CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

From earlier articles, you’re probably starting to get the idea of concentrated incompleteness .   In my book How Stories Really Work  I use the term ‘vacuum’ to describe this, as it implies a mental and emotional pulling power like that of a real, physical vacuum.   Incompleteness on whatever level and in whatever field creates in us the need or tendency or desire to have completeness . You can immediately see a thousand examples in fiction, and, as I have said, incompletene

In an earlier article, we learned that Bluma Wulfovna Zeigarnik discovered the Zeigarnik effect by studying memory in relation to incomplete and complete tasks. Incomplete tasks, she found, are easier to remember than successful ones.   We learned that, related to this, if you want your reader to be attracted to a character in your fiction, you want that character’s life to be full of holes, gaps, threats, missing people or things. Characters, to be attractive, need to be inc

Bluma Wulfovna Zeigarnik was a Soviet psychologist and psychiatrist who discovered the Zeigarnik effect after a study she completed in the 1920s in which she compared memory in relation to incomplete and complete tasks. Incomplete tasks, she found, are easier to remember than successful ones.   What has this got to do with marketing?   Almost everything.   It also has quite a bit to do with writing stories.   What are you doing when you create an effective character in fictio

Learning how to be a better writer can be a little overwhelming.   Perhaps your ideas are not clear enough. You have something to say, but you’re not sure quite what that is. Master authors seem to build their tales around strong themes - do you have some? Or are you simply writing one word after another and hoping for the best?   Is it your characters that are failing you? Have you not developed a powerful leading figure who captures readers’ hearts and makes them want to re

As a writer, you probably thought that you only needed a limited range of skills to survive, right?   If you were to list out those skills, you might put ‘typing’ at the top, as most writers these days use keyboards to write with. Perhaps, thinking ahead, you might also put ‘social media skills’ on the list: it seems as though today you need to be able to operate the basics of Facebook and the like to get your name out there, even if you have a traditional publisher behind yo

In this series so far we have explored the parallels between writing fiction and putting together a marketing campaign. Hopefully, you will have realised that there are actually quite a lot of things in common between telling a story and getting someone to buy that story.   One of the problems you face, though, is that there is an awful lot of people (as opposed to a lot of awful people!) trying to do exactly the same as you, i.e. grab enough attention in the marketplace and

This is how conventional marketing is supposed to work:   1. You have a group of ‘warm prospects’.   2. You place before this group a well-positioned ad, or a forum comment, or a free gift in a news feed to grab some attention.   3. Those prospects with a strong enough need for your kind of work will click on them. In a group of fantasy readers, for example, someone sees your latest novel about the inner life of dragons. The topic might be quite similar to some others around,

We have all heard the term ‘comfort zone’, usually in the context that we should be getting out of ours. The idea is that we have established an area emotionally, mentally and spiritually, in which we feel ‘at home’, and that this is not ‘good’ for us. We can only grow, they say, by leaving this zone behind and becoming uncomfortable on purpose - this leads to expansion, supposedly.   I’m not entirely sure that this is what happens. It seems to me that experience is relentles

If you’re having trouble putting a story together, try writing it backwards.   The question ‘What will happen next?’ occurs in even the most primitive stories - in fact, it forms the basis of the simplest story form. If a listener or audience member or reader knows what will happen next (unless some of the other characters in the story don’t know, and the tension is to do with if or when they will find out) then there isn’t much horsepower in that story. There are various tec