As a result of this bow, something odd happened. Within four hours, the script for the movie was rushed through China’s censorship board and approved not only for filming in China but for distribution. Normally, this process would have taken years. It normally took two years to get a script approved for filming, and then once the film was made, it could take another nine months for approval. But based upon one director’s estimation of the story, we made history. So one key to enlarging your audience is to create a diverse cast of characters.

  Climbing the Emotional Richter Scale

  Bestsellers register high on the emotional-Richter scale.

  Now, there is nothing wrong in writing stories that don’t adhere to a formula. You can do just fine writing mystery novels set in the present day that feature an old woman as a protagonist, for example. It has been done with some success before. The audience is wide enough so that you can make a living at it.

  There’s nothing set in stone that says that you have to set your books in another time and place in order to sell. Contemporary stories for teens can work well.

  You can also decide that you’re only interested in writing to teenage girls rather than have a broad audience, ala Stephenie Meyer.

  But here’s something interesting. You can’t ignore one thing: you still have to score high on the emotional Richter scale if you want to create a bestseller.

  Some authors will say, “Well I don’t want to appeal to my readers’ emotions, I want to appeal to their intellect.” But when you appeal to a reader’s intellect—when you surprise them with insights, or make them feel as if their head will explode from a revelation, or when you twist your story in dizzying directions that they’d never imagined—your intellectual insights invariably lead to powerful emotional responses.

  So you have to carefully consider each scene and ask yourself questions like, “What is the emotional draw behind this scene?” If it’s drama, and I’m writing a romance, how well will my reader respond? If I tell a joke, is it a good joke, one that really keeps the reader laughing, maybe even days later? Or in my comedy, are there enough humorous notes. We’ve all been lured to movies that are advertised as comedies and then found that all three of the good jokes we saw in the commercials are the only ones used in what is otherwise a drama. We felt cheated.

  So how well does your story stack up to others in its genre? If you’re writing horror, how strong are your horror beats? Will you surpass films like Jaws, The Shining, and Aliens?

  You may also find that your story can be strengthened if you add entire new dimensions. For example, let’s say that you’re writing a comedy. Will it help you get your 20-something audience if you add a romance line? Or what happens if you create a bit of adventure?

  When you look for ways to expand your audience, you’ll find that you make surprising and valuable changes to your story.

  Pulling it All Together

  For the past 30,000 words I’ve been discussing some of the basics of audience analysis. Hopefully by now you recognize a few truths:

  First, telling stories can be a very healthy activity. Through it, your audience can be entertained, emotionally strengthened, educated, and can grow through shared experiences. Stories bind communities together and can help create a consensus about how we should act and feel.

  So as you create your stories, you need to consider what it is that your audience wants and needs. That should be a huge priority in your mind.

  We can show that audiences of certain ages and sexes will crave slightly different things—wonder, humor, horror, romance, adventure, intrigue, drama.

  And we also know that by studying what has been popular in the past, we can gain some insights into how to create powerful stories for the future.

  Don’t restrict yourself to any one medium. If you want to write a powerful novel, you can draw inspiration outside books. One of the most popular books in years was The Hunger Games. Author Suzanne Collins reported that the idea came as she was switching between two channels on television. One of the channels had footage from the war in Iraq, and it became juxtaposed over a popular reality television show—and combined to create a runaway bestselling book!

  So as a storyteller, you draw your inspiration from wherever you can find it.

  Section 2: Identify the Elements that Help You Plot Your Story

  In this section, we will study what the parts of a story are so that you will understand what you need to do in order to create a fulfilling tale.

  Elements of a Story

  As I’ve said before, there are several elements to a story. Orson Scott Card has said that a story can be guided by milieu, idea, character, and event. (See his book Characters and Viewpoint).

  I prefer to think that other things help guide your story. Certainly milieu, idea, character and emotion might seem like better tags to me. After all, we divide our literary genres by the emotion that they evoke. When you go to the bookstore, you’ll see sections for romance, thrillers, horror, adventure, wonder (usually called speculative fiction or science fiction and fantasy), humor, and so on. So there are a number of ways to think about story elements, and I’ll go into more depth of these later.

  For our purposes here, I’m going to divide our story into four aspects:

  —Milieu: The setting of your story includes the time and place that the story occurs, even if it is only an imaginary setting. The milieu is perhaps where most stories need to begin, simply because the milieu so strongly defines the types of characters that you may have, the society that they live in, and so on.

  —Character: The characters of your story grow out of their milieu, to some degree, but the characters also generate your conflicts. In short, it’s the conflicts between and within your characters that create the plot. So we’ll talk about how to create characters in a bit more depth.

  —Conflicts: The conflicts between the characters, and of course the way that characters struggle to resolve those conflicts, really define your plot. You need to consider how your conflicts arise, how they build relentlessly, and how they are resolved in your story. As an author you’ll spend a good amount of time just thinking about little things, such as “Why is it that my protagonist doesn’t just run away? What’s his motivation?” or “Would my character really do that?” or “How can I make this ending climax more powerful?”So we’re going to talk about plots and plotting devices.

  —Treatment: Beyond the things mentioned above, you as a writer bring your own special talents to a work. A strong and intriguing voice might draw readers, or your smooth handling of tone, or your skills at describing events, or your lyrical style. In short, your unique writing skills can often turn a drab story into something engrossing, and, in fact, most editors and agents will evaluate a manuscript initially based almost on your treatment alone. So it becomes important to develop strong writing skills. Teaching these basic writing skills goes beyond the scope of this book.

  Brainstorming Your Settings

  The milieu of your story consists of the setting—both its time and its place. Thus we might have a story set in London in 1898, or in Montana seventy million years ago, or in the town of Hobbiton during the Great War.

  In mainstream literature, we typically deal with settings that either already exist or that have existed historically. Thus, when you write about the city of Chicago, it behooves you to do your research. If you say that there is a great sandwich shop on the corner of 25th and Regal, there had better be one there, lest your reader (who happens to live on that corner) recognizes that you don’t know what you’re talking about.

  So the great skill that you need to develop in order to create a setting for a contemporary or historical novel is to do research on your setting, and then figure out how to incorporate that research into a story.

  However, if your city is made up—for example Soap Opera, Georgia—your audience will take it for granted that the city is something of your own creation.

  Whether you’re using a real setting or making one up, though, you need to understand that not all settings are created equal. Not all settings will draw the same number of readers.

  The Power of Transport

  I mentioned that if you look at the bestselling movies of all time, you would find they have one element in common: they all transport you to another time and place. The same trend can be seen in novels.

  The super-agent Albert Zuckerman, in his book Writing the Blockbuster Novel, suggests that in choosing your settings you should choose (or in the case of speculative fiction writers create) a setting that doesn’t just transport an audience but transports them to a place that they would like to be.

  Thus he would advise you that rather than have a scene set in Boise, Idaho, you should see if you can move it someplace more exotic and desirable, such as Paris or Monaco. In particular, he believes that folks are curious about the lavish lifestyles of the upper-crust. People would like to be transported to posh resorts and the halls of power.

  To some degree he’s right. Television shows like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and The Bachelor cater to such tastes, as do many a spy novel and romance.

  And as if to verify this notion, there are some settings that almost always spell doom for a film—prisons, tenement houses, ghettos.

  Yet sometimes people can be fascinated by truly vile settings. Take a look at the Alien movies. The planet where the aliens are found is a nasty place—hazy, dirty, and constantly raining, while the local predators are shocking in their nastiness. Yet people not only watched the first movie, they hungered for further installments.

  There are lots of examples of harsh or nasty places that people like to visit in speculative fiction. I hate hot weather and I know that I’d wither and die on the planet Dune, but I’ve traveled there in my imagination many times. Have you ever noticed how harsh life sounds on Pern? Everyone is scrambling for their next meal. It doesn’t sound like a particularly appealing place. I could go on and on.

  In most of these cases, the settings often have some particularly powerful draw that offsets the negatives.

  For example, in Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels you not only get to ride the dragons, you get to bond with them on an almost spiritual level—you get to find a life-mate. On Arrakis the desert is deadly, but the draw is Melange—which lets you tap into your ancestral memories and bestows upon many the gift of prophecy. Tolkien’s world can also be a nasty place—with its forests of giant spiders and tunnels filled with orcs and trolls, but the horrors are balanced by the ethereal beauty of the elves, the nobility of the humans, the admirable stoutness of the dwarves, and the childlike innocence of the hobbits.

  Each of these settings has one thing in common: each of them is deeply intriguing. Each is loaded with curiosities and mysteries.

  In short, in creating your fantasy or science fiction world, arousing a sense of wonder might well be your primary goal. As you create that sense of wonder – by subjecting your characters to places, people, and creatures that truly are unique – you might also carefully consider your world. Ask yourself, does the beauty balance the horror? Does the darkness overwhelm the light? Will my readers want to visit here, or will they want to flee? Will they want to return to the land that I create, time and time again?

  It isn’t just enough to create a setting. As writers, our goal should be, from time to time, to create a place where weary readers will seek rest from their journeys.

  Dealing with Repetitive Settings

  The rule of thumb in Hollywood for big-budget movies says, “Don’t show me the same setting twice.” Thus, if you have a mobster meet your hero at a strip club in scene one, you don’t want to repeat that location. The reason is that you want to keep the story visually interesting by making sure that each scene shows the viewer something new.

  This rule is pretty hard and fast for big-budget films, but not for films with a smaller budget. For example, in the movie My Dinner with Andre, the entire is shot on one set. And of course in low-budget movies, a producer might really enjoy the savings that come with having three scenes shot in the same location. But you should be aware that if you’re writing a book that you hope will be adapted to film, it is likely that scenes set in the same location will be rewritten into new locations. Perhaps you might want to consider saving your screenwriter some work—and looking like a genius at the same time.

  A second rule of screenwriting that applies here is: make it interesting. For example, if you set a scene in a house, it shouldn’t be a generic “indoor house.” People go to movies to see something new. Make it a place they haven’t been before. For example, let’s say that I’m setting a novel in Australia. I could describe a “lonely farmhouse” somewhere, but it would be like farmhouses around the world. But in Coober Pedy, Australia, folks often dig their homes underground to escape the harsh heat. At the same time, they will be mining opals as they “dig themselves a new bedroom.” If I were going to set a tale in Australia, I might consider such a location just because it would be interesting, different. But why not do something unique with multiple settings, look for challenging new places to start your tale?

  When I’m judging for Writers of the Future, reading the slush piles, I can’t tell you how many fantasy stories I read that open with the heroes sitting in the common room of an inn. I get to the point where I want to reject them out of hand.

  One way to make any indoor house scene unique, of course, is to build or furnish it to the tastes of the owner. Thus, an avid fisherman might have a fly-tying room, while a woman who loves to make pots might have a kitchen table covered with green ware.

  There is one other good reason to vary even your exterior settings. Let’s say you are writing an “epic.” There are a number of strategies for writing these, whether they be adventures, fantasies, or whatnot. The point of an epic is to give the reader of your story the feeling that he has lived a whole life, traveled the world.

  Now, Chaucer tried to create an epic by writing about citizens of a village—the nobility, the peasants, the workmen—and creating a sense of wholeness that way. Some Russian authors believed that a proper epic needed to capture all of the various levels of language—lord to pauper, husband to wife, father to child—in order to convey an epic sense.

  But I would say that in creating an epic fantasy, in devising a whole world, we would want to create one that explores various lands, oceans, and climes in order to give the reader that we as authors have truly formed a whole new universe. Such a universe, of course, would not be a static thing. It would include a mythic and historic past, and it would seem to be rushing toward some intriguing future.

  Over the years, in reading tales from new authors, I’ve been surprised by how often I find that writers will neglect to give us any sense of setting in their story. In particular, authors trained primarily as screenwriters often feel that a single line of description—something not much longer than “interior of house, night”—serves to create a setting. Writers who fail in this respect once seem to do it over and over, as a matter of habit.

  It’s important for you as a writer to remember this: if you study the bestselling movies of all time, you’ll find that all of them transport the viewer to another place time. Whether we’re talking about The Passion of Christ, The Titanic, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Jurassic Park, The Godfather, or any of the others, this rule holds true.

  So as a writer, your success will be determined largely by your ability to transport a reader to another place and time.

  Half-hearted attempts at creating a setting just don’t cut it. Don’t make that mistake—ever! Don’t let your imagination fail you in this step of the creation process.

  In brainstorming any setting for any story, it’s important to remember that settings aren’t static. By that I mean that a setting isn’t just a place that you put your character, like an empty room with nothing but a chair. The setting should have an impact on the character, and the character will often have an impact on the setting.

  A setting is a place that should exist in your mind, that should have a life of its own outside of the character. The setting should interact with your character, and vice versa.

  When You Imagine Your Setting, Try a Couple of Tricks

  First, in every scene, the setting should impinge upon the character’s senses. For example, imagine you have two characters talking in the woods as they walk along. Ask yourself, “how could the setting impinge upon the character?” One way might be through the aural senses. Your characters might be startled by the bark of a squirrel as it scurries up a tree, or the sound of a twig snapping in the distance as a hart bounds away. Or maybe the setting impinges visually as a bird goes winging through a slanting beam of sunlight, or tree-tops that are blowing in the wind cause the slants of sunlight to move and dance. Or perhaps the setting will impinge upon the character through smell, as your character notices the scent of some bitter weeds or an old campfire or the scent of bear dung as he passes a spot. Or it might impinge through the sense of touch—as your character finds it suddenly cold as he moves into the shadows of the deeper woods. We might even have some physical impact. Perhaps your characters find that they must struggle over a fallen log, or wade through a bog.

  Second, as you’re creating your setting, think of how your setting may impact the plot as your character interacts with it. In the woods above for example, you might imagine the different ways that the woods might impinge upon your character’s journey. If you’ve ever tried traipsing through real virgin wilderness, you know that it isn’t easy. In some places, thick bushes might cover the forest floor to a height of a dozen feet or more. Ever tried walking through sword tail ferns or Oregon grape that rise up to your chest? It can’t be done quietly. And you’re constantly trying to negotiate wind-fallen trees, uneven ground, and so on. Then of course there are the pests—biting flies, midges, bees, and so on, not to mention the fact that the weather always has a mind of its own, and may rain on you relentlessly one moment and then seem to decide to freeze the next for no reason other than to annoy you. So maybe your characters have to stop beneath the shelter of a tree for a moment to put on warmer jackets—or to shed those jackets later as they begin to sweat from strenuous exercise.

 

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