Million Dollar Outlines - 2013

Part 10: Emotional Beats

Emotional Beats

In order to sell to any audience, you need to understand what drives that audience. A child may be looking for stories of wonder, tales that have comforting endings. A teen will be more likely to be looking for romance. An older male might be interested in figuring out how to best take care of his family, and so tales that have a strong tie to obtaining wealth become attractive, while older women in particular are interested in stories about belonging.

I worked with a greenlighting company in Hollywood for a few years that used to study how the emotional beats generated in an advertisement campaign would translate into filled seats at the box office. Depending upon the age and sex of the viewer, we could tell what they wanted to see.

So we broke those emotional beats down into certain categories: mystery, drama, romance, adventure, wonder, horror, humor, and lust.

Using this system, we could look at a commercial and say: okay, your primary audience is teen girls. We know that 92 percent of that audience will be driven to the theater to view a movie that has romance in it, while 89 percent are looking for comedy. If the movie hits those emotions, then it will have a large potential audience. On the other hand, what if it hits the wrong emotional markers for the audience? Teenage girls don't generally look for drama; they get enough of it in their lives. Nor do they respond well to pornography. So what if you give them a movie that deals with things that the audience doesn't like? Well, you will probably drive viewers away. Instead of appealing to 90 percent of your audience, if you make a pornographic movie for girls you'll be advertising to less than five percent of them. So your sales will drop dramatically.

Themes

Emotional markers are big in Hollywood, but the list of markers isn't as helpful as it could be. There are commonalities in stories that go beyond the emotional tags, and I'm going to label them as "themes."

I've noticed that tales about character growth tend to be more satisfying than those that are not. So I add that into my mix of things to look for.

Similarly, many readers respond well to novels about friendship―gaining and keeping friends. If you look at the "top television shows of all time" you'll see that many of them―shows like Cheers, M.A.S.H., Seinfeld, I Love Lucy, Happy Days, and so on all revolved around a small cluster of friends and cohorts.

As I mentioned above, as a man I've noticed that tales about "making it rich" are attractive to me. Interestingly, before I got married I was far more interested in romance―how to find and wed the right girl. Now my fantasies tend to revolve around, "How am I going to support my family―not just for the rest of my life, but even after I die?"

So look at the bestselling novels of all time. How many of them deal with themes appropriate to their audience?

Miscellaneous

Look at the books above and ask yourself what length has to do with becoming a bestseller. I suspect that when Lord of the Rings came out, it was perhaps the longest fantasy novel ever published. But most of the books on the list above are big, honking novels of a quarter of a million words or more. Most of them are among the longest books of their kind.

Why is that? Orson Scott Card has pointed out that when you write a novel of transport―one that takes the reader into another time, place, or culture―it naturally takes longer to tell the story.

But I think that there is more to it. I think that a longer novel invites greater depth. It allows the author to put more characters into deeper conflict, bringing in wider themes, weaving a tapestry that becomes more engrossing to the readers than a shorter work can produce.

Beyond novel length, look at things like: length of chapters and length of scenes.

You could easily go into the mechanics of a bestseller. How much dialog does the author use compared to, say, narration?

Is the book written in first person, second, third? How deeply does the author penetrate into the character's viewpoint? How well is voice used?

You might even get down to smaller elements. In bestselling novels, there is a tendency for authors to dwell upon things such as: what it's like to eat at a restaurant that only the very wealthy can afford. You might study things such as: how does the author handle a dining scene?

Summary

I'd like you to become a student of what sells, and I think that the only way to do it is to do as I have suggested here: create a list of the bestsellers in your genre and medium, then begin to study the commonalities.

As you do this, you'll gain a tremendous advantage over not just the new authors that you meet but even some authors who are widely published. I know dozens of authors who've never given an hour's thought to audience analysis―even authors who have written 30 novels or more.

Some authors have an inner sense of style that allows them to naturally drift toward writing for a wide audience. But most of us have to work a little harder to get a grip on such things.

What other emotional beats come to your mind? Feel free to comment.