Can Science Tell Us How To Tell Better Stories?

Am I the asshole for even asking?

I mean first of all, better stories for who? For readers?!

Second of all, who cares what readers think?

But most of all…don’t you care at least a little?

I care a lot about readers. I write what speaks to me and speaks from my heart. Gosh do I love when I find a way to bring just one reader into that experience with me.

The problem is when I try to share it with two.

NOTE: an infinite amount of research for this article started out way back in 2013 with my graduate thesis “Book DNA” (offsite to University of Georgia, written when I was still using the boy’s name Stephen Morgan)

One person can hate a book for the exact same reasons the other person loves it

Did you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? It’s a long, long, long meditation on the nature of Quality.

When we ask whether a book is good, the answer depends on what we mean by “good.”

Does good mean it sold a lot of copies? That those copies earned money? That the story got a lot of good reviews? That it cultivates a timeless readership? That it’s as infamous as celebrated?

Any of those? All of those?

If a book changed my life and no one else’s, can I still claim it’s the best thing I ever read?

Quality is not an absolute term. The quality of a story depends upon how audiences perceive it. If writers want to know how to make their stories more effective, they will need to ask: More effective for whom?

Science has answers. Not that it explains everything. But it did tell me a few things. And since none of us are in the business of ignoring scientific facts…

The Creative Benefits of Science

What good would this be without a lay of the land? Here are the three areas we’ll cover.

• Marketing to Readers
• Validating Editors’ Intuitions
• Social Advocacy

Marketing to Readers

I began this study ten years ago in graduate school. My professors warned me that whatever topic I picked would dominate my research for the rest of my career.

Well…

Listen, Jack, I never let go because in my heart, the research is a form of activism. I want to expand diversity throughout all forms of media. We can’t do that without knowing how to persuade people to consume our stories.

Whether they’re paying with their money or their time, they’re paying us for our creativity. Can’t we meet them halfway on what will hook them into reading it?

Because if we understand how to do that, we can convince readers to give books a shot they’d otherwise have walked right by.

A reader who likes epic war stories but presumes distaste for science fiction might then discover her new favorite book in the epic In Conquest Born by CS Friedman (or the long-awaited sequel The Wilding).

Buy at Amazon: In Conquest Born and The Wilding

Validating Editors’ Intuitions

Don’t editors deserve to know when they’re doing a good job?

I worked for my share of publishers. The biggest one brought with it a pressure to sell, sell, sell. A company that big can’t survive on love alone. Not like it got there on love alone, right? Even if most of their books are about it.

It’s hard to tell an editor when she did a great job even if the book tanked.

I mean, it’s easy once or twice. But if it keeps happening, it doesn’t matter if the editor’s creative intuitions persuaded everyone around her. There’s a mismatch on how to shape the content to resonate with readers.

It’s not easy. A lot of the obstacles aren’t within the editor’s control. That’s sort of the reason why this is so important. What works for one publisher’s readers doesn’t necessarily work for another publisher’s. At least not when branding is as important as what’s inside the books.

And boy is that becoming more important than ever.

Future research would incorporate interviews and surveys with professional editors to compare their creative intuitions with measurements produced through further content analysis. Potential research questions include:

• Do editors perceive the same commonalities and distinctions in commercially and critically successful books?
• When editing a book, do their creative intuitions guide them in a direction that matches what prior research shows about audience preferences?
• When asked to justify their answers, are they aware whether their edits innovate on or violate elements and structures used in previously successful publications?

Social Advocacy

How do we get readers to read stuff they don’t want to read but would LOVE if they’d just give it a shot???

Back in 2010, McQuail released the 6th edition of Mass Communication Theory. He wrote that we have to be careful whether writers, like misguided journalists, “[sell or impose] a… system which is at the same time both desirable and repressive” (p 96).

Some books, like those in the mystery genre, have come under heavy criticism for seeming to sell or impose a social hierarchy feminists have worked for decades to eradicate.

It would be hard to believe there has been any decrease in misogynistic depictions of violence against women in the genre since Sara Paretsky called attention to the issue in 1986.

In a still-significant conference paper for International Popular Culture Association titled “Sister In Crime At The Quarter Century: Advocacy, Community, and Change” (2011), Fister noted how in 2009, British reviewer Jessica Mann declared that she was sick of being sent fiction that seemed to be competing to be more sensationally sadistic in its depiction of violence against women and would no longer review such books. She particularly scolded women who write violent crime fiction (p 11–12).

The science of better storytelling (and who it’s better for) would empower writers to tell stories that don’t need to compete with sensational sadism as well as those whose “violence against women can be interpreted as feminist” and may hope to criticize rather than enable gendered violence and patriarchal power structures.

Indeed, one author responded to Mann’s complaint, saying women, because they grow up experiencing the violence they want to overturn, have internalized the experience, enabling them to write about it from the inside. “Men, on the other hand, write about it from the outside.”

Consider the international bestselling Millennium Trilogy, the first of which, upon its original publication in Sweden, was titled Men Who Hate Women. That paper by Fister noted that the book’s American publisher, perhaps fearing the title would seem to condone rather than condemn violence against women, chose to change the title to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (p 11–12).

Consider, too, the most recent Alex Garland head-trip movie entitled Men, in which a widowed woman travels on holiday to a countryside village but becomes disturbed and tormented by the strange men in the village, all portrayed by Rory Kinnear (wtf).

Consider, instead, the novel Manhunt by trans author Gretchen Felker-Martin, a story she describes as the “depraved psychosexual horrorshow…currently giving TERFs around the world a collective aneurysm.”

What if I want my story to swing just as hard as that one?

If I want a story to do so much for one reader, the least I can do is pay attention to what would best entertain them along the way.

But to do that, you better figure out how to make your words do more than sit there on the page.

Anyone can do that. You don’t even need a finger to bang out a book on a typewriter.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

A good story does more than tap.

A good story makes a reader feel.

A great story makes a reader laugh, cry, and come back for more.

Now here’s the really cool thing.

Go here and I’ll tell you how to get your story to do that every time.

THE END (DAMN GIRL, THAT’S DARK)