dreams they wish they could fulfill, fears they wish they could overcome, past choices they wish they’d made differently, and hard future choices they hope they’ll make wisely.  Those universal experiences are what you must tap into.  Given their precious and limited reading time, readers are going to devote it to a story where the point-of-view character, or the protagonist, is experiencing the same things.  What keeps them reading is to find out how the problem might resolve—not for the character—but for their own inner selves in their real lives.

Throughout your story, you must keep that linkage in mind and keep reinforcing it.  Your story is about your reader’s inner thoughts.  The methods by which authors maintain that connection are through writing techniques such as describing a character’s thoughts and feelings, showing rather than telling, including all the senses, and ratcheting up suspense and increasing the level of conflict.

I may well address each of those in future blog entries.  In the meantime, as you write, pause from time to time and ask yourself if your reader would be wondering, “So what?”  That’s the question to be avoided, or I’m not…

Poseidon’s Scribe

May 8, 2011Permalink

What’s in a (character’s) name?

Here’s one weird thing about the way I write.  I can’t get started writing my story until the characters have names.  I might have fully outlined the plot, gotten the story clear in my mind, even come up with fleshed out personalities and histories for my characters, but without their names I can’t write the story.  In planning one of my stories, plot comes first.  As I’m outlining the plot, I’ll use character markers like Characters A, B, C, etc., or ‘Bad Guy’ or ‘Wise Old Woman,’ something like that.  But I’ve found when it comes to generating the prose, these markers won’t suffice.

Maybe that’s not weird.  Look at real life, and those things to which we give names.  We give our own babies names at birth or very shortly after.  We name our pets—the large ones–soon after obtaining them.  In a strange way, the name gives them their uniqueness, their personality.  Think of small pets like tiny tropical fish that often are not named.  Can they be said to have as much individuality as named pets?  Some people name their cars, and I contend that in some mystical manner they are imbuing their vehicles with a persona that doesn’t exist in unnamed cars.  Ships receive names after construction but before going to sea, and the naming itself is part of an elaborate ceremony.  Sailors have long considered it bad luck to sail a ship that lacks a name.

How do I choose names for my characters?  One rule is obvious; a name must be appropriate to time period and geographical setting.  Very few members of the Mongolian horde were named Trevor, I suspect.  The internet serves as a vast resource for coming up with realistic character names.  We’ll stay with our Mongol horde example, in case you’re writing about a single squad (called an arban, apparently) of the horde and you want to have plausible names.  Just typing ‘mongol names’ into a search engine comes up with plenty of sites with good examples.  Some sites pair the names with their meanings.  I do try to pick names with appropriate meanings, if the name feels right.

It’s a good idea to have interesting, distinctive names for your main characters and more plain names for background characters.  On the other hand, writers often give common surnames to main characters to convey a sense of a humble, common background, or give the character an ‘everyman’ feel.  Indiana Jones, for example, or many of the characters in the novels of Robert Heinlein.  If you do that, you might want to make sure the first name (or middle name) is unusual.

It’s also wise to avoid having any two characters whose names start with the same first letter, or the same sound.  Why risk confusing a reader?  Like most rules of writing, you can break this one.  Say you want to suggest a deeper similarity between two otherwise opposite characters.  Similar names can provide a hint of that, but you’ll have to go the extra mile in each scene to make it clear from context which character is involved so the reader doesn’t mix them up.  To take our Mongol horde example, you’ll need to use context to remind your reader that Mungentuya is the arban’s leader, and Munkhjargal is the young upstart who wants to challenge him.

As with other research, time spent choosing names is time not spent writing.  So you want to select your characters’ names wisely, but not take all day about it.  Remember, the object is to come up with a great story, not a list of perfectly suitable names.

On occasion I have picked a character’s name, started writing, and found later the name doesn’t work.  Sometimes changing a name is the right thing to do—and technically easy, using the ‘replace’ feature–but it always feels odd.  When you’ve built up an association of a character with a particular name it can be jarring at first to change it.  Still, if it must be done, like deleting a wonderfully written scene that just doesn’t help the story, then do it and get on with things.

As always, feel free to comment.

Poseidon’s Scribe

February 6, 2011Permalink