Books unique style, as well as its themes, its emotional highs and lows, its characters and its settings, & plot – these are usually discussed in writing classes

Noun-to-adjective ratio matters because it affects description and style

To be able to predict things, you must be able to detect and understand patterns. Prediction is all about established patterns

Question marks and exclamation marks are important

- excessive exclamation marks indicate melodrama

- question marks indicate dialog

2800 features differentiate the difference between bestsellers and also-rans

The Contract

The details are hazy but nevertheless point to the aesthetic, emotional, intellectual and even ethical reasons underlying the choice to read

The reader has an unwritten contract with the writer

-        you promise a thriller, there has to be a dead body, and you’ve mastered the heart-racing scene

-   you promise a romance, it better be about not start, but end with a unified, happy couple

You have 350 pages to get there and back

Goodreads – source of good books

No Magic Tea

Old Axiom – Great writing is a skill that can’t be taught

Theme & Topic - The Godparents of Fiction – Grisham and Steel

All books have a Book Industry Standards and Communication (BISAC) Code – It defines the genre: what the book is about – it is the only system

Topic and Theme are not the same

         Lord of the Flies

         The Topic is English boys, a tropics, a desert island, hut building, and

so on

         The Theme is Nature versus Nurture, Good and Evil, Savagery or

Civilization is more natural

The conventional wisdom is that we read for theme – but not always or

exactly true

Topic is not the only driver of interest in a novel, however, topic is central to the industry and central to the possibilities of a specific story

Topic’s building blocks are nouns & in innate sense of different proportions  and delicate balance

Readers are reading for a a specific kind of experience, achieved by the dominance of an abstract theme. The bridge between topic and experience cannot be stressed enough

Romances and thrillers both create a certain type of mental, imaginative and emotional experience. If we want to understand a successful topic, we have to think what it might do to us, and what we want it to do to us

Raw sex sells, but only in a narrow, niche market

Topic modeling: topic words (usually nouns) occur in word clusters

Top two topics make up 30% of novel, four topics for 40%

First machine tells which topics are in manuscript (can be up to 500), and which words compose each topic

Second, the proportion of each topic

Every novel has its own topic profile

    These show the topics used to

         create a thematic experience,

         its particular message,

         and the exact proportions in which they appear

Topics transcend genre, but the presence of key topics somewhere in a manuscript of any kind matter greatly

two bestsellers : Danielle Steel & John Grisham  always have same most important & occurring topics with variation in less important topics

If reader enters an implied contract with a favorite writer’s book, part of the expectation is topical both authors consistently deliver this: 1/3 of Grisham’s topics are legal system, 1/3 of Steel’s are domestic like – formula is 1/3 same, 2/3 varied

Telling the heart of a story with fewer topics focus, means lack of unneeded sub-plots, more organized and precise writing mind & implies experience

Focus that brings both depth and a story that can be easily followed is the preference

Topics provide the linchpins for character and emotional experience – and these are not meant to be overshadowed

Grisham and Steel both have only one topic that accounts for 1/3 of the book – not two – that is their “brand”

Their topics are about creating realism and relate-ability with topics

Grisham 4% sports, money 3%, cops 2%, government 2%. 4% everyday moments (used for pacing)

Topics

1st – signature theme, give novel its glue

2nd -  provide base for conflict

Realism – something that already affects the psyche of the masses & is knowledge they can manipulate

At least one of the top 5 should be something the masses fear

Emotional and ethical topics are favored

Must appeal to the mass mainstream with universal appeal, inflammatory ones are avoided

Some topics have both positive and negative appeal, such as the courts have both fairness and threat

*** top topic most often shared by bestsellers is people communicating in moments of human closeness and connection, shared intimacy, shared chemistry and shared bonds

Characters must have moments of casual intimacy and closeness

The portion of the American public that reads likes to read like to read about themselves. The want their own possible realities dramatized

Go-to topics are: marriage, death, taxes, technology (preferably modern and vaguely threatening), funerals, guns, doctors, work, schools, presidents, newspapers, kids, moms and the media

Avoid: sex, drugs, & rock and roll, seduction, making love and the body in anything other than pain or a crime scene, cigarettes and alcohol, the gods and big emotions, revolutions, wheeling and dealing, existential or philosophical sojourns, dinner parties, playing cards, very dressed-up women, and dancing

It likes a laboratory over a church, spirituality over religion, and college over a party, and dogs over cats

The preferred place of action is town or city  but will accept a vast variety of either

They don’t like their imagination stretched too far – no desert, ocean, jungle or fancy ranch

Stick to an average home

Plot - Perfect Emotional Curves

50 shades of grey Top two to three topics make up a third of the book, smaller parts of others give variety and flavor

    has 21% human closeness – not BDSM sex; second was intimate conversation @13%, third @10% is communication such as verbal facial expressions

    theme is will Ana submit or not

    readers keep repeating that they were emotionally triggered, viscerally and physically triggered

Conflict drives novels

Two types of books: novels for the mind ate literary, but novels for an emotional roller coaster sell the emotions and to the body

Reading is not necessarily about providing pleasure to the mind, but to the heart

Heart-fending novels have a “meaning of absorption”, the “pleasure of escape”, and the “pleasure of escape” – they “work” not by what they “say” to us but what they “do” to us

Your heartbeat must increase, you feel anxiety in your gut, you feel a contraction of fear, stirring of arousal, the back of your neck prickle, or smile, or shout aloud to a character or throw the book against the wall – sometime in the first 10 pages

Changes in direction on the plot graphs equate to emotional responses in their characters  - and therefore their vicarious readers

Changes in direction roughly equate to moments of conflict and resolution – the more frequent the peaks and valleys the more of an emotional roller-coaster for the characters and the readers. The gradient shows the intensity of the changes in emotion. All this translates in the market and book reviews into words such as “page-turner, “suspenseful”, “gripping”, and “addictive”

3-act structure

    Called Set-up, conflict & resolution

    Or rising action, climax & falling CTION

    Need a plot turn at 1/3 way through novel, and another one at 2/3 through

Plot Types: in 1959 William Foster Harris said only 3 types: Comedy, Tradegy and Literary

1993 Ronald Tobias suggested twenty

Suggestions for just one

Suggestions for as many as thirty-six

Christopher Booker says 7

7 different plot types

1. Traditional Comedy Structure – the happy ending

    Plot twist at 35% and 65% with change in fortune for protagonist at 50%

    Ending is happier than beginning

    From confusion to enlightenment – features mis-communication and separation % hiccups

2. Traditional Tragic Structure

    Inverse of Comedy with last 20%  flat right up to last page % coming to terms with fate

Often the flaw is pride – often about internal conflicts and character flaws % how character falls

    victim to flaws

3. Coming of age or rags to riches

    Initial happy turn, then loses everything, the recovers happier, fulfilled or peaceful

4. Inverse or rebirth

    Main character experiences change, renewal and some sort of transformation

    Often a dark or corrupting  influence

    Character’s values are tested and world becomes more complex at 1st change –a crisis of confidence

         or low self esteem before new learning, new experience and new expressions of themselves

```Typically ending lower due to lack of closure or a crisis as character struggles with change brought

         on by someone else

5. Voyage and Return - “W” Pivots around midpoint

    Confronted with or plunged into a whole new world, find fascination with

         it, experience a dark turn and end with happy return and normalcy

    Journey could be emotional or physical

    Favorite of romance novelists – first love scene at halfway, then plot twist to part lovers before reunite at end

6. the Quest – “M” – Seeking and Finding

    About unknown territories, fighting monsters (literal and figurative), dashed hopes and finally quest completed

7. “Man in Hole” – Overcoming the Monster

    Hero and bad guy where a treat to someone or culture that must be eliminated

    Main character is forced to take it on and change future back from bad to good 

Da Vinci Code go up-down-up-down-up-down-up-down-up, 50 shades adds a down at the end

    Pacing is evenly spaced peak to valley

Mastered the page-turner beat – called sentiment analysis

Pays close attention to positive and negative emotional language

In both, at high and low points, almost always physical, visceral and totally embodied

Dan Brown uses moments of intimacy and lightness to pace the action. Personal scenes where the sentiment is positive, personal, soft, reflective – gives a feeling of fondness

Style

Nouns in particular tell what a novel is about

Understanding how things such as paragraph length contribute to the tone and pace of a story. A pacy, scary novel will tend to have shorted, punchier paragraphs

There are no news stories, no new plots, there are only new ways of telling stories.

Style matters, Style is what helps a writer appear new and engaging to his readers. Style is exactly what refreshes a familiar tale

The first line of the novel is critical

Creates voice

Length, punctuation, relative simplicity

Someone is talking to us, and must sound authentic, in command of some sort of authority

No wavering or lack of surety

All novelists have the challenge of creating some sort of selfhood, and readers tend to keep reading when that selfhood, attractive or not, at least knows itself and leads its reader

The best writers are able to establish this kind of presence from the opening sentence with tiny and seemingly effortless modulations in style

Should be an active decision, two characters implied, conflict at the heart, simple language, easy to read, no excessive uses of clauses, no unneeded words, a believable & authoritarian voice

The best opening sentences contain all the conflict in twenty words or less

Achieved with grammar and usage of common words that one hardly notices

A novelist’s art is to create the illusion of selfhood through style and narration

Word choice is part of that, and it should complement grammar, style and character

The first sentence is the hook and conflict achieved through the mechanics of diction and syntax

Use the everyday language of the common man - extremely important