Tag Archives: Shane Snow

3 Tips for Compelling, Shareable Writing

Everyone who creates an online post, tweet, or meme hopes it goes viral. That occurs when others read it, like it, and share it. Viral posts often contain three key attributes. Do these same attributes apply to fiction in general?

Author, speaker, and producer Shane Snow blogged about these attributes and gave them an easy mnemonic to remember—FIN.

Image courtesy of Pixabay

Fluency

The F in FIN stands for fluency. Snow means this in the sense of smooth, flowing prose, rather than familiarity with a language. He advocates plain, easy-to-understand writing.

Go for a low number in the readability index. Don’t force readers to wade through flowery phrases to grasp your meaning. Shorter words, sentences, and paragraphs make life easier for your readers. Read your writing aloud to check for awkward phrases or other stumbling points and edit as needed.  

Identity

Here, Snow refers to how well the reader identifies with the characters or topic. To engage readers, connect with universal themes and struggles.

Give readers something familiar to latch onto. Often, novels begin in a familiar setting to orient readers to an identifiable locale—home, office, neighborhood, etc. They give characters commonplace problems readers can relate to. Having grounded the reader in a familiar place, the novel can then launch into the unfamiliar.

Novelty

Speaking of the unfamiliar, Snow includes novelty as the final third of the acronym. We call them novels for a reason. Be bold and creative. Strike off in a new and different direction.

Take an old idea and give it a fresh twist. They say there’s nothing new under the sun, but ‘they’ haven’t read your book yet.

Putting FIN Together

Shane Snow focused on FIN as a technique for giving your social media posts and memes a better chance of going viral. Fiction stories can be sharable, too, in the sense that fans get a buzz going and that increases sales.

For a short story, novella, or novel, consider applying these attributes in reverse order–NIF. First, think of a new and fresh thing to write about. Then, begin your story by giving readers something to identify with. Last, as you edit, work to keep your prose clean and fluent.

Soon, you’ll FINish a wonderful, sharable tale, thanks in part to Shane Snow and—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 13, 2024Permalink Leave a comment

How Readable is Your Story?

If you’d like your fiction to sell well, wouldn’t it be beneficial if readers found your stories easy to read?

Not all writers see it that way. Some authors of the world’s great classic literature made it tough on their readers, but their books still became bestsellers. Obviously, readability alone doesn’t determine great writing.

For the most part, the factors of great writing remain intangible, but you can measure readability. Many word processor software packages calculate the ‘Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease’ score, as well as the ‘Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level,’ both standard measures of readability. The higher the Reading Ease score and the lower the Grade Level, the more readable your story.

Journalist Shane Snow inspired me to think along these lines with this wonderful blogpost. He did a lot of research obtaining Flesch-Kincaid data on many great fiction authors, and graphed it all.

That made me wonder how I measured up. I obtained the data on my ten most recently published stories. Listed from least readable to most readable, here they are:

StoryFlesch-Kincaid Reading EaseFlesch-Kincaid Grade LevelGenreYear Written
“The Steam Elephant”69.06.8Alt Hist2006
“Target Practice”69.36.5Scifi1999
“The Unparalleled Attempt to Rescue One Hans Pfaall”69.86.5Alt Hist2011
“Reconnaissance Mission”71.46.2Alt Hist2019
“Ripper’s Ring”72.26.4Alt Hist2015
“Moonset”74.85.3Horror2018
“A Clouded Affair”75.95.5Scifi2014
“The Cats of Nerio-3”76.35.1Scifi2016
“After the Martians”78.35.1Scifi2015
“Instability”79.14.8Alt Hist2017

Not too many obvious patterns there. My alternate history stories tend toward less readability than my straight science fiction, but not always. To some degree, I’ve improved readability with the passing years, but there’s some scatter in that, too.

When I average the F-K Grade Level of these stories, I get 5.82. According to one of the charts in Shane Snow’s post, that puts me around the readability level of Hunter S. Thompson, and between early J.K. Rowling and Stephen King. Not bad company.

If my stories don’t sell as well as theirs, it only proves that, as I mentioned above, readability alone doesn’t make for great writing.

What if it did? Could you write in a way that maximizes your Flesch-Kincaid readability score? The Wikipedia entry gives the formula. It’s very simple. Just take your average number of words per sentence and the average number of syllables per word, and the rest is math.

To make readers struggle, use long words and long sentences. To make your writing more readable, do the opposite.

To make your stories irresistible and widely sold…ah, that’s the magic formula I’d really like to know. That equation—whatever it is—might contain readability as one factor, but also many others. Ernest Hemingway earned a F-K Grade Level of just over 4, and Michael Crichton earned one a little under 9.

Shane Snow makes the point that a lower F-K Grade Level allows you to reach a larger potential audience for your stories. However, he cites two other factors that help determine whether your writing will gain traction and catch on. I’ll discuss my take on those in a future blogpost.

Although readability alone won’t determine whether your stories sell in the marketplace, consider this: if all other factors rated the same between two stories, wouldn’t you prefer the more readable one? I suspect you would, and so would—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 10, 2021Permalink

Writing Sideways

You have a problem. Perhaps you’ve written your main character into a plot trap. Or you’re trying to create an irresistibly likable character. Or you need a good motivation for the antagonist. Or you don’t even know what to write about. I don’t know what your problem is. Still, let me help you solve it.

By writing sideways.

No, that’s not what I mean by writing sideways

Well, it’s really called ‘lateral thinking’ but I like to think of it as writing sideways. I’m indebted to Shane Snow for the ideas in this post. He discussed problem solving in general, but my post is about solving problems while writing fiction.

His article starts with a clever problem to illustrate his method, but I’ll choose a different one. Your character is in a new house wired by a crazy electrician. The character sees three switches in the basement and knows each switch controls a different incandescent lamp on the first floor, but doesn’t know which switch controls which lamp. How can she find out, by making only one trip upstairs?

Shane Snow’s method has five steps, but you might not need all five for every problem. I’ll rephrase his steps in my own words:

  1. Examine the assumptions. All problems have assumptions, but some are so obvious most people ignore them. List all the assumptions you can think of, and examine each one. Is it really true? Are there other options? For our Switch-and-Lamp problem, the assumptions might include:
    • You need to know which switch controls which lamp.
    • Each switch controls a different lamp.
    • You can only make one trip up the stairs.
    • You can’t see the lamps from the basement.
    • You can determine a switch-to-lamp connection by flipping the switch on and looking at the lamp.
  2. Question the direct approach. Think about the way most people would solve the problem. Then ask, “what if I couldn’t do it that way?” For the Switch-and-Lamp problem, most people would flip a switch or two, then go upstairs and find they’ve only identified one of the three connections. They’re stymied by the limitation of being allowed only one trip upstairs.
  3. Re-write the Question. Often by examining the question, ingenious new answers emerge. Why is it so vital to know which switch controls which lamp? Why am I only allowed one trip upstairs? Does it matter that they’re ‘incandescent’ light bulbs?
  4. Approach the Problem Backwards. This is a common method used with mathematical problems. Imagine you’ve already solved the problem and think about what form that solution took and what route you must have taken to get there. In our character’s case, her solved problem consists of going upstairs and finding the three lamps in three different states, so she can know which switch controlled which lamp. That seems impossible, since lamps have only two states—on or off, right?
  5. Get a fresh perspective. Look at the problem from different angles and sides. In a problem involving fictional characters, think about how each of them see it. In our switch-and-lamp problem, look back and notice how we’ve constrained our thought by thinking of lamps as binary—either on or off, but we need some third state of a light bulb to know, in one trip, which switch controls each lamp. Is there a third state of a light bulb other than on or off?

Readers love books that break molds, defy conventions, and explore new ideas. They enjoy characters that are out of the ordinary, or who solve bedeviling problems in ingenious ways. Perhaps these techniques of writing sideways will help you.

Oh, yeah. I forgot about the lamps. By now, you know one answer: your character must turn the first switch on and wait a few minutes, then turn that one off, turn the second switch on, and go upstairs. Your character will find one light bulb off but warm (switch 1), one lamp on (switch 2), and one lamp off but just room temperature (switch 3).

That’s the problem’s classic solution, but what if the problem permitted no trips up the stairs? Then our character could drill a hole in the basement ceiling and construct a periscope so she could see at a glance which lamp comes on as she operates each switch.

If you apply the sideways writing techniques, you’ll come up with even more solutions to this problem and many others, solutions far beyond the imagination of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

April 7, 2019Permalink