CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

Earlier, I suggested that a writer must use sequences - and the ‘hook’ of something missing in expected sequences - to draw readers along, not only in stories themselves, but in the whole marketing process of attracting attention to his or her stories. Blurbs are a primary means through which to do this. Let me give you an example by looking at the blurb for one of the top novels for 2018: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman. This was a debut bestseller,

Human beings seek Meaning. They seek it everywhere they look: in the world at large, in religions, social movements, politics, in groups, in relationships and in themselves. It’s a constant and eternal quest in one form or another. Readers of fiction seek meaning in stories, whether they are completely aware of it or not. Meaning therefore attracts attention. To attract attention, one needs to develop Meaning and then find ways of communicating that meaning to a range of

We're looking at four kinds of meaning: sequential, vertical, contextual and embracive. All readers - arguably, all human beings - are seeking Meaning of one kind or another. Combining these types of meaning produces not only a successful story, but attracts attention from the marketplace at large. Earlier, we looked at how meaning occurs in sequences like words in sentences or numbers in mathematics. The next type of meaning I have termed ‘vertical meaning’. Just as se

We’ve been talking about Meaning and its relationship to Attention. The basic simplicity is an equation: more meaning = more attention. For the most part, as we have seen, the world at large ignores us as writers and as human beings unless we belong to the small class of the super-famous. Even then, the attention given is usually fleeting, or what I have called Momentary. Much of the energy expended by those trying to attract attention in order to sell something or comm

Deep Attention is the fount from which ripples move outward, meeting the consciousness of readers at the level of Intermittent Attention. Perhaps you will understand more of what I am talking about if I use even a rather obscure example. ‘The Woodspurge’ By Dante Gabriel Rossetti is on the surface a simple enough poem: The wind flapp'd loose, the wind was still, Shaken out dead from tree and hill: I had walk'd on at the wind's will,— I sat now, for the wind was still.

Deep Attention is the fount from which ripples move outward, meeting the consciousness of readers at the level of Intermittent Attention. Perhaps you will understand more of what I am talking about if I use even a rather obscure example. ‘The Woodspurge’ By Dante Gabriel Rossetti is on the surface a simple enough poem: The wind flapp'd loose, the wind was still, Shaken out dead from tree and hill: I had walk'd on at the wind's will,— I sat now, for the wind was still.

Using quite a few jumbled analogies and metaphors, we have proceeded through the levels of Zero Attention (largely ignoring it as it ignores us) and Momentary Attention (encouraging it to linger with gifts) and arrived at Intermittent Attention. Having largely dismissed those who give us Zero Attention, we have focused on that mysterious shadowy troupe of people who visit us momentarily, and - depending upon which analogy you prefer - we have left out a saucer of milk, lure

Choosing the right genre, selecting the best setting, devising the most engaging plotlines, providing the necessary archetypal characters, and attracting attention through carefully planned and run scenes are part of what a writer must do to get the product of a reader connected with, fascinated by and moved by a story. It isn’t that there is such a thing as a difficult reader; there is really only a failure to recognise where a reader's attention is, or bungled attempts to

In one version of the story of Schrödinger’s cat, a cat is imagined as being enclosed in a box with a radioactive source and a poison that will be released when the source (unpredictably) emits radiation. According to quantum mechanics, the cat is simultaneously both dead and alive until the box is opened and the cat observed. I prefer the version in which no deaths are involved: the cat is either there, or not there, much like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. The p