The Mathemagical Index of Story Execution · 2:41am Nov 5th, 2014
At some point, every author finds themselves pondering the age old question:
Which is more important: originality or execution? Ideas or story mechanics?
Of course, what they are really asking is:
Could someone please tell me that I don't have to put any more effort into writing the bits of my story that I find boring?
We ask this for a reason. We have only so much time in a day to worry about the minutia. When we are proofreading chapter 1, we might be letting our zeal to get to chapter 2 boil over and out. As a result, we may find ourselves with a more or less shiny chapter 1 and no desire to get to the next one. Motivation is hard.
Reviewers run into a similar problem. Should this fic be panned for objectively containing bad writing buzzword patterns x, y, and z, or is it safe to gush because despite its flaws that one part was reeeeeeely cool?
I believe that the answer to both problems can be found in basic human psychology. And that means...
I get to post a cute widdle Purple Smart in jammies
What's in a fic?
So what is it that we are after here? While it would be nice to create atomic-precision polished fic, we have to eventually sit down and accept the fact that at the end of the day no one can enjoy a story that we refuse to release, and regardless of our skill level, at some point we are going to start over-tuning and ruining what was already perfectly fine as is. So perfection cannot be our target. What does that leave us with? Well, we are putting this story out there ostensibly for other people. Other people are where the upvotes and views come from. It makes sense to use the audience as a measuring stick. If we cannot make them happy, what can we do?
So what does an audience want? At its most basic, they want to be left with a feeling that their time reading your story was well spent. Most are not going to require Nobel Prize literature (unless you are shooting for a more discerning target audience). They just want to put your fic down with more desirable vibes than undesirable. They want the time and effort they put into your fic to be rewarded.
Now how do they come to that decision? Well, I notice there are two parts to our experience of a story. On one hand, there are !WOW! moments. Flash Sentry, Kyle Anon, and Angel Bunny walk into the bar and walk out with all the husbandos. The audience goes wild! Cadence and Shining share a chaste kiss on their tenth anniversary. Eww, straight canon shipping? Who does that? These occurrences resonate strongly with the reader and will stick in their head throughout the fic. They form the basis of the gushing or raging to our friends and family after we put the book down.
However, we cannot be wowed at every sentence or else we will soon get used to it. Overstimulation and all that. The vast majority of our fic is going to stick with us subconsciously if at all. Where the wow moments stick out, the subconscious blurs together in the neural connections of our mind and eventually results in our ambient overall impression of the story. We cannot point to any one thing, but we have a sense of whether there was decidedly more good or bad. If a story does not even give us this, we are probably going to remember it unfavorably. No one likes mehfic.
Put this all together and it seems reasonable to convert these observations to the handy equation:
= ((
-
)/ wordcount) + ((
/
) - (
Brain math explained
You will notice our equation has two main components. On the left of the right side, we find the wow factor. Wow is a conscious thing drawn from the parts of the story that stood out to the reader. This means that we are comparing the very limited set of memories that manage to muscle their way to the forefront - probably no more than the top one or two moments for or against. The stronger set of memories wins out. Of course, a really good memory can cushion the blow of the bad and a bad memory will tarnish a good memory, so we end up subtracting bad from good. But that is not all. The longer a story goes on, the more moments we have to choose from and the less of an impact each one has individually. As a consequence, as word count increases the wow moments have a proportionally lessened effect on our impression.
That leaves us with the subconscious factor on the right right side. As mentioned before, this is more a matter of whether we remember proportionally more good impression or bad impression from the body of the story. As such, we divide the kinda good by the kinda bad to arrive at the overall subconscious factor. But this tells only half the story: as one or the other impression becomes dominant, it crowds out the thoughts of the other. Bad grammar keep drawing your eye? Then you are not going to notice the pretty scene descriptions as much. As such, it makes sense to speak of the two not only proportionally, but additively.
Now I know what you're thinking: if I write no words, I get infinite Sweet! But hold your horses. Remember that reading the story always asks some time and effort out of your reader. is ALWAYS at least 1 to account for this. If you ask them to read nothing, they're still going to be at least confused, so you've still got a net at least, and since you wrote nothing, is 0. That means you've got 0-1/0 + 0/1 -1/0, or double negative infinity at 0 words. The best way to lose is not to write.
The overall takeaway here is that reader attention is ultimately a matter of bang for your buck. While we can rest safe in the knowledge that the reader will forgive us a few negatives so long as we are otherwise bringing the goods, we ultimately want a story that gives the reader as much positive value as possible while taxing them as little as possible.
Remember delta
The tricky thing is that this equation is not a static representation of our story as a whole. The reader is constantly re-evaluating their opinion throughout the read. If it goes too far negative, tables get flipped and our readers walk out to tell their friends about the lowest point in the story they could stomach reading to. If the story got that bad, what hope was there of anything washing the foul taste from our mouth?
This is why everyone is so insistent on having a good hook: if you fail to throw SOMETHING cool out front then the first time you tax the reader, you have no evidence that there is anything else to stick around for, and every trip to the negative zone could be your last. Any time you allow a negative into your story, be it tedium or outright incompetence, you are relying on all the positives you have already established to keep the reader from walking away. Not the positives you are going to give later to make it "worth it." The positives the reader already has in their hands. They have no idea if they will even like what you have planned, or if it is coming at all. If they think it is not going to pay, they do not have to play.
And furthermore, why would you even entertain the notion of any part of your story being boring or a necessary evil? This is your story. Why would you fill it with filler and boilerplate? You have to write that tripe, after all. So you might not be ready to start the plot yet. Well, something clearly must be even more interesting and important than the plot, right? Otherwise you would be talking about the plot right off the bat. Maybe we have to meet our characters first. Ok, fine. Let's meet our characters. But why make it a roll-call when we can have fun with them and let them bounce off each other in non-plot important ways? Maybe there's this cool world you made? Let's have a little misadventure even if it has nothing to do with the overall story. So long as it is entertaining and moving along, no one will mind. Whatever you write, write always in the spirit of: "this story I am writing contains interesting things, and I am not going to bother with a single word otherwise."
That being said, what are these interesting things, and more importantly: can they see why 5 out of 4 doctors prefer brushing Minuette?
Pic unrelated
: the star of the show
It is super cool when people talk about your story after they are finished reading it. What are they going to talk about? Whatever happens to spring to mind, of course. But it is up to you to give them definite memorable moments for their attention to settle on supported by properly constructed context. The obvious candidates for these kinds of experiences are local and story-wide climaxes. When you finally bring all your pieces together to your point and pay out successfully, you get reader trust and interest in return. Promise. Deliver. Get paid.
However, there are more places to wow your readers than the places you obviously intended to do so. Readers also appreciate vivid, fresh, description used in appropriate amounts. Any time you can bring them somewhere worth remembering or let them meet somebody that they might like to allow to bounce around in their head afterwards, you are giving them something to carry with them for the rest of their life. You bet they will remember. Even something as innocuous as an uncommon turn of phrase can tickle your reader's fancy. How do you think memes got their start?
The evil doctor
Likewise, there are some things that the reader will remember for all the wrong reasons. The most common of these is when something physically gets between them and enjoying the story. If the pace is dragging, they will be checking their watch. If they cannot decipher the prose, they will be ready to deal out righteous smiting in the comments section. When the story will not tell them the first thing about what is going on, but expects them to be on board anyway, then they will find your plushies and light them on fire.
A story asks the reader to give it access to their imagination and their heart. When it does not respect this trust, it is only natural we feel offended on some level. Every time a character acts, we are expected to believe a reasonable character of this description would act this way. When they act stupidly or completely without regard for what they allegedly want and value, the reader is asked to accept that these allegedly sane characters we love are morons and/or this extreme stupidity was actually the smartest thing that could be done at the time. No one wants that. When a story asks us to believe something about its world, but fails to believe that thing itself as shown by how everything behaves in-story, the reader starts feeling that they are asked to believe a lie. I gave you my heart, and you drew a mustache on it in pen. I let you into my mind and you barfed on the ceiling. Out out out you writer of refuse!
The things not quite indifferent
While the above are going to stick out long after we read it, there are a vast multitude of things that might stick out for a moment before being swept up in the rest of the goings on and forgotten. Some things might not even rise to our attention at all, but simmer under the surface as the mind spazzes out trying to figure out what this offness is. A healthy chunk of the reader's subconscious impression of a story consists of the vast mass of these forgotten or never dwelt upon moments sorting themselves out. If a story worms its way into our head in a favorable light, we are going to want to find all the rest of the cool stuff in there. If it turns us off, even if we cannot say why, then we are going to be looking for more of the bad stuff.
A subconsciously good story is consistently good in some ambient, quiet way. Consistent is the key here. If we can make a commitment to focus on adding a consistent specific little something extra, the reader is going to notice even if they don't. It only takes a few bonus mentions that maybe the Blueblood indigo plant was engraved on the salad forks or the stew is in fact made of the fluffier Cloudsdalian nimbus rather than the dry Las Pegasus cirruses for the reader to be squeeing "Wow, vivid world!" even if they cannot point to any specific example. Likewise, a moment's pause to spruce up the wording or let your characters do something frivolously them can and will net you a disproportionate amount of goodwill.
Likewise, a subconsciously bad story is like your little sibling hovering their finger above your shoulder and looking at you with that smug grin on their face. These are the worst kinds of problems because you likely know it is there but cannot put to words what is wrong. That, or it sends your pre-readers into conniptions but no one can pinpoint why. Poor word choice and other subtle style problems are the worst culprits because there is not much agreed upon language for discussing exactly what is wrong or what to look for in general. But there are also issues that can arise with plotting: are your characters shunted from plot point to plot point by happenstance, or are they going there because they want/need to do so? Sometimes it looks the same, but one is going to be more engaging than the other. Are you adding enough detail for interest? Too much detail for interest but not obnoxiously so? Are you being inconsistent in your goodness or badness? Nothing irks a reader more at a primal level than an author who looks like they know better.
Picking out the nitpicks
The in-betweens are most likely where the story is going to get over or undertuned. The rageworthy is generally visible, if not to the reader, then to the angry mobs in the comment section. The noteworthy was likely designed and included on purpose. It is the little delights and sorrows that get us into trouble because we feel they are there in our hearts, but we do not quite have a mental picture of what they look like so we do not know for sure when they are gone. Ergo, we nitpick our stories to death in pursuit of "perfection". So what can we do? First and foremost:
DON'T PANIC
The best defense against quiet flaws is pre-readers and editors. If they specifically notice and mention something, then it is a problem. If they mention nothing and you trust them to be worth their salt, then it is likely that whatever you fear will fly under the average reader's radar. If you do not trust them, then you really need to find some pre-readers you CAN trust. Why waste people's time asking for their opinion if you do not value it at all? Rood.
But suppose even though you have good pre-readers, the nagging feeling will simply not leave and it is driving you mad. What do? Going back to our equation up top, we see we have TWO options for combating the nitpicks. The first is easy: we can chase them down and kill them with blunted safety scissors. But we do not know what they look like and running with scissors is simply not done, so that option is clearly out.
However, there is another way: we can consciously add enough quiet cool stuff to dilute and reverse the negative subconscious impact we anticipate the mysterious problems will have on our reader. Refocus your effort on asking yourself what the strongest elements of your story are and where you could consciously and consistently add a little something extra throughout your problem story/chapter/scene to give you some insurance. Not only will this help you with your worry by asking you to look for the good bits, but it will give you something positive and concrete to focus your nervous energy into for the good of your story.
So how much effort is sufficient effort? Have you given us all the good you had prepared? If not, there is more work to do. Are you comfortable begging this much forgiveness of the reader? Make it right or get groveling. The reader holds your story's fate in their hands and they have only one question: is your story juicy enough to be worth spitting out the seeds?
5 out of 4 Doctors prefer brushing Minuette? I was not aware of that fact.
I suppose I must be part of the -1 that prefer brushing Ditzy... count to think of it, why haven't I had my Doctor brush Ditzy yet?
2575105
Well, if he is negative then contact with the (allegedly) positive brush will likely result in total annihilation, ergo brushing could not take place. However, if the polarity were to be reversed....
2575240 I'm not sure. There would be a few things that would need to be taken into account. The position and age of the universe, the interference caused by the magical leylines, the frequency of the universe's neutron flow... and he didn't even figure out about the leylines yet. Even then, it would require a tremendous amount of power. About enough to move a small sun. Wait...
I think he might need to call in a favor.