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Where Sime and Gen Meet, Creativity Happens
Workshop:Structuring to Sell
Workshoppers;
Midst of everything, I haven't time to get this written up in detail, but I wanted to lay this thought on you for discussion and consideration.
I've been urging the S~G fanfic writers to formulate their work to include the relevant BACKGROUND in each piece they write for web posting, and perhaps I left them with the impression that the BACKGROUNDING is the only difference between fan and pro writing.
This is relevant to the discussion we did last spring here where I came up with my analogy of "conduits" that the fiction delivery system makes a certain size and shape and forces commercial writers to shape their fiction to fit the conduits.
The more I've thought of things that way, the better that analogy seems to me.
Adding in the relevant BACKGROUNDING is only one of the ways to make your fanfic fit a commercial conduit.
There is one other, much more difficult, thing that must be done before a single word is written -- and sometimes before the IDEA is born.
The deliberate conscious intent of the writer of the story has to be focused on ADVERTISING that background using the loathsome Madison Avenue techniques that readers and viewers are most familiar with.
You have to structure your commercial fiction to "SELL" your story's background to the reader as "ENTERTAINING".
That's what editors/producers are looking for when choosing among the wealth of submissions, finding the one out of hundreds they will put money into distributing.
The more obvious and firm-handed, slick and subtle but powerful your AD COPY FOR YOUR BACKGROUND -- always couched in SHOW DON'T TELL -- the more commercially viable your fiction.
Now that ad copy has to go on Page One of your novel, or parag one of your shorter story.
Remember, way back last winter when we did a homework assignment (maybe it was last fall) on this workshop in which I focused your attention on watching commercials, looking to master the SHOW DON'T TELL methods. That was in connection with the overall plotting and structuring of a piece of fiction, but this was the real point of the exercise that I am only just now getting around to mentioning.
To commercialize fanfiction, you must add in the background in such a way that it's all in SHOW and not in TELL, and then you must SELL that background to the reader right there in the very first words.
And that SELLING aspect to casting the opening of a story is where most beginners make their fatal mistake that gets the form rejections.
The assumption most beginning writers make is that what interests them personally is in fact intrinsically interesting.
Commercial fiction vendors do not make that assumption. (Except possibly deep inside the well defined genre categories such as Romance (which is very much like fanfic in that the assumption is that anyone reading a romance is interested in romance and therefore the writer doesn't have to explain what it is about romance that's interesting.))
Nor do the great artists in any field.
In fact, the more personally interesting something is to an artist, the less likely it is to be of any interest to anyone else. Things interest you because of who you are - and you are unique.
The substance of commercial art focuses on the myriad elements we have in common. The more widely interesting a thing is, the less INTENSELY interesting it will be to any given individual. That's why television is so bland compared to books - it's aimed at a broader audience. Thus it is less particularized, less personalized.
The thing that makes any fiction viable as commercial fiction is the broadening of the "reach" of the art. There are two ways to do that -- to choose a SUBJECT that is a focus of public concern at the moment, and to ADVERTISE that subject with the glamorizing tools of Madison Avenue so that even people who are not particularly interested will stop, stare, and become absorbed or at least diverted for a while.
All the fanfiction we have posted (and that we published in the fanzines) is constructed on the assumption that the reader is ALREADY consumed with an avid interest in the subject. None of that fiction (except ONLY GOOD SIME and a prior version of ICY NAGER) make a serious advertising effort, and even GOOD SIME and IN don't do a hard sell on the background. HOUSE OF ZEOR is pure, nothing but, hard sell on the background which is presented mostly show-don't-tell -- which is why a book with almost no visual description is remembered by many readers as the most visual thing I've ever written. HoZ is pure Madison Avenue and was designed to be just that with mallice aforethought. It was the first of the novels in this Universe and it had to SELL the idea of that universe.
Any novel which kicks off another venture of Sime~Gen into the commercial marketplace (which market has changed drastically in the last 20 years but still requires a broad reach and a massive sell) will have to have that same Madison Avenue basis to it. JL
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