Category: Non-Fiction

Like Gum on the Bottom of your Shoe

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By , May 18, 2011 12:38 pm

Imagine writing a logline query so sticky that no agent or editor could forget it. Or creating characters and stories that stick in people’s minds like an annoying ad jingle. Ahhhhhhh…..Ok, I’m back.

Some ideas stick even though there is nobody blogging, tweeting, posting, facebooking, yodeling, or organizing any marketing campaigns around them.

The examples are all around us.

From Snopes.com: 

Friday the 13th is a perilous day.
Gum takes 7 years to pass through your digestive tract.
Hair grows back thicker after it’s been shaved.
Secret flights rescued Bin Laden family  members and other Saudi nationals out of the U.S. immediately after the 9/11 attacks and before the FBI could interview them.

Oh, and by the way, none of the above are true!

Some from movies and TV stick in your mind like the theme from Gilligan’s Island. (wince, sorry.)

Snakes on a plane.
“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”

 Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Or from politics… 

“It’s the economy, stupid.”
“…this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”

 Or even from fables… 

The grass is greener on the other side.
Sour grapes.
A rolling stone gathers no moss.

In their book, Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath examine the similarities across time, space, and media between short messages that “stick” and those that fade away. They suggest a stickiness test you can apply to loglines, hooks, concepts, characters or anything you want to stick like done spaghetti to a cabinet door. Since Made to Stick is a business book, they have a snappy mnemonic to help you remember the key elements that will make your message stick like gum to tennis shoes: SUCCESs! Woot!

Just for you, I’ve summarized some the key messages from Made to Stick and suggested ways to apply them to your writing.

S simple Find the core of your story. What one single thing when told says volumes? Find your theme and distill it into a few words. To find it, they suggest answering questions like “The single most important thing in my story is….”, if I could only tell you one thing about my story it would be….” 

The Heath’s use Southwest Airlines mantra “Southwest is the low cost airline” and James Carville’s “It’s the economy, stupid” from the 1992 Clinton campaign. These two concepts unified their organizations.

If we think literary, we find: “an orphan boy is really a powerful wizard” or “…the lion fell in love with the lamb.” These aren’t loglines for Harry Potter or Twilight, but they encapsulate the one thing core to the story.
U Unexpected We’ve all heard “same but different” way too many times! Take a known motif and twist it enough that it is still recognizable but new. This triggers our natural surprise reaction and makes us do a double take. Exactly what you want that agent to do! 

The Heath’s use the examples from the anti-drug ads from the 80′s “…this is your brain on drugs,” an image of a frying egg in a hot pan, and the wild Southwest airlines flight attendant who tells her passengers that “while there may be 50 ways to leave your lover, there are only 4 to leave this aircraft!”

The unexpectedness relies on taking something that is familiar and twisting it to capture attention. Kind of like sparkly vegetarian vampires and Harry Potter’s society within a society with many elements very much like our own such as the Ministry of Magic and penalties for underage flying.
C Concrete In a story, we create concrete moments with key details: an aching smile, a eggshell-pink china cup. The Heath brothers suggest that we take that a step further and ground the details in the specifics relevant to our audience. The more universal the detail the wider the message. 

The Nature Conservancy, rather than just asking for donations to save protected lands, now ‘sells’ actual parcels in exchange for donations. While, Nordstrom does not tell it’s sales associates to “provide exceptional service” it tells them about the sales associate who ironed a customer’s shirt or accepted a customer’s returned tire chains (Nordstrom, a high-end department store, does not sell tires!).

Unexpected and Concrete go together, the examples that I gave above from Twilight and Harry Potter are both unexpected and concrete.
C Credible You can imbue an idea with credibility by making it come from a respected source. The secret flights rumor above is more credible because it invokes the gravitas of the FBI. Hey, if the FBI says so… You can also increase the credibility by honing details or adding statistics. The seven year gum, for example, works partly because of the detail of seven, not “a few” years. 

What the Heath’ s call the “Sinatra Test” comes from the song New York, New York when Frank sings…”If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” You know it’s true because New York City is specific and commands respect, and Frank knows what he’s talking about.

But the stickiest way to make an idea credible is to make your audience the authority, as Wendy’s did in their 1980s ad “Where’s the beef.” Wendy’s used the common knowledge that most fast food hamburgers were small! We all knew that!
E Emotional For a message to stick your readers must care. One of the simplest ways to make people care is to create an association from your concept with something they do care about. 

Ads for a single, named, and pictured starving child in Africa are effective because we all know children of that age. If you can make your message relate personally, that’s even better. Drive around your town and look at the poster board ads for examples like “You can be thinner in 5 days” or “Make $125,000/year working 4 hours a day from your own home.” You may not believe them but you recall them. These ads appeal to your desires and that’s emotional and personal. I’ll leave you with one that I love, the anti-littering ad scattered on Texas highways that speaks to our belief of the tough Texan: “Don’t mess with Texas.”
S Stories This one is more obvious for us. After all we write stories! 

But studies show that when we read stories we create pictures in our heads, more than that, we create a sort of plot-pathway. When the stories we read are logical and consistent (i.e. draw a realistic path) we integrate them into our thoughts and remember them. We also recall the concepts far better. The story becomes lifelike. How lifelike is the magical world of Harry Potter? It springs to life, in part, due to the internal consistency and attention to detail that J.K Rowling applied to her world-building, coupled with her familiar and realistic plot elements.

Made to Stick is a book for anyone who wants their message to stand out. I’ve only touched on a few of the useful concepts in this book. I encourage all of you to read it, and apply the message like superglue to your next pitch, logline, query, and manuscript.

Now go out and be sticky!

(initially published Jan 9, 2011 on SavvyAuthors.com column, Connect the Dots.)

categories Book Reviews, Non-Fiction, Writing Craft

Slush readers Blink

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By , August 2, 2010 7:38 am
In the Malcolm Gladwell sense of the word, of course.

One of Gladwell’s key premises in his popular book is:

When faced with an onslaught of information, only an expert has the prior knowledge that lets her weed out the confusing mess of important-looking but irrelevant chaff so she can focus on the one or two key bits the decision turns on.

His examples range from curators at the Getty museum who when faced with an expertly executed fake statue failed initially to see it as a fake, to overwrought doctors trying to decide the fate of possible cardiac patients in a inner city hospital in Chicago. He walks us through the dilemma faced by police officers with milliseconds to decide if the dark object in a young man’s hand is a gun or a wallet.

It’s interesting stuff. And the parallels to the current crisis in the publishing industry were obvious.  According to Gladwell’s experts, the key factor between making the correct split second decision, the right blink, is the amount of good, no excellent, prior information and research you have internalized or a willingness to follow a set of triage instructions and not waver in the face of conflicting information. The cardiac physicians who used the apparently simple triage rules, ignoring the rest of the symptoms, had patients with better results. The art experts with years of experience trusted their first glances of the statue and identified the fake, but only because they backed it with deep knowledge.

Gladwell found when inexperienced people trusted their initial judgments, or blinks, preconceived results based on bias ruled. Decisions often went awry.

The publishing industry is in crisis and not just from the threat of ebook readers. Personal computers, the internet and easy access to just about anyone makes it seem like anyone can write and publish a book. Just do google search! Slush readers who twenty years ago would get a handful of manuscripts  a week to slog through for an editor or agent are receiving, in some cases, hundreds each day. Agent backlogs are months long.

How are these querys and first pages getting read? I bet they’re getting blinked. And in most cases the slush readers are likely experts and know what they are looking for. But some are getting blinked in an unknowable, inexpert way, as well. That’s just human nature and the internet firehose.

Since I am getting ready to query my first novel, this means that anything I can do to elevate myself above the slush pile is crtitical. You can work to gain access through contests and, pitch sessions at sites like SavvyAuthors or other writing sites. Producing squeaky clean pages and a tight query seems like a good starting point. Making sure my unique voice shines in my first pages, and the rest of my novel is one of my priorities, and improving my basic grammar and self-editing skills. I figure in a Blink world it’s all about not squandering any opportunity that drifts my way.

categories Book Reviews, Non-Fiction, Publishing, writing process

Writing Book Epiphany: #863 Just reading writing books is like throwing crunchy spaghetti at the wall it ain’t gonna stik

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By , April 13, 2010 11:32 am

I am a student. I have a string of degrees behind my name that proves that I am incapable of stopping until all the boxes are checked and every grade given and curve blown, by me.

When I began to write, I bought the Approved Books on the Subject and commenced a-studyin’.  Yawn.

One in particular I found yawn-worthy: the redoubtable Ms. Francine Prose’s Reading Like A Writer. OMG.

I am not a Lit Major, I dissected them. Really, come here I still have my scalpel.

Ms. Prose can and does spend PAGES on single sentences. I plunked this puppy closed and did not give it a passing glance, until last week. You see I’ve become obsessed with how my sentences sound.  I’ve been writing for nearly two years and NOW I get it.   ::HEAD SMACK::

Finally, the spaghetti of those ideas found enough framework in my mind to stick and make sense. More than make sense, make music. Blessings to you Ms. Prose, I bow to your greatness and am just plain happy that  my stupidly analytical brain finally could see the dance in the words. Back to studying; I’m like a pig in sh*t.

categories Book Reviews, Non-Fiction, Writing Craft

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