"The Audacity of Hope" or "Why Variable Ratio Reinforcement Keeps You Writing"

Hope is a powerful thing, as every writer knows. Hope can keep readers coming back book after book to see whether or not their favorite characters really do fall in love. It can keep someone turning pages all night even though he has work in the morning because he can't believe there's no way out of the dark place you've taken your lead. Hope also keeps writers putting words on the page even though there's no guarantee that the blog entry, article, short story, novella, or novel will bring in a single, red cent. The kind of writers who are banking on selling books, getting ad clicks, or otherwise earning a living from the things they create for the public to consume do this every, single day.

Why do writers do this to themselves?

Hope. Hope, and a concept called variable ratio reinforcement.

That, and robbing banks is dangerous.

 What is Variable Ratio Reinforcement?

Reinforcement is a psychological term that is used to describe situations where someone's behavior is strengthened. If a child reaches for a hot stove and gets her hand slapped, that punishment reinforces the idea that reaching for the stove is a bad thing that shouldn't be done. On the other hand if a student earns $20 for every A on her report card, then that reward will make her even more likely to shoot for that 4.0 honor roll. When someone takes an action the result of that action leads to behavior being reinforced or discouraged. The more often the result happens the more solidly the behavior is reinforced.

So where does the irregular part come in?

In addition to rewards and punishments there's a reinforcement schedule. This schedule is how often that behavior is reinforced. If every time someone breaks a rule he gets punished, then there's a certainty that bad things will happen if certain actions are taken. That's a fixed ratio. A fixed interval is applying a certain reinforcement after a certain amount of time; getting a yearly raise every year one maintains a job, for instance. Variable ratio reinforcement is when you perform a certain action, but you don't know how many times you have to perform it before you get rewarded. This is essentially how slot machines work, but it's also how a lot of writing works as well.

How Do You Mean?

If you keep rolling this until your character succeeds, you already understand.

This concept works best when you use examples. When I wrote an article titled "The Health Benefits of Oral Sex" on Yahoo! Voices (which you can still read here if you're of a mind) it got a lot of page views. I looked at that, and decided that writing about sex was a smart way to make some money. So I published several other articles including one about sensory deprivation in the bedroom (found right here), and another about the positive effects of pornography (still live right here).

These articles did get some page views, but I didn't recreate the months-long splash and more-than-decent royalty payments I'd earned from the first article. They got fewer views overall, and those views dropped off more quickly. Because I'd seen that an article about sex could generate a lot of traffic though I kept at it. I never managed to recreate the original article's success, and the website got a great deal of content out of me it might not otherwise have received for a lot less payment.

This works the same with book sales. Let's say that you wrote a book about a vampire private detective, and that book shot through the roof and made you a lot of money. Your next, logical step would be to write another book to try and make the lightning strike twice. Even if subsequent books didn't do as well, or if they did terribly, knowing it's possible is sometimes enough to keep you running on the hamster wheel just a little bit longer than you otherwise might.

But I've Never Had Any Successes Like That!

What if I told you that you didn't need to actually experience the success in question to make this effect happen? Knowing that just one pull on the slot machine can make you rich is often enough to make you put your last quarter in the slot. If you've actually won a lot of money on a slot machine before though then you're a lot more likely to keep pulling that one-armed bandit until you either run out of money or you win.

Writers do this all the time, except the slot machine is the publisher and the coins you're hoping for are royalties.

This is easily illustrated in short story anthologies. One anthology might offer $30 for an accepted story, and another one will offer an even split of the royalties. Even if the story is an electronic-only anthology from a first-time publisher, there's a little bug in the back of most writers' heads that tells them royalties might be a better bet if this book takes off. It also means more than one payment, if all things go well. More often than not books in this scenario sell enough copies that no one but the publisher makes a profit, and the writers end up being paid $0.68 each quarter for a year.

Why do we do this? Because the next one might be what hits it big!

Like this book right here, for instance!

The media doesn't make this any easier on us as writers either. Just look on the Internet and you see stories about self-publishing authors who make six-figure incomes off trashy romance and monster porn. That monster porn thing isn't a joke either; read this in case you thought I was fucking with you.

What's The Problem With Hope?

Part of the problem is that I'm a hard-bitten, cynical bastard who likes spitting in your eye. The other part of the problem is that hope does more than keep your energy up, and your outlook positive. Hope, much like cocaine and meth, can blur your energy and make it hard to remain focused and realistic. You can get so high on your own hopes and the potential of victory that it's easy to forget you're betting black on a roulette wheel with a disproportionate amount of crimson on it.

Is it possible for your short story or novel to springboard into national or international fame even though you're an indie author no one's ever heard of with no one to help advertise your story or spread the word about it? Yes, it is. It's happened, as the news and the Internet are only too happy to point out. But the chances of it happening are astronomical.

Keep your hope, by all means. I'll be the first to admit that hope of infecting the world at large mixed with a genuine love of my story (and a touch of spite, if I'm honest) is the cocktail that keeps me going on some projects. But it's important to make sure that you're not just jerking the lever and hoping against hope that the Bestseller Gods take pity and shower you with big sales, TV interviews, and book deals for sequels. If that's the kind of thing you want it's time to grab a shovel and start laying your foundation. Hope is just as useful, but a lot less necessary, when you've actually done the work to build a readership, earn a place with a good publisher, and made certain to refine your craft until you can cut right into your readers' hearts and guts with it.


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The Golden Rule of Good Writing: Don't Be Boring

As an author you can do anything you want. If you want to write a horror story, write a horror story. You want to write a rape scene, go right ahead (I already covered this here). You want your characters to say fuck all the time, feel free (I covered that here too)! You can be profane or prudish, disgusting or droll, biting or brazen... what you cannot be is boring. Nothing, and I do mean nothing is worse than a boring book. That's why this week The Literary Mercenary is here to help you pick up your prose's pace with a few, simple rules.

Rule Number One: Open With The Monster

No one cares about the building of the mead hall; we care about Grendel.

There's a phrase every writer should be familiar with; in medias res. It's Latin for "into the middle of things," and it was first coined by the poet Horace. The phrase refers to stories that start the reader out in the meat of the action instead of at the "beginning" of the story. Whether the hero is in the middle of a shootout, the heroine is chasing bad guys down a dark alley, or someone who might be our lead is sitting in a classroom and taking a stressful exam, the point is that we come in while someone is doing something. Details of the world and context for what we see are filled in afterward.

As always, examples work best. Some time ago I was chatting with a writer who was having trouble with her plot. I asked her to give me her elevator pitch. Her book was about a girl who was a high school freshmen, getting used to her surroundings, new classes, adjusting to new friends, etc. After about twenty minutes of telling me about her perfectly normal trials and tribulations she drops the bombshell that the girl is being stalked by a nightmare creature from the ether, and that in chapter five it slinks out of her closet and tries to kill her.

My advice to her and to you dear reader is this; open with the monster.

Rule Number Two: Short and Sharp

Say hello to my little friend!

You know that one family member who drones on and on at events, insisting on telling you every story in the most languid, roundabout way? The sort of person who could be regaling you with a story of a behind-enemy-lines covert kill mission in Afghanistan and make it sound as exciting as getting a root canal? That's the sort of prose you want to avoid.

Let's take another hypothetical example here. Say you're writing a hard-boiled detective story, and your hero went home and crashed after a long night on a big bust. You could eat up page after page of him preparing breakfast, showering, going through his closet, washing his dishes, and shaving. Or you could slam all of it together into a single paragraph of short, hard-hitting sentences. "I woke up with the afternoon bells, and stumbled into the shower. Once I was clean and shaved, with a few eggs in my guts and clean clothes on my back, I was ready to hit the streets."

That's an entire early afternoon in less than 50 words. What's more the reader internalizes it more easily because it's in handy, bite-size pieces. Your novel shouldn't be a meat loaf that someone has to slog through; rather it should be a bowl of M&Ms that when someone has eaten the whole thing they wonder how the hell that happened.

Rule Number Three: When in Doubt, Cut it Out

Editing, in its natural form.

What do Kathy Reichs, Michael Crichton, and Tom Clancy all have in common? Well aside from being bestsellers, all three of these authors have habits of including reams of information in their books that read like technical manuals which are not necessary for readers to understand the story. Reichs presents jargon-filled run downs of murder wounds rather than just telling us the victim took an ax to the head, Crichton provides abstracts of scientific theory on everything from gene-splicing to time travel that have no impact on being chased by a T-Rex or life-or-death sword fights in medieval France, and Clancy often waxes on for pages about naval culture which seems completely unconnected to the book you're reading. This information may be fascinating to some readers and tedious to others, but the point is that if you don't need it to clarify the story you should cut it out.

Put another way, we're all very impressed that you're an aficionado of 15th century Renaissance artwork. If we don't need to know the name of a particular artist, an official term for a certain brush stroke, or the value of a given painting then don't waste page space on it. Don't break stride while we're running pell-mell after terrorists to remark on the architecture; focus instead on where characters are going and what they're doing.

Rule Number Four: Don't Waste Our Time

You have precisely 20 seconds before your reader self-destructs.

Most people have fairly scheduled lives. Students go to class, then come home. People with 9-5 jobs go to work, then come home. Maybe they take in an occasional concert or go see a movie, but their lives are routine. Characters are people, and many of them have equally boring, scheduled lives. That said, a novel is a series of points of interest strung together on a chain like a pearl necklace. We're interested in the pearls, so don't waste time telling us about the chain holding it all together.

Look at Harry Potter. The bulk of the story takes place during sessions at what amounts to a wizarding boarding school, but we don't slavishly start every day with Harry getting out of bed and end every day with him going to sleep. We don't mention anything he does or learns in class unless those incidents build the story. You cannot tell the reader every action a character takes, so focus only on the important parts. If readers can't tell the difference between a plot-relevant scene and non-plot relevant scenes then they're more likely to shut your book and move on than read every scene for fear of missing something crucial.

As always, thanks for dropping in on The Literary Mercenary. If you'd like to make a donation to keep me going feel free to visit my Patreon page or click the "Shakespeare Gotta Get Paid, Son" button on the right hand side. If you'd like to get my updates then either give me your email, also on your top right, and just to be safe follow me on Facebook and Tumblr.