Bestseller Metrics, By Elaine Ash

Bestseller Metrics is focused on helping writers figure out how their manuscript matches up in characters and structure with published bestsellers such as Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and others. It forces the writer to confront what is actually in their manuscript rather than what they might *imagine* is in it. The writing is clear and concise, with touches of humor throughout. There are numerous "tests" for writers to run on their manuscripts, and each one is clearly described, with worksheets provided. When necessary, screen shots are given to explain the procedures on a step by step basis.

The creator of Bestseller Metrics is Elaine Ash, an award winning author in her own right, and one with many years of experience in editing. Although Ms. Ash did not specifically set out to create a writing "tip" sort of book, Bestseller Metrics does offer a lot of insight into the writing process and I personally found a lot of wisdom in it.

I've also not seen any other writing book out there that takes this kind of approach. I found it very valuable. It's something I'll keep referring back to with each new book I work on.

Some Thoughts on Writing

1. Writing is never wasted. Sometimes I just write individual scenes involving characters or settings, without really trying to make them a story. Often, some of these scenes later tie themselves together in various stories, although they usually need to be revised to fit. I have a computer file called “Parts,” where I keep such unconnected scenes.

2. Related to the above, I started pretty early to keep a kind of "Encyclopedia" for each invented world I came up with. This would have brief descriptions of characters, races, plants, animals, cities, etc. It’s fun to do and also helps me hold the disparate threads of stories or settings together in my head where my unconscious can  work on them. Some of these kinds of elements end up in my dreams because of that.

3. Remember that "you can write ugly" when you begin. The 'story' doesn't have to be anything publishable when it first comes out onto the page. Writing allows you time to fix all that stuff later. I find that the act of writing itself often generates a flow of creativity and things come out better than I would have thought when I was just 'thinking' of the story.

4. Related to #3, writing is really "rewriting." I've learned to enjoy it. I never have anything come out right when I first put it down, but I have confidence that I'll be able to fix it down the line.

5. A story idea belongs to you. Just because you’ve written it one way doesn’t mean you can’t rewrite it in another way. I’ve taken stories that I wrote early in my career and revised them based on experience, sometimes turning the core into a completely new story, and sometimes just an expansion of an original tale. Many writers do this. Poul Anderson and Louis L’Amour spring to mind. I have multiple versions of some stories, either with different endings, or just ones that were better developed as I grew in experience.

6. Reading a story is like flying over a landscape in a plane. Writing that story is trudging the ground, going up and down the hills, fighting through the underbrush, wading the streams. It's a lot more difficult but one experience can't replace the other.  When I first started out, I sometimes took really strong scenes by other writers, such as Howard, or Bradbury, and typed them out for myself to get a feel for sentence length, paragraph length, etc. 

A Little Push to Start the Year

Someone new came to our writing group yesterday, although she is someone I’ve known for a number of years. She brought along a copy of Write With Fire, my book on writing, and asked me to sign it. I was surprised, flattered, and probably a little bit flustered since that doesn’t happen to me often. I had actually been thinking about Write With Fire for a while and trying to think of some way to give it a push since sales have pretty much flat-lined for it.

I decided last year to write a few “tip” articles and put them up for the Kindle as a way of promoting Write With Fire. I completed the formatting for these and did the covers over Christmas and they are now up at Amazon. There are three of them, each with more than 4,000 words of material, and I’m calling them the “Fiction Techniques” series.

The series includes:

Fiction Techniques #1: Creating Suspense

Fiction Techniques #2: Characters Wanted

Fiction Techniques #3: The Twist Ending

The first two, “Creating Suspense,” and “Characters Wanted,” are substantial expansions on material that actually appeared in Write With Fire. The “Twist Ending” piece is brand new. If they do what they are supposed to do, I’ll probably write more for the series. I enjoy doing this kind of thing and it really helps me clarify my own thinking and understanding about the writing process.

If you’re not a writer, these are almost certainly not of interest to you. I will make both #1 and #2 free for a few days at some point in the next week or so. (I’ll announce it here and on facebook.) That’s why they are published exclusively on Kindle for now.  So if you’re a writer and want to get them you don’t need to buy them. (I would appreciate some “likes,” though.)  I probably won’t make the third one free since it’s brand new.

As for the covers, I thought to do something to reflect our modern world of “Direct to electronic” publications and the ebook revolution. They’re basically screen shots of the works in progress. (I kind of thought it was inventive.) You can see the covers below, although not very well. If you click on the links, without having to buy the piece, you can see the images much better, and can use the "look inside" feature to get a flavor for the works.

Have a good un!

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A Tool of the Writing Trade

In 1989, two psychologists, (Nemeroff & Rozin) introduced college students at the University of Pennsylvania to the “Chandorans,” a made-up tribe who supposedly hunted wild boar and marine turtles as part of their cultural behaviors. Half the students learned that the Chandorans hunted boar for their meat and turtles for their shells. The others were told that the turtles were hunted for meat and the boar for their tusks.

After reading the two different descriptions, the students were asked to judge the Chandorans on various characteristics. Students indicated that the Chandorans who were described as turtle eaters lived long lives and were good swimmers. Students told that the Chandorans ate boar meat judged the tribe as aggressive and as more likely to have beards.

The judgments the students made are indicative of something called the “representativeness heuristic.”  A heuristic is a mental short cut that allows humans to decrease the mental effort required to make a decision. It does not guarantee that the decision will be the correct one, but its ease of use makes it very common. The representativeness heuristic is based on the concept of “like goes with like.” Marine turtles are long lived and are good swimmers, so the people who supposedly ate the turtles were thought to have these characteristics too. You are what you eat according to this thinking. Because boars are aggressive and hairy, those who supposedly ate boar meat were also judged as aggressive and hairy.  Like goes with like.

Although the Chandorans were made up and, thus, there was no connection between their eating habits and characteristics, and despite the fact that this kind of relationship does not generally hold up where ‘real’ populations are concerned, human beings routinely make this kind of connection. And because they do, writers can exploit the tendency to add depth to their cultures and characters. Consider the Vhichang from my Talera series of fantasy novels. The Vhichang are bipeds with feathers and a beak-like facial feature. Also on Talera we find the Nokarra. The Nokarra are bipedal, too, but furred, clawed, and with bodily characteristics that are more similar to those of big cats such as lions and leopards than to birds.

Because of these simple descriptive characteristics, readers will be inclined to accept without question that the Vhichang are better than the Nokarra at controlling the “saddle birds” that people on Talera ride.  They will accept that the Nokarra are more physically impressive warriors than the Vhichang, and that they have heavier bodies, even though I specifically say that the Vhichang do not have hollow bones like earth birds do.  If, however, I wanted to convince my readers that the Vhichang were far better warriors than the Nokarra on a physical, one on one basis, I’d really have to work at it. And, many folks would still ‘feel’ as if it were unbelievable, even though it’s all made up fantasy and they wouldn’t know ‘why’ it seemed unbelievable that a Vhichang could easily best a Nokarra.

Heuristics are such a common and unconscious part of human thinking processes that most of us don’t even realize when we’re relying on them. But being aware of them can help a writer create a sense of things being “true” for readers even when they are completely made up.

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