This live recording by Bill Stevens Productions is copyrighted by Romance Writers of America, all rights reserved. Distribution of unauthorized copies or file sharing constitutes copyright infringement under the Copyright Act. My name is Heather Long and the title of this session is Writing for Your Id.
Now let's welcome our speaker, Jennifer L. Barnes. Okay, Dr. Jennifer L. Barnes. In addition to being the author of more than a dozen young adult novels, Jennifer Barnes is also one of the world's leading experts on cognitive science of fiction and the psychology of media fandom.
She is a Fulbright Scholar with advanced degrees in psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science, and received her doctorate from Yale University in 2012. As an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma, she studies the universal appeal of stories and runs a research laboratory dedicated to scientifically exploring the ins and outs of how the world works. How the Human Mind Engages with Fictional Characters, Situations, and Worlds. Jennifer wrote her first published novel at the age of 19 and has written television pilot scripts for MTV and USA. She has a dual appointment in psychology and professional writing. Thank you so much.
I am so thrilled to be here talking to you guys today because RWA was actually one of the first professional conferences I ever went to and one of my favorite that I've been to as a writer. But of course, as you might have guessed from that introduction, I'm going to be talking about RWA. I'm not actually here today to speak to you as a writer. I'm here today to speak to you as a psychology professor, as someone who studies the psychology of fiction and the imagination, books, movies, television shows, and fandom. And as someone who lives with a family of people who are not alone, with my feet is sort of in two worlds at all times.
The world of psychology where I run a research lab and I do experiments and there are theories and scientific method. And then the other foot at all times in the writing world where I'm writing books and reading them and looking at the bestseller lists. There are sort of two questions that I find myself asking a lot. The first is a question that I ask often as a scientist and discuss with other scientists interested in why we like stories.
And that question is, why fiction? Why is it that we as a species seem wired to spend so much time and money and emotion on something that we know isn't real? And the second question I ask myself is probably a question you've asked yourself before too, which is, why that book? You know, when a book takes off, when it sells really well, when it becomes a huge bestseller, you ask yourself, why is it that book?
Why did that book do this? You know, I'm a YA writer, so it's like, why is Hunger Games Hunger Games? Why is Twilight Twilight? How did these books become these huge things? And the neat thing about doing what I do and having a foot in both worlds is that these questions really are integrally related and they inform each other.
So what I do generally on a day-to-day basis is I can take a ton of theories about why people like stories, about why psychologists and computer scientists and literary theories and evolutionary biologists, why all these people think we like stories, and then I can go and I can apply it and look at bestsellers through that lens. time, when I have my writing hat on, I can look at a big bestseller and I look at the way people are talking about it, talk to people about it, you know, look at what the reviews say, look at what the fandom is saying and what people are getting attached to. And I can use what I see there to generate other theories that answer this big question about why fiction, right?
And when psychologists are studying why fiction, a lot of this debate has taken place in an evolutionary psychology framework. So it's a lot of people asking, how did we evolve? to be a species that is so into stuff that's not real.
That is an evolutionary puzzle, like how could this have ever happened? And there's a lot of different theories that explain this in an evolutionary perspective. So if you're available tomorrow at 9.40 a.m., I'm actually talking about six different theories and how you can apply those to your writing. But today I'm only going to talk about one theory.
And this is a theory put forth by Steven Pinker in his book, How the Mind Works. So basically what happened is all these people are debating the evolutionary history of how we came to like fiction and stories. And some people are saying, maybe fiction makes us better at reading other people.
Maybe fiction makes us empathetic. Maybe it makes us more moral. Maybe it provides group cohesion. They're coming up with all of these explanations for why it might have been advantageous for us in the environment in which we evolved to be really into stories.
And into this debate waltzes Steven Pinker. And he basically says... I don't really think this is an evolutionary puzzle. All of this debate that's going on, I think there's really a very simple answer to the question of why people like stories. And to make his argument, He said, listen, evolutionary psychologists, you guys aren't sitting around asking, why do people like cheesecake?
How would liking cheesecake have helped us in the environment in which we evolved? You're not coming up with complex theories about why we like cheesecake, because you know quite well why we like cheesecake. So why do we like cheesecake? Well, Pinker argues that we will like cheesecake, not because we evolved to like cheesecake per se, but because we have a bunch of other hardwired... innate, evolutionarily advantageous preferences that are built into our brains.
So, for example, we have a preference for high sugar content and high fat content because people who had those preferences in the environment in which we evolved were better at surviving and reproducing because they didn't starve. So over time, this becomes hardwired into our brains. We like sugar, we like fat, and then what happens is Clever people in the modern world are like, you know what people will really like? Something with a lot of sugar and a lot of fat. And that's why we like cheesecake.
And that's why people make cheesecake. So cheesecake, Pinker argues, is what he calls a pleasure technology. What he means when he says pleasure technology is he means that there are a bunch of pre-existing pleasures hardwired into the human brain and cheesecake just delivers those pleasures.
It's designed to deliver those specific pleasures at high... content. And so his argument, he thinks that fiction, and indeed he applies this to all of the arts, is also a pleasure technology.
He thinks it's not any more of a puzzle why we like stories than it is why we like cheesecake. We like stories because clever authors cram them full of things we like. And this leads to a very easy prediction, which is the prediction that the most successful books will be the ones that deliver the most pleasure, and that deliver that pleasure the most effectively. So I'd like to pair this with an observation I've made in my own career as a writer.
So just to give me a little context, context, how many of you out there have written several books or more than several over time? Okay, so I'm betting some of you might have had this observation as well. Here's my observation.
The books I'm writing now are just much, much better books than the books I wrote 12 years ago when my first book came out. My level of craft and characterization and plotting and pacing and even just the way I use words, I'm so much better at all of that now than I used to be. And yet, the relationship between the level of what I see as the craft of my books and how beloved those books are by readers is virtually non-existent.
And the same thing goes for my sales numbers. There's not this nice linear relationship between how good I think my books are and how well those individual books sell. So this question of why that book is a question that I ask myself looking only at my own books, too.
Sometimes I'll look back at a book I wrote five or ten years ago, and I'm like, why that book? You know, I'm like, this one I wrote. now is so much better why do people love that book so much and so I was starting to think about this a lot and I was talking to other authors about this and I found out that I am not the only one who has this experience I'm not the only one who's had the experience of going on to write what I think is a much better book and see it underperforming books that I wrote before I was as good as I am now And then I looked out at the market and I realized, at least in young adult, what I write is often when you're saying, why that book?
Why did that book take off? Those books were often debuts or books written very early in someone's career. And so I was...
about all of this and as scientists do I have observations and what do I do? Scientific method from your third grade classroom. I generated a theory and here's my theory both from my own experiences and from talking to lots of other authors. believe that as we progress in our craft as writers, as you write more and more books, as you do more and more revisions, as you work with editors, as you get feedback from readers, as you just really become more polished, I think we sometimes begin editing out our id, the base level got just fun pleasures in our books. And I think it's easy to see how this can happen because as I've written more and more, you start worrying about things like this.
You ask yourself, oh, I kind of want to do that, this thing, but is that too cliche? Is that overdone? Is it realistic enough? Is this silly?
You know, is that too over the top? Is it Too much. Or if you've written a lot of books, you might think, oh, I've done that in one of my other books. I can't do that again already. Right?
And meanwhile, it's not just the voices inside our own heads, because there's no shortage of people out there in the world saying stuff like, I am so sick of InstaLove. Or, I hate love triangles. I never want to see another love triangle again. Or, one of my personal favorites, that character is such a Mary Sue.
Or finally, even things like, oh, princess stories, I'm over princess stories, princesses are so overdone. So as we're getting better, as we're revising, as we're taking our craft to the next level, and as we're hearing all these voices from the outside telling of us all these things, I think a weird thing happens. We all hear the term guilty pleasure. People will attach it to what they read.
And I've never been a person, I firmly believe, in not feeling guilty about the things I love. So I don't have guilty pleasures. I only have pleasures.
And yet, as a writer, somehow the idea of writing those very basic gut-level pleasures, the things that debut books are brimming with, because they're written in a vacuum, before you have all that outside input, before you've studied the craft. as much, right? Those things start to be associated with some kind of guilt. And we start thinking that those things that just give us pleasure by virtue of giving us pleasure must not be good.
And what I want to point out to you today is that this is a completely irrational belief, right? So there is no reason in the world why a lot of the things that might give you pleasure actually would make your book in any way worse. You can write with a high degree of characterization. You can write very nuanced stories.
You can write beautifully executed plots with great language and still put in all of those tropes and all of that good stuff. So I'll take a very simple example. So, for example, one thing that I see more often in debut books is you'll be like, oh, the character has, you know, purple eyes or a very unique name or, you know, all of these kinds of things that people actually really like.
And as you go on and on, those are things that end up on Mary Sue checklists, and people say, oh, that's cliche, all this, this. So as you get better and better, you're like, no, no, no, I'm not going to do any of that. I'm going to tamp down on all of that.
And yet, if you sit there and you actually think, think about it. There is no reason in the world that your character's eye color has anything to do with the actual level of craft in your books. Your book is not actually going to be a worse book or a less nuanced book or less of a work of art just because there's these random pleasurable things in there, right? So my goals for this workshop, one, I want to help everyone in this room stop subconsciously editing the... the gut level basic pleasures out of your books.
So I want to defeat this idea of the guilty pleasure, and I want to free you all to write without asking yourself, is that cliche? Is that overdone? Have I done that too much? And secondly, I want to help you guys learn to consciously edit into your books all kinds of pleasures, both universal pleasures, which we see broadly across cultures. across the world, and also idiosyncratic or individualized pleasures, so the things that you personally just really, really randomly love.
Now, for those of you who might not have taken an introductory psychology class, what I mean when I say id throughout this level, I'm stealing from Freud. He thought there were three levels to the self, and the most basic level was what he called the id. It's the impulsive, irrational, pleasure-seeking part of the self that wants what it wants when it wants it, even if there's no good reason to want it, gosh darn it.
So when I say that I want everyone to be writing for their id, What I mean is you write the things that you like, those gut level pleasures, because you like them, without necessarily having to have a reason or justification for what you want. And the reason I think it's so important to do this is that by doing this, by editing the pleasures into your book, you're not just going to increase the pleasure you as a writer have in writing the books, because it's going to make writing your books way more fun. than editing the pleasure out is, but it's also going to give your books a different level of appeal to readers and bring them in.
So a brief outline for what we're going to talk about today. First, we're going to talk about editing some hardwired pleasures into your books. So we're going to look at what are the kinds of things that the human species generally is disposed to find pleasurable, and how can you put those in your books.
And then we're going to talk about identifying your idiosyncratic or individualized pleasures. and things that you just really, really randomly love. And I could have just as easily called this talk making cheesecake, right? Because you're taking the things people find pleasurable and you're just shoving them into your books at the highest quantity possible while still maintaining your level of craft.
So to begin by talking about some of these hardwired pleasures. So to greatly simplify things, and I apologize to any neuroscientists in the room because I know romance writers and I know their... there might very well be a romance writing neuroscientist, or more than one in this room. I'm going to very much simplify things, and just refer to pleasure, or pleasure centers, as kind of a button you can push.
Right? So there's a pleasure, you push the button, it delivers pleasure. So the question we're asking, and please no dirty jokes here, is what buttons can I push? In other words, What do human beings tend to find pleasurable? And if you ask this question to a group of people, almost certainly the first thing that's going to come up is sex.
And I think this is a good time to explain that when psychologists talk about something like a universal pleasure or a hardwired pleasure, they don't actually literally mean that every single person finds that thing pleasurable. Because we know quite well, for instance, that the... there are some people who don't have a drive to have sex or who don't find sex pleasurable. Even among people who do find sex pleasurable, you don't find all sex pleasurable, right? So we're not saying it's bulletproof everyone's going to find this pleasurable.
What we generally mean... when we call something a universal pleasure is we mean that if you look across cultures, across the world, across history, there's been a predominance of people who kind of find these things pleasurable. So it's a general trend in the human species to find something pleasurable, but doesn't necessarily apply to everyone.
So, stepping beyond sex, what other buttons are there? What other pleasures can you deliver? Well, one of them that I think romance novels are very, very strong on generally...
is related to sex in some cases, and in other cases it's not. And that's just the pleasure of touch. So before I started studying the psychology of fiction, I was actually a primate cognition researcher, and I worked with a variety of monkey species. And they show a variety of grooming behaviors, right?
And it's grooming and bonding, and it's a certain kind of touch, right? So there's a whole variety of ways that you can have physical contact with other people that release oxytocin. and that sort of make you happy in the real world. So how does this manifest in books? Well, if I was talking to anyone but romance writers, I would go through a lot of different ways to do this.
But since I feel like romance novels are generally very good at the pleasure of touch, I'll just say it's both romantic touch, but it's also things like holding hands, assuming you want to be holding hands with the person. It's cuddling. It's brushing someone's hair. It's a massage. It's even holding a baby.
or a small child or a puppy touching something soft. It's just all of those kind of things that in the real world we get pleasure from. I'm going to talk a little bit in more detail about the five other pleasures I'm presenting for you today because those are ones that I think we don't see, we see sometimes, and you're going to see some of these you're going to think, yes, I'm definitely doing that in my books, and others you might think. You might not. So what, besides sex and touch, do humans tend to find pleasurable?
My disclaimer is that this list is not exhaustive. They were just the first, like, six things I thought of as being hardwired pleasures. Here's one of them. Beauty.
So how cultures define beauty varies across cultures. It varies across history. But...
Even young infants prefer to look at sort of symmetric, beautiful faces. Every culture, or at least the vast majority, have a definition of beauty and seem to take some pleasure in the things that are beautiful. so as a writer knowing this how might you push the beauty button in your books well one way beautiful characters right there's a reason that the people on the covers of books are often very very aesthetically appealing. This is The Bells by Donyell Clayton. And look at her.
She's gorgeous, right? But I've chosen this book to put up here for a second reason, which is it's a book that deals very explicitly with beauty. So in addition to having beautiful characters, you can push the beauty button by dealing with the idea sort of of beauty as power. So this is Snow White, right?
This is Helen of Troy. You look across mythology, across folk tales. this idea of there being some power inherent in beauty is everywhere. In the example of the bells, it's set in a universe where there are these supernatural creatures named bells who are actually able to sort of like supernaturally make people over.
They can change the way people look. They're highly sought after, but both kind of enslaved. So it's a book that very clearly addresses the issue of beauty and the themes of beauty head on. Another way of pushing the beauty button, Having your characters actually grapple with what is beauty. So one of the wonderful things about all of the themes I'm going to show you that people tend to find appealing is you don't have to have them in your books uncritically.
So I'm not saying you have to write a book where everyone is a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful person, right? So you can write a book where someone is grappling with societal ideals about beauty. And you're still going to be pushing the beauty button, right?
And in a romance novel, you know, people don't have to be beautiful by a societal definition because we can see them through each other's eyes, right? We can see the beauty in each other. It's not like a movie.
when you go and we're actually seeing the beauty ourselves, the writers are creating it for us. And one of my favorite ways to push the beauty button, the makeover sequence. So like in all of the teen movies, Pretty Woman, all of these... kinds of things where someone's getting a makeover and they're changing the way they look and all that, that's just someone going beauty button, beauty button, beauty button for like 15 minutes, right? You also have things like the getting ready sequence.
So someone is tightening a corset or getting dressed or looking at their closet. Those are all just beauty-centric scenes. And finally, if you're not so into the beauty button through beautiful people, it turns out there are also some things other than people that can do this. So, for example, beautiful places.
There are researchers who research what they call aesthetic awe, which is sort of... visual experiences we can have that make us feel a small sense of self and kind of awed by the world at large. They tend to be things that are very, very vast and big. They're waterfalls, right? They're the Grand Canyon.
They're the, you know, giant sequoia trees, right? So beautiful places also do this. So to give you another example from recent popular culture, when the audience has seen the movie Black Panther.
from Marvel, right? First of all, I think we can all agree there's some very beautiful people in that movie, right? So they're pushing the beauty button in that way.
But if you watch the movie, you'll also notice from the beginning right up through the end, they're talking about how Wakanda is the most beautiful place in the world. And there are actually some really emotionally significant moments in that movie about the beauty of the place of Wakanda. And so those are moments that are just pushing the beauty button.
Like I said, you know, You can have a high level of craft that can be emotionally beautiful moments, but you're still delivering this base level pleasure to your readers. Another button you can push? Well, we tend to have a preference for high resources or wealth.
If you look at this from an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense. In the environment in which we evolved, resources were things like food and shelter. So it was advantageous to find those things preferable in the people who had them and maybe make friends with them and so on.
Again, you can look at fairy tales and folk tales across the world. We have Midas. We have Rumpelstiltskin. Now keep in mind, these aren't fairy tales.
that are necessarily saying, rich is good, rich is wonderful, yay, yay, yay, money. But they are saying, he's weaving stuff into gold. There's just gold everywhere. Everything he's touching is gold. Gold, gold, gold, right?
So they're actually pressing that button. You can see it in popular media and stuff sort of set in high society, very wealthy worlds, everything from Gossip Girl and Dynasty to the upcoming Crazy Rich Asians, where the word rich is right there in the title. This isn't specific to any genre. look at the superhero genre.
Have you ever counted how many superheroes are billionaires? Here you see the trifecta of Tony Stark, Bruce Wayne, and Oliver Queen, all of whom are superhero billionaires. You know, it's everything from Great Gatsby to Fifty Shades of Grey.
And as everyone in this room probably knows, there are entire sub-genres of romance that are guaranteed to push this button. So, what if you're not writing about billionaires? billionaires? What if you don't want to write about billionaires, but you still maybe want to deliver some of these pleasures? Well, I think there are a variety of ways that you can do this.
The obvious way, of course, is depictions of wealth and luxuries, whether it's across the entire books or in one moment. Just as I said for beauty, you can also push this button through critical depictions of wealth. So as a YA author, one of the examples I like to use is the Hunger Games. So in the Hunger Games, you have the poor outlying districts, you have the very rich capital, and the inequality between those, when you go from the poverty to the very rich capital, it's sickening, and it's meant to be sickening, like the capital is so...
rich that people eat food and then throw it back up again at their lavish, lavish parties. And yet you're still pushing this wealth button because there still are the lavish, lavish wealthy parties, right? Another thing that I think is important to point out is what constitutes wealth is relative, and it's going to be specific to your individual book.
So to bring another example in for YA, there's this wonderful YA book that's been on the New York Times list since it came out a year and a half ago called The Handmaid's Tale. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. And in the first scene, it's a girl who's grown up in a poor, predominantly black neighborhood. She goes to a richer, predominantly white private school. So again, you can already see that's pushing the wealth button.
But also, one of the first scenes, she's at a party in her neighborhood, which, you know, as I said, is a much poorer neighborhood. It is not a very wealthy neighborhood. But even in that scene, you get immediately what one of the cues to relative wealth is there, because she mentions that one of the other... other girls always has the newest Jordans, like the newest, hottest sneakers.
And that's the only cue you're getting there to what wealth means in that context, right? So no matter what socioeconomic status or what setting you're writing in, there are going to be some cues to something like wealth. What other things do humans tend to find pleasurable? Status and power, which is often correlated with wealth, though not always.
So I think this is the reason that people really, really like books about dukes, about royalty more broadly. And so how can you push the power button? Well, the first and most obvious way is you have characters who are in positions of power. So everything from royalty, peerage, and politicians, the FBI, police, and other authorities, CEOs, or bosses, generals in an army, people who are supernaturally powered. So again, if you look at the romance genre, you can start to see which genres, which subgenres, how these books tend to press the power status button.
But there are also a lot of different kinds of power you can play with. There are a lot of different things that can make people powerful. So, for example, if you hold a lot of influence over other people, regardless of whether you have a high status position or not, you are powerful. You know, if you have connections to a lot of powerful people, you are powerful. There's occupational prestige, so there's a certain amount of power, at least in our society, associated with positions like that.
doctor or lawyer. There's legal and religious authority. There's respect. Just being someone that everyone holds in esteem is a kind of power.
There's physical power, so physical size and strength and brawn, right? And there's also just reputation. Other ways to push the power button? Through power differentials.
Again, you can see whole genres of stories about this. So like the dystopian genre in general, the pleasure of power is central to that genre because it's always about the people who aren't. aren't powerful, going up against the corrupt and powerful government. It's also every underdog story known to man, because you have someone who is not powerful, who's going up against the more powerful.
It's your David and Goliath, right? And then specifically... for romance, you have power differentials, power dynamics, and trust in relationships. Now at this point, I would like to make a disclaimer.
Because I've told you I want you to turn off your inner critic, but I want you to turn off your inner critic when your inner critic is saying stuff like that's cliche, that's over the top, that's overdone. You are still responsible for what you write, which I feel is important to point out when we're talking about powers and power differential and relationships. So I am not in any way advocating you turn off your inner critic if your inner critic is saying something like this might inflict harm on someone else right so that's still the part of your inner critic you need to take on so this is just my public service announcement don't walk away from this talk going oh, power differentials are great, and make something like this your hero in your romance novel. Tomorrow I'm going to talk about moral psychology and imagination and morality in fiction, and I'll tell you why this doesn't work on that level. But this is just your general public service announcement.
I'm asking you to get in touch with your inner pleasure, but there are still some things you need to keep in mind. So what other buttons are there to push? So those first three were really easy for me to come up with, as well as touch.
And then I started thinking, and I came up with another one that was inspired by... by my time as a primate cognition researcher. And that's competition. So I used to spend my summers on this island full of free-ranging rhesus monkeys.
There were a thousand of them. You walk onto the island, it's just you. It's all these monkeys. If you want to eat lunch, you go and eat in a cage, and there's monkeys outside of the cage watching you. So one of the first things you learn on Monkey Island is there's a lot about power and hierarchy because they too are wired to care about these things.
But there are a lot of people who are like, but there's also a lot of competition. So like any time two highly ranked monkeys start fighting each other, like practically every other monkey on the island circles up like they're middle schoolers yelling fight, fight, fight, and they're just glued to it. When you think about human beings, there's a reason that professional sports is a thing.
If we didn't find competition somehow innately satisfying, there would be no such thing as sports. There would be no reason that we would care about teams or watch them. That wouldn't be one of our biggest pastimes, right? So how can you push the competition button in a book? Well, contests, races, games, sports, but also rivalries between different characters.
Love triangles are a competition, right? Bets are a competition. Battles and wars, or anything that turns the conflict in your book into a competition between two people, right?
So, Game of Thrones, I have another talk I do on titles. This title is basically competition of power. And so is the second book in the series, Clash of Kings.
It's also Competition of Power. And those are words that are just money words because we're like, ooh, we're wired to like competitions. We're wired to like power.
Game of Thrones, that sounds great. And, of course, Game of Thrones is very big on the competition pleasure. Highlander, you know, the subtitle here is there can only be one. That's a competition logline, right? And what is another button?
This one may surprise you. So, danger. You say, why would we ever, ever evolve to like danger?
Shouldn't we evolve to like run away from danger? Yes. So, I'm going to put a caveat. People tend to like danger. safe danger.
By safe danger, I mean things that feel dangerous, but they can't really hurt you. Now the bonus is any danger that happens in a book is automatically safe danger, because it can't actually get you. And obviously people have different levels of comfort with how dangerous they like their books to be, ranging from I don't want any danger to bring on the serial killers, right? But... I think there's a reason that this is a specifically interesting one for romance novels.
Because one of my favorite experiments I learned about back when I was an introductory psychology student was what's called the rickety bridge experiment. And that's how it's referred to. So this is an experiment.
They bring people in, and they have them walk over one of two bridges. One bridge is very sturdy. The other bridge is kind of rickety, and it seems like it might fall, and you might fall. And then at the end of the bridge, there's a research assistant, a college student, who hands you some forms to fill out, and you think the experiment's about the forms you're filling out.
But really, what they were really interested in is how hot you think the research assistant is. How likely are you to call them if they give you your phone number? If you ask people how attractive they are, they fill it out.
And what they found is that people thought the research assistant was hotter after crossing the rickety bridge. The experimenter's explanation for this is, well, after you cross the ricketing bridge, what's happening? Your heart is pounding. Your palms are sweating. You're in a high state of physiological arousal.
And then you see someone and you think, wow, my heart is pounding. My palms are sweating. I'm in a high state of physiological arousal. That person must be hot. Even though that has nothing to do with why your heart was pounding in the first place.
So the very first time I ever saw the Twilight movie, I don't know how many people have seen the Twilight movie, it's been a few years now, there's this scene where the vampire hero and the human heroine, you know, they're in a parking lot and this car comes careening up. to her and he puts out his hand and stops the car and saves her life right before she dies and then it's like it's kind of like hi i'm edward cullen right and i was like i read that and i was like it's the rickety bridge like they just rickety bridged edward cullen right and so i think this is a very powerful thing to know as a romance writer even if you're not writing in a sub-genre that's high on danger So how can you push the danger button? Well, dangerous characters. So these are your assassins, your soldiers, your supernaturally powerful vampires, your, you know, dark characters. But it's also dangerous worlds.
And if you're not writing in a subgenre in which you have dangerous characters or those dangerous worlds where you could lose your life at any moment, you can also just have a dangerous moment. So say you're writing a very sweet romance set in a small town and there is no overwhelming danger there's nothing stopping you from having a car careening and having the person do that you know maybe they're in the car they're on ice it careens for a moment it's a moment of danger which is going to give this high arousal physiological state which is going to enhance some of the other pleasures that are there So something that's probably come up in this talk already is that different genres tend to be associated with different pleasures. And my personal theory is that I think taking your book to the next level is a matter of paying special attention to really ratcheting up the pleasures that people expect out of your genre or subgenre. So if you're writing a billionaire romance, he's a super, super rich, super, super powerful billionaire, right? And you're hitting that button.
But it's also a matter of taking care to include moments or scenes that push the pleasure buttons that aren't associated with your genre. So if I were talking to a room of thriller writers, I wouldn't talk very much about danger. But I would talk to them a lot about, say, touch or maybe competition. So how can we see these in action?
So I came up with these not by looking at stories, but based on psychology. And then I went and I was like, well, I wonder if there's anything to this. Okay, Pinker, let's see how your cheesecake theory holds up with the specific pleasures I've looked at. And I looked at a few best-selling books or really big movies to see how this stacked up. And it's pretty amazing.
So let's take, for instance, Hunger Games. For those of you who aren't that familiar with Hunger Games, it's a young adult novel about a girl named Katniss. who grew up in a poor outlying district. When her sister's name is pulled from a lottery, she volunteers on her behalf to go be a part of the Hunger Games, which is this yearly televised competition in which kids from the district fight the death for the amusement of the rich capital.
Okay, so how does it push these different buttons? Beauty. Now you might think, this doesn't sound like a book that would push the beauty button at all. It's a horrible dystopian future where kids are fighting for the death.
And yet, the second section of the book, like Act 2, Part 1, is a makeover. It's a very extensive makeover because in the way The Hunger Games works, you have to woo sponsors to sponsor you during the game. So every tribute gets a whole team devoted to making them over and designing their costumes. And so there's multiple costume changes. There's all of these makeovers.
It's like going beauty button, beauty button, beauty button. Even though in another writer's hand, the beauty button might never have been hit in this book at all. Wealth, as I mentioned earlier, you've got the very rich capital, the very poor districts, and that is a theme explicitly dealt with in the books. Power, again, you've got the power differential between the capital and the outlying districts. You also have powerful figures.
So you have the villain as the president. But you also have a character who gets the power of reputation. In the first book, she becomes known as the Mockingjay.
People are using her for propaganda because her saying or doing anything influences people. So there's power. There's physical strength in the games. Who's going to win, right? Competition.
It's called The Hunger Games. It's a survival competition. So competition is really integral to this premise.
Danger. It's a competition where people fight to the death. Obviously there's lots of danger. Touch.
This is probably the one that shows up the least in Hunger Games. And yet if you look at the opening chapter of this book, the first thing she ever does, she's lying in bed. She reaches for her younger sister who's not there. And then we see her brushing and braiding her younger sister's hair. And there are several key and subtle moments.
moments of touch between her and other people, such as when she's mourning someone else and she puts flowers on them, the way they touch each other in subtle ways. Okay, Twilight, Beauty, the vampires in Twilight are supernaturally beautiful, such that when you become a vampire, you become way more beautiful. Wealth, the vampire family, the Cullens, are super rich. And the ultimate villains in the book, they're even super richer. Power, you've got the supernaturally powerful vampires.
You also, they come up against like this high society, like ruling body of vampires, who are sort of, you know, they rule with an iron fist, they kill people. Power is all over there. Competition. There is not only a love triangle, but it's a love triangle between a vampire and a werewolf in a society where those species have rivalries going back hundreds of years, right? So way up in competition and danger.
Edward spends literally the entire first book in... movie telling Bella how dangerous he is for her and how he might accidentally kill her and then other people sometimes accidentally try and kill her and all of these things danger touch not only is there a lot of touch in this because it's a romance novel but the author also creates distinct sensory experiences so like vampires are really cold and werewolves are like really furry and there's all kinds of touch in that way you So switching gears to a movie, Titanic, right? One of the most profitable movies of all time.
Beauty Button. They have some really nice beauty scenes in Titanic. So like Rose getting her corset tightened and her mother dressing her up.
The best one is one where Jack, it's an upstairs-downstairs story. He's poor, she's wealthy, she's lying naked and he's drawing her. That whole scene is just a beauty scene. He is literally turning her into art. Wealth.
this is all over the place. She's wealthy. He's poor. The whole plot revolves around this giant jewel called the jewel of the ocean or the heart of the ocean.
Right. And it, that plays a huge role in there. So, um, power, there are multiple kinds of power.
They deal with imbalance and gender power. and wealth as well as like the captain of the ship and the people in charge competition i hesitate to call this a love triangle because she's never really into her fiance but certainly the conflict is driven by the fiance's sense of competition with jack danger there on the titanic that isn't a good place to be it's dangerous right touch some of the key moments in the movie she he's holding her up on the front of the boat That's a touch moment. Even at the end where it's sad, where she's touching his hands and she's on that door where there is totally room for him too.
But I'm not going to get into that. And she lets go. Like the tragic moment of the book is the cessation of that last touch.
So what you can see is that these very, very big properties are doing really well. On the pleasure front. I've actually done this analysis of a bunch of other stuff, and I haven't done an analysis of any huge property so far that wasn't hitting all of these buttons, at least to some degree, that I could identify without going back to reread the book.
Right? Based on my observations, I think there are four ways of... You got that for me?
You guys, we appreciate it. Okay, for those of you listening at home, we just changed microphones and we are back. Just saying that I think there are four ways of integrating these pleasures into your books. First, there are pleasure-centric premises, right?
So competition is central to Hunger Games. Beauty is central to the Bells. There are also ways of adding pleasure to premises. So taking a premise like Hunger Games that you wouldn't naturally think would have something to do with beauty, but designing a Hunger Games that actually does involve beauty in some way.
also pleasure in plot. So like in Titanic, I mentioned Jack draws the picture of Rose. That picture actually ends up playing a really big role in the plot. So one way of integrating pleasure into your books is looking at your big plot moments and seeing are those moments where you're hitting a pleasure, do they hinge on one of these things in some way? And finally, you can also just add in pleasure-centric moments, details, or scenes.
Like I was talking about in your sweet romance, having the car spin out just for a moment, right? So maybe it's not something you're going to do big picture. Maybe it's not a part of the premise.
Maybe it's not a part of a plot. You can still have a moment. So what do I recommend doing?
Well, since I started this work, I have started taking a pleasure inventory of how many of these are there. I am hitting in my books. So when I'm trying to decide what book to write, I'm like, okay, which one of these has the most pleasure inherent in the premise, and what pleasures are inherent in the premise? What pleasures am I really hitting in the book as a whole? And actually, when I'm revising, I'll even look in each individual chapter and be like, okay, am I hitting any pleasures in this chapter?
If so, which ones? And every time you're hitting one of these buttons, consider whether you can and should hit it, harder and more often if there's a button you're not hitting consider inserting a scene or scenes that deliver that pleasure so for me when i go back and i do this math on some of my old books one that i only sometimes hit on is competition so i've had plenty of books i have a couple books where there was a love triangle or a werewolf series where there's a lot of competition for power but I have other books where there were no competitions at all and I was writing a book and I was like oh my gosh there's not really any competition in this I'm like I can add a few rivalries but I will also do something like okay we're going to add a game night we're going to add a scavenger hunt we're going to add a race we're going to add this one thing that gives you a moment of competition in the broader book Now, as I said at the beginning, this list of pleasures is not at all comprehensive. And if you're able to come to my talk tomorrow at 9.40, where I'm talking about some of the more complicated theories of fiction, they deal with other pleasures, like the pleasure of gossip. of family and belonging, of moral righteousness, of all of these kind of knowing what other people are thinking, of all of these kinds of different things. So one thing you can do for yourself is you can ask, okay, what kinds of things do I think people generally find pleasurable?
And there'll be ones that aren't on my list so far. You add them to your list. So that's just a brief overview on how you can go about.
editing some of these hardwired pleasures into your books. We're going to spend the rest of this talk talking about editing idiosyncratic or individualized pleasures in your books. So when I talk to my friends about this, when I'm like, stop worrying about whether or not your book's cliche, you're not going to suddenly start writing worse characters just because you're putting in some of these tropes and doing these things. One thing I hear is people say, Well, if everyone's going to be hitting these pleasure buttons, how do I make my books unique?
If this pleasure feels really overdone, how do I make it unique? And there's a reason that this talk wasn't called Writing for the Id. It's called Writing for Your Id.
Because I have come to believe that the way you make your book unique is not by dialing down the... hardwired more universal pleasures it's by you know you keep those at a high level and then you add in lots and lots of the stuff that you personally really really really like all your favorite tropes all the things things that just really do it for you for no reason at all, you add those into the universal pleasures, and that's what's going to make your book unique. So for example, this is my most recent rung click buy.
It's a romance novel called Grumpy Fake Boyfriend by Jackie Lau. I did it because I really like stories about fake boyfriends, and it's a total bonus if they're grumpy fake boyfriends. Because that's a trope that just really does it for me.
And it's not like grumpy fake boyfriends or a universal pleasure. There's tons of people who aren't into fake boyfriends or fake dating, aren't into grumpy characters. But if you like grumpy fake boyfriends, there's a very high chance that this book is going to be appealing for you.
So the question that we're going to spend sort of the rest of this workshop dealing with is helping you guys identify what are your bulletproof tropes. What are the things that you love every time they see them? The good litmus test for me is imagining you're watching a movie that is really, really, really, really bad.
What trope or tropes can you put in that movie that are going to make you watch it anyway, no matter how bad it is? I make, and advocate everyone making, what I call an id list. This is a running list of any and all things, big and small, that you love in fiction. My id list probably has 500 or more things on it, because I've kept it over a long period of time. I'm going to give you just a sampling of things on my id list.
Number one thing on my id list, identical twins. I imprinted on Parent Trap very young. I am now, anytime anything is about identical twins, I'm like, I'm there. I don't care what the quality of the story is. If it has identical twins, yes please.
If they have magical powers and are also identical twins, that's even a bonus. Other things, not surprisingly, I also like clones. I like robots who look like people. I also like robots who don't realize that they're robots. I love stories where a 20-something is raising their younger siblings Party of Five style.
I love hereditary magic. I love any character who's a little sister. I love stories about big families.
I love curses, heiresses, puzzles, eccentric billionaires, characters who are, in the words of Anya on Buffy, newly human and strangely literal. I love amnesia stories and princesses. I love people who have to live under fake names. I love scenes that take place on rooftops. I love waterfalls.
I love spies. thieves, assassins, secret passageways, overprotective older siblings, cousins who are the same age, secret societies, and females who use gender expectations to defeat their enemies. These are just a few things on my id list.
For the past four years, I have been asking people about their id lists constantly. Whenever I go out to dinner with other authors, I explain to them this is what an id list is, what's on yours. I actually have a Facebook group, like a private Facebook group on Facebook with a few writer friends where we just update with updates to our id lists all the time.
And I teach writing classes at the University of Oklahoma, and all my students make id lists every year. So rather than just showing you my id lists, I want to show you things that have shown up on other people's id lists over time. Airport reunion scenes. Characters eating ice cream. This seems so random and yet I saw that and I was like, oh my gosh, they eat ice cream in all of my books.
Like I used to get in fights with copy editors over whether milkshake was one word or two. And I was like, why have I put milkshakes in six books and now they just eat ice cream? Unique character names. This is one that shows up all the time on my students lists.
Road trips. Okay, this one's random, but I loved it so much when someone told me. Organ donation scenes. They dearly love in books and movies when someone donates an organ to someone else.
Characters who collect vinyl records. Characters who are incapable of feeling emotions. Characters who are incapable of feeling pain also show up a lot.
Police dogs. Scenes set on trains. Unnatural hair colors.
Sometimes people specify unnatural hair colors that the person naturally has. Underwater caves. Haunted houses. Bets involving dating, boarding schools, cities at nighttime, dying requests, parents who leave clues for their children to discover after they die, old maps, abandoned amusement parks, ballrooms. and evil twins also people discovering they were mistaken about the identity of their biological parents shows up a lot this is just a sampling everyone's id list looks a little different some of those things probably popped up and you're like nope doesn't do it it for me.
Some of them probably popped up and you were like, yes, yes, 1000% yes, that's on my id list too. And that's why working your id list into your books is going to work very well, because it's very unlikely that you are alone on your id. And if you can work in lots of things from your id list into your books, you're going to be hitting a lot of other people's ids as well. So here in a minute, we're going to make id lists.
I'm actually going to give you guys about five minutes to start writing stuff down while it's on the top of your mind. My id list is divided into four categories, which might be helpful for you. The first is character tropes. So like, mine will say something like, wayfish assassin.
I'm like, yes, I'm totally into that, right? Plot tropes. So maybe you like marriage of convenience stories, right?
Places. This is a huge one for me. I didn't know how many places I really loved for things to be set.
So things like the rooftops, the hidden passageways, the cities at night time, the abandoned amusement parks, and so on. Islands is another big one for a lot of people. And then just details, things like the unnatural hair color, the unusual names, and so on. So what I want you guys to do, just take about five minutes and start writing down the tropes you like. If you run into trouble and you're having trouble thinking of...
them, think back to some of your favorite books, movies, and television shows, and think through some of the tropes on those and be like, oh yes, I do like, you know, I'm a Grey's Anatomy fan, and I like the Christina Meredith relationship, so I'm going to be like having a person, quote unquote, that's on your id list. So just go through and do this in about five minutes, and then we're going to do some sharing of what's on those id lists. Alright, so I made about 15 additions to my id list while I was sitting here.
I don't have my actual list with me because I am forever losing it and having to create it all over again. So I recommend you actually start a document on your computer that cannot be lost. But in this time, I added female scientists, irreverent princesses, hidden wealth, secret countries, private jets, all female societies, characters who are really strong.
physically, but also naive. Half-siblings who meet in adulthood, Machiavellian women, enemies becoming allies, supernatural siblings, and vampires in suits. So I'm interested to hear from some other people. Is anyone willing to volunteer their id list or some of their id list?
Um, awkward dinner parties, I have one in every book, abandoned buildings, secret pirate islands, enemies to lovers, unexpected first kisses, bonus if they're boy on boy kiss, ghost boys, sassy thief girls, awkward surprise reactions, giant trees that are magic schools, and mentors with hidden agendas, or who know what you're up to and let you do it anyway. Other lists? Okay, right here.
Thanks. I've got characters working together to complete a project, the confluence of food and sex, chase scenes, animal characters, induction to a secret world or society, shameless debauchery. sex scenes um great girlfriends like the sisterhood around a character um uppity menials and nerdy heroes animals come up a lot animal companions uh dogs that you talk to all of those kinds of things come up on a ton of people's lists okay another id list All right, I have awkwardly adorable height differences, the too honorable guy, a beta male, someone growing in strength and confidence, marriage of convenience, Cinderella stories and makeovers, second chances, thrown together, relationship of proximity.
Anything in the rain or touching in the water. Opulence, costumes and gowns, feasts, drinks from a little bit buzzed to straight up drunk. Messy hair.
Ancient forest, mystical site, waterfalls, castles, winds that swept cliffs. Candlelit, isolated by a storm. Yeah, I just added rain and castles to mine. I could do with both of those. Girls dressed as boys, professor adventurers, boys with scars, animal familiars, or unusual animals kept as pets.
Amazonian women, badass old people, like Yoda or like grandmothers who are secretly like... spies or whatever. Enemies to lovers, reunions, forced to work with antagonists against will, retellings, islands, caves, lagoons, creepy old houses, retrofuturism, ruins and catacombs, frocks, meaningful jewelry, unusual nicknames, the moon, secret organizations, sailboats, and maps. Excellent.
So maybe one more. Anyone else? Go. There's some wave in here. I understand.
I have mistaken identities, obsessions, psychological fears, solving mysteries, uncovering reasons for people's unusual behavior, a bad boy veneer with a good heart, problem solving, paranormal, and lack of trust. Yes, I just added mistaken identities to mine too. because that's another one I really love. So we've talked about some of the things on your id list. And just to convince you that I really do think the biggest books have universal pleasures and just are brimming with these really individual ones, I want to return to two of our examples.
So in Twilight, there are sparkly vampires, supernatural baseball, eyes that change colors, riding on wolves. larger-than-life animals, secret society, super-powered twins, eternal children, made-up names, private islands, a family of choice, and a supernatural wedding. In Titanic, you have vastness, heights, the oceans, jewels with names, irreverent rich women, forbidden romance, treasure hunters, upstairs, downstairs, Stairs romances, dancing, historical costumes, and natural disasters, right? So the id list is ever evolving. I literally cannot go to a movie if I'm liking the movie without having this moment where I'm like, gotta add that when I get home.
That thing, I'm like, yes, yes, please that. So once you have an id list, what do you do with this list? Well, first, I would actually advocate.
Spend several weeks developing it, right? Get a really good long list going of locations, of characters, of plot tropes, of details. And then you just add id into your books.
So when you're toying with a premise, ask yourself which items on your id list you might be able to include. So my personal story about this one that I always tell. is I was trying to come up with an idea for a young adult thriller because I had a successful young adult thriller series that's sort of a teenage criminal minds, and I wanted to write something that was different but would go with that.
So I was like, well, what else do I love? I was like, maybe I'll do a teenage kind of scandal west wing political thriller. And I was like, that seems like the right next move, but I was having trouble getting excited about the premise.
And then I went to ye olde id list, and I was like, what if? I was originally like, I'll do... like the daughter of a political fixer. And I was like, no, that's not really doing it for me.
I'm like, what if she's a teenage girl who moves in with her older sibling, who is a political fixer? And I am so into teenagers who are being raised by their older siblings that that automatically did it for me. And this whole story took shape. And I wrote that book.
So when you're dealing with a premise, and maybe you're already excited about it, but what can you add in that would make you even more excited about it? But I also do this if I'm not looking forward to writing a particular chapter, because that chapter is going to be a lot of hard work. This is sort of my carrot that I dangle for myself.
I'll be like, okay, I'm going to pick something from the id list. For me, it's usually a location. I've never had a reader actually tell me, I've noticed that every single one of your books has a scene that takes place on the roof.
But it's totally true, because I'm like, oh, I have to write this scene. And I'm like, well... Guess they're going to go hang out on the roof of the house now. Because I had a friend in high school and we used to hang out on the roof of his house.
And somehow that, or the roof of a very tall building. Or I'm like, okay, we're going to be discovering a secret passageway now. Or we're going to be on a private island now.
Or they're going to be eating ice cream now. Right? So you just find these things that you can put in the scene. And you keep adding it to the scene until you're really, really excited to write that scene. And you look and you say, how much id is there in this plot?
Like, maybe there's not a lot in the plot. Look at my id list. Huh, I wonder if this book needs an evil twin. Or some amnesia.
Or, you know, I'm just looking at my list and I'm looking through those things. You know, characters. If there are character types you love, you know, is there a way, if there's a character who's not quite looking for you, to turn that into one of those character tropes? that you love.
And I do this when I'm building the worlds around things as well. So just as a little reminder, the goals for this workshop, one, I wanted to convince you to stop editing the id out of your books. I wanted to free you from asking yourself if something was cliche or overdone or too much. And at least for your first draft, just go there and do it and take pleasure in it the way you did before you knew everything that you know now.
Thank you. And secondly, I wanted to equip you guys to edit in pleasures and consciously do this as much as you can, both for some pleasures that tend to be more universal, as well as for those individual things you really like. Now, going forward from this, you can also make your own observations, right? So I advocate analyzing bestsellers in your genre or subgenre.
Look at how they're integrating both these prevalent or universal pleasures and also these idiosyncratic ones. know, use them to help build your id list. Also, it's very helpful if you've written multiple books to go back and look at the books you've written before. I did this and I scored all of my books on one to six for how many of the six universal pleasures were hit in a way that I could automatically tell you how I hit it. And my books generally ranged from between a four and a six.
But not surprisingly, the ones that were at six are also my most successful books, right? So go through, look at your past books and figure out, okay, these are the pleasures that I tend to be really strong on. And these are the ones like maybe you don't have much competition in your book. Or maybe you don't really deal with beauty in your book, so you can insert that makeover sequence.
You know, mine is always, it's the character who doesn't want to be made over getting made over, because then you get the beauty sequence, but you're also like, ugh. And that's on my id list. It's actually on my id list.
It says characters getting makeovers who hate makeovers. Right? And then, you know, look at that. Which ones are you weak on?
How can you buff those up? the ones you're strong on, how can you hit those even harder? And then what items on your id list tend to appear a lot?
So there are some items that I didn't know were on my id lists. One day I was at Panera writing with a writing friend. And this realization, I was like, I just realized this is the fourth book in a row that I've written where people were in a cage or a cell at some point.
And... I was like, people in cages show up in all of my, you know, I was like, the werewolf series, that made sense. But then I was just going through all my book and I was like, gosh, I've written like the last five books I'd written at that point or four.
Uh, and my friend across from me who we always joke that we share an id because we like all the same things, she looks up and she was like, so do all of mine. And then I said, well, what book are you working on right now? Um, her name is Rachel Vincent and she goes, it's called Menagerie. It's about people in cages.
Right? So you're like, okay, this is clearly my id. It shows up a lot, but that might help you discover some other things.
And then, you know, look at your id list. Is there anything on your list you've never gotten to do? And is there a way you can do that in this book? So basically, if you think of fiction as a pleasure technology, if you think of writing a book on some level as making cheesecake, then you can actually think about these pleasures that you're delivering when you are choosing which project to write.
Right. You have multiple ideas. They're all so fun. Which one do you want to do?
You know, do the pleasure inventory, do the inventory. Which one do you think is the strongest on all of these? I think about it when I'm sort of outlining or first drafting.
It'll be like, oh, I haven't had. this pleasure for a while or it's been a while since the id list is there um when i revise i actually do a chapter by chapter revision we're at the top of each chapter sometimes or at least for the first third of the book before I get tired of doing it. But I'll actually write, okay, these are the pleasures I'm delivering in this chapter.
I actually do it more comprehensively because there are a bunch of other theories of fiction as well, so I have a bunch of other things that I'm trying to include. So I'll be like, okay, these are the things I'm doing, and then I'll look at all the things I want to do, and I'm like, these are the ones I want to do more strongly, create opportunities to do it. I also think it's worth thinking about this when you're looking at your packaging, your marketing, your back cover copy, your metadata, all of those things. So I'll give you just a brief preview of some stuff.
So there are certain words, I think, that are title buzzwords. So, for example, these are things that just cue pleasures in books. So beauty buzzwords, for example, beautiful, lovely, and beautiful. pretty. So I'm a YA author, beautiful creatures, pretty little liars, wicked, lovely, a great and terrible beauty.
They all have these words, right? Wealth, heiress and heir, billionaire, rich, inheritance, gold, money, anything that cues that. Competition, game, race, versus, rival, winner.
Game is one of those really money words like ender's game, game of thrones, hunger games, because it just cues that competition right away. so what you can do is you can look at all the pleasures that I've come up with all the ones you're coming up with what are the words that mean those things if you come to my talk tomorrow there's six other theories you can pull title buzzwords for I literally I almost always have to retitle my books because my editor will email me and say marketing doesn't love the title and last time I just sent them a huge list of psychological buzzwords and I'm like something with this And they were like, oh, you know, that's how I've titled my last two books. I have a search and rescue book, a family that raises search and rescue dogs, YA thriller coming out next summer.
It was originally called Lost Causes. They thought that was too generic. I went to my list.
It's now called The Lovely and the Lost because lovely is a beauty buzzword. Right? And also, package and market your books in ways that advertise the wish-fulfillment, pleasure-centric elements in them.
Don't be ashamed of the tropes you're using in your books. Even when you're on your Twitter. whatever id list things were in your books do a tweet that says hey if you love evil twins have i got a book for you and you do that with all the things on there because i guarantee you every time you type that if you have a wide enough social media reach someone's going to be like i love evil twins and then they're going to do that so i've given you one answer today to this question Why that book?
Both looking back at your own books, looking at books that are doing well in the market, concentrating on the basic gut-level pleasures that you present. If you are here tomorrow at 9.40 a.m., I believe back in this room, I'm covering six other theories of fiction that you can also integrate into your books, sort of like looking at what the psychological underpinning of the bestseller might be. But for now, we have about 15 minutes left for questions, if anyone has them. If I, thank you, that was wonderful, and then my question is, if I heard you correctly, you said don't be worried about having done this before. How do you get around writing 10 amnesia books?
10 amnesia books? Or do you just do it? here's the thing if your readers like amnesia books they're probably still gonna like another amnesia book i try not to do it in two books in a row but i don't take it off and i I won't do it in two books in the same series.
But I tend to write duologies or trilogies. So the fact that I used amnesia in one trilogy does not at all mean it's off the table for another one. So I try and put some space between so they're not doing 10 amnesia books in a row unless your series is the amnesia series where you're just going to write amnesia romances and lean into it really hard and develop a readership of people who really like amnesia. your romances, and then that might be something you would do. I think another way around that is you develop a really long id list.
If your id list only has five things on it, you're going to keep going back to the same well. If your id list has 500 things on it, then you're writing lots of different things, and even if amnesia works their way into multiple different books, the other items on the id list that are there are going to be so different that the books are going to come out as a different experience. Hi, I know that, this was wonderful, thank you. I know that you analyzed some best-selling fiction, movie and print, to see if they had all six of the elements.
I'm curious as to whether you've done the reverse, as in looking at things that maybe weren't so successful, and were they missing some of those elements? So I haven't done the reverse in part because I think that the books or movies you would most want to target for those things are things that have equivalent marketing budgets so that they had all the exposure and then they didn't go. Because there are so many, many reasons that a book cannot sell.
You could do all six of these things and have so much id and still never find your audience if you're traditionally published. If you're not in the store, if there's not support. If you're indie published, you're having trouble finding your audience.
So the case studies there that I think are interesting are, you know, where do you have like a six-figure marketing campaign? Or you've got like a big movie that they're throwing everything. after.
So I have not done that analysis yet, but I think that's a great point because I think these things tend to bring the book to the next level, but they're not sufficient to sell. They might be necessary to go what I call supernova. So there's a bestseller and then there's like a publishing phenomenon. And I think it's difficult to find publishing phenomenons, things that are actually Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, Fifty Shades of Grey, Level Big, that don't hit on these things.
But there are plenty of books that don't sell well that do hit on all of these things. So I'm wondering kind of about the flip side of this, about displeasure. So to have pleasure, it seems like you also have to have displeasure.
But if you're bringing displeasure to your reader, is that turning them off? How do you find that balance? Or if you could just touch on any thoughts on that. I think it depends on the specific kind of displeasure you're bringing them.
I do think so. Some of my other work on the psychology of sort of fandom. One thing that fandom arises from is a resistance to authorial authority.
So you get fandom where people are really invested in fictional characters and the source material doesn't give them absolutely everything they want. Because if the source material gives you everything, everything you want, then you close the book and you're done. But if the source material holds back a few things, Then you have something to daydream about. You have something to write fan fiction about. You have something to complain to your friends about.
You can make people read it so you can say, can you believe she faded to black in that moment? Or like that thing they keep referencing doing, what is that thing? You have other displeasures like, for example, disgust if you're writing horror, genuine fear in addition to danger, sadness. right? And I think those can really heighten the other emotions you do.
There are some psychological theories out there based on what's called excitation transfer, which is sort of why we like danger. The idea is you get into a high state of arousal for a negative emotion, but then it gets converted to a positive emotion when something positive happens. So like you can have the dark night of the soul where it's very bad.
The couple is split up. It's horrible. You know, nowadays in romance, you can somehow sometimes even have a whole book if you're doing a trilogy right where the middle book maybe things are going bad for that couple and that experience people will go through with that because in romance they know that they're ultimately going to get the happy ending right and then it gets transferred so sometimes the pain can sort of uh heighten the pleasure uh that you're getting from things um I also think there's an effect in psychology, it's not in the psychology of fiction at all, it's actually in economics, called the peak-end effect.
And it says that at the end of the day, we tend to evaluate experiences based on two things. That is the most intense moment, and the last moment. So when you're looking back at a book you read or a movie you read, the ending, like really sticking the ending is going to be important because that's one of two things that people care about. But the other thing they're going to look back at is the most intense moment. So if you're writing comedy, it's the funniest moment if you're writing tragedy it's the moment that you were like crying and snot crying i think like if you've got a book that's both funny and sad you can have two most intense moments because you have intense negative and intense positive and that's what people are going to look back and see um so i think you can get away with some of those displeasures as long as the most intense moment for whatever reason is really pleasurable for your readers you Any more questions?
All right. Well, thank you all so much. Thank you.