Pop Culture

As writers, we deal in stories. Regardless of genre or medium: whether we're writing episodic non-fiction for our blog or screenplays or children's stories for the iPad or novels we want out in every format known to Man, including dead tree, we want to have a story that makes people come back for more.

How do we figure out what makes them come back for more?

Obviously, knowing who you're writing to is key. Writing letters to our grandmother is different than writing letters to the IRS agent who just completed our audit. Writing to a group of people can be a little more difficult. I talked last week about romance novels: in some ways, they're probably one of the easier genres to write, because readers are vocal about what they want. Steampunk has a similar strength of readership, though feedback there is more direct: forums and fan letters as opposed to simple numbers (did you know that romance novels account for 55% of total paperback sales? There are a lot of numbers there).

But what about other genres, or maybe those not as well defined? Those can be more difficult to pinpoint an audience for, to determine who you're speaking to. What's winning literary awards or flying off bestseller lists can be a good indication of the sort of stories that are engaging to people, but when we look at books alone we miss out on a lot. Many people - I'd even venture to say most - in North America also find a lot of the stories that engage them on television. Which means that, for anyone who generates stories, television, and pop culture in general, are invaluable tools for researching story structure.

I'm not saying we should all be writing magical children going to boarding school. Far from it: derivative is not exciting or intellectually stimulating. But if there are several shows with real science taking a reasonably prominent role (NUMB3RS, Criminal Minds), then maybe that's an element we can draw on when writing our own works.

Gareth Gaudin: The Graphic Novel as Literature

The first Wednesday of the month brings another Victoria Writers' Society general meeting. This month, we have Gareth Gaudin, owner of Legends comic shop and creator of Magic Teeth, an ongoing comic series.

Eight years ago, he started doing a daily comic strip. He's made himself do a comic every day since. Creating every day based on what he's done has lead to saying "Yes" to a lot more - like speaking here, or being a pallbearer. It's an interesting phenomenon, that there are a fair number of people who put themselves out there every day who feel obliged to be interesting and try to stay that way.

The difference between a comic and a graphic novel was brought up, and Gareth's answer was simple: "Nothing," and then elaborating that the term originated with Will Eisner, who was having a hard time selling his serious comic relating to the death of his daughter and rebranded it to get in past the door.

He talked about publishing the daily strips, and having to move on when it's done, and we digressed into creators who come up with the pictures and words at the same time, and circled around the idea of drafting. In comics, especially daily, you create and move on. It's interestingly opposed to the frequent approach in writing of drafts and edits and drafts again.

It was a fantastic presentation.

Romance Woes

I can't tell if the book I'm reading is self-published or not.

This could be considered a great stride in self-publishing: a book put together by someone who respects their work enough to hire a good editor and a good designer, someone who has been paying attention and decided to do it on their own and doesn't see any reason there should be any qualitative difference from something put out with the totality of A. A. Knopf's editorial team behind it.

In some cases, it would be.

But this is a romance novel.

So the cover's pretty okay, and the layout's pretty darned good, but the editing . . .

To be fair, if the editor did what I would have been tempted to do and took a shot for every sentence fragment, they'd have been dead of alcohol poisoning by Chapter 3 and none of this would be their fault.

The plot revolves around two lovers separated before they had closure, and their reunion and presumed eventual resumption of relations (I haven't read that far). She is in a non-threatening caring profession (she's not a cardiac surgeon or a Special Education teacher, but somewhere in between where the audience can nod along that yes, she has obvious nurturing qualities and no, we don't need to think about anything too difficult). He is in a highly-paid and highly-respected field that leaves him feeling somewhat isolated (sports star, business tycoon, whatever: that's not important either except for props). Her son is in the requisite 6-10 age range, smart and quiet (quiet because we can't have one of the obstacles to their relationship taking up too much dialogue).

This plot, with these characters, are practically a genre unto themselves. If I kept track, I could probably name a dozen with the same setup. Most of them are probably put out by some imprint of Harlequin. To give credit where it's due, Harlequin romances are often well-written. Rather, actually, comprehensibly written, because I am quite aware of the literary merit of cotton candy nailed to a page.

But with other romance publishers, I have encountered nightmarishly bad editing. The rub of it is, I wasn't particularly scandalized. If a sci-fi novel had been published with a similar startlingly vast array of problems, I'd have politely tweeted to the author that they had gone insane. But these are romance novels. So I take the warm-fuzzies of the inevitable happy ending, go to the next one, and forget I ever read it.

This time, I'll try to include a note to self that just because it's free from the Kobo bookstore does not mean I  am obliged to download it and read it.

Tomorrow

I usually post on Wednesdays. I've been in a pretty good groove about that the past six months or so, including queuing my friend Pat's post for the week I was on vacation.

I won't be posting tomorrow.

In fact, none of my blog is going to be visible tomorrow. I'm joining up with a whole bunch of other sites and going dark for tomorrow in protest of SOPA. A whole bunch of people have made more cogent arguments as to why it's bad than I have, and you can read some of them here and here. Wikipedia explains why it's going dark here. Read quickly, though: you only have three hours until it's down for the day.