Toss A Coin To Your Reader
Keep the Rewards Coming
Here’s what you get in every episode of Into the Storymaze: writing insights or a work-in-progress; something creative I’m digging; a highlight from my comics-writing credits; plus a quote that’s got me thinking — both about right now and what’s next.
Twisty Little Passages
Writer pal Mark Bellusci and I get behind the mics each week for a fast, funny, practical 10 minutes of writer podcasting we call Street Writers. Here’s one of our recent tips.
Dan: I'm going to give you some gold. We're going to hand out some gold, good investment.
The tip here is basically whenever you're writing, keep your readers in mind and hand out gold coins along the way. And what I mean by a gold coin is anything that rewards the reader.
The easiest thing for your reader to do or your viewer to do, the easiest thing for your audience to do is to bail on you, is to quit right then.
Mark: Yep.
Dan: They got no investment in you right now. They could just leave. A lot of times the mistake is, I got something so great for the ending. I'm going to lead up to it and I'm going to deliver it all in a punch. Instead… hand out little bits of stuff along the way.
Mark: Yeah.
Dan: Hand your reader little jewels. And where I stole this example from had such a brilliant way to point this out. They were talking about an article on airline design, which was relatively dry, except that right in the middle they got to this point of how do they test the strength of windows in the airplane?
Well, what they do is the chicken test. And so they wrap a live chicken in a plastic bag for aerodynamics and they fire this chicken at 200 miles per hour at the windshield —
Mark: Oh geez…
Dan: So that window may crack, may whatever. But if it holds up, it passes the chicken test. So imagine you're reading through something and suddenly you've come across that chicken test? Yes. It's horrifying. But on the other hand, yeah — that's your gold coin, right? You’re going to read the rest of that thing no matter where it goes, because they handed out that lovely little gold coin.
Mark: Just to interrupt one sec. PETA, when you're listening to this, that was Dan's point. The squashed chicken had nothing to do with me.
Dan: One less sponsor we've got. PETA is not signing up.
Mark: So I have some idea of gold coins that I love. And people who've used them. Tell me what you think a gold coin would be.
Dan: I think an out there fact, like we just put there. If you're writing something nonfiction, what's something unusual that people are not expecting that's still relevant.
Mysteries are built on gold coins in my mind.
Mark: I couldn't agree more and from my end of it, I look at like the mystery genre in novels and stuff. And I've gotten to the point where it doesn't matter how good the wrap-ups going to be if I'm not getting intrigued or, like you say, if I'm not getting rewarded at the end of every chapter or in the middle of every chapter. I don't really care who done it. I want that reward for getting through this chapter.
My hero is Elmore Leonard. The quirkiness of a character in chapter one is my reward. So to this point, there are books I've read where I couldn't even tell you what the end was, but I can tell you about his description of an old man, and…I think I stole this from him in one of my plays. An old man in South Florida, which he wrote about a million times, and he had his pants up to his chest and Elmore Leonard said, where did they get those pants that have zippers that long? And I said, that's like my reward right there.
Dan: That's a perfect example. There's different ways of handing that out, but it's important that we don't get so caught on the the start to finish that we're not keeping that going along the way.
Mark: That's a gold tip there. You just gave a gold tip.
Treasure Seekers
One of my daily web visits is the excellent Boing Boing, for its eclectic mix of ideas, posts, tech, pop culture, politics. I always feel I’d like to hang with these people, and aligned with their recos and reviews. The one place it’s almost always out of sync for me, though, is their book reviews.
I am almost always charged up by what they tell me about a read — and almost every time I come away disappointed. There’s a sad trombone disconnect between the promise and the pages. The exceptions are rare — and one of those delivered on one of my absolute favorite book series of, well, maybe evah. Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim is a magician — real magic, hoodoo, make miracles and monsters kind of stuff — betrayed by pals and sent to hell as a living being. By the time he claws his way out he’s wicked scarred, wicked vengeful — and wicked funny.
As Sandman Slim — aka James Stark — returns to the scene in LA, he surrounds himself with a cool collection of alchemists, shapeshifters, geomancers, angels, devils, bartenders and donut shops. Many books in, it’s a quirky, exciting cast of characters to spend time with as Stark saves the city — and occasionally the world. Kadrey knows when he’s getting too comfortable, and has upended the status quo at just the right moments to keep the story charged up.
Ballistic Kiss is not my *favorite* of the bunch — there were a couple of points I thought got telegraphed early on, which gave away the “twist” for me. But it’s the one I just finished, so it’s got my attention — and now, I hope, yours. (It’s also the penultimate volume of the series, so I’m both eagerly anticipating and already weeping for the final book.)
The Comics Labyrinth
Marvel and DC had taken their crazy cast of characters into a few cross-company mix-ups before… but maybe none so mixed up or crazy as the “Amalgam” universe. In this series of inspired (“WTF” was not in use that the time!) tales, the most well known heroes and/or villains got the mash-up treatment (again, ahead of its time in terms of that nomenclature).
Brundlefly-ed together, what were standalone characters in their own comics became cross-characters with rich histories that we had to make sense of in a standalone fashion — all in 22 action packed pages in the mighty, um, Amalgam manner! If memory serves, this would have been a delightful call from editor Paul Kupperberg, with the standalone characters already selected… but up to me to figure out how they combo-ed, collided, got renamed, etc.
The Amalgams were to be Catwoman and Elektra (who became Catsai); and Daredevil and Deathstroke (who became Dare the Terminator) — which, given my and Scott McDaniel’s history together and with the characters, made sense that we’d get offered the chance to play with these particular pulled-apart-put-together toys. I can’t remember if the villainous Big Question (The Kingpin + The Riddler) was already provided for my mix-and-match, or if I suggested them given the Gotham/Hell’s Kitchen character set.
In any case, it was a fast, wild ride — totally off-the-hook, self-standing, “why not?” stuff. I do recall taking some early online grief from one reader, suggesting I’d used the existing Daredevil/Elektra relationship to conjure some inappropriately salacious Catsai/Dare romance. I don’t think that was overtly intentional. But I do think every reader gets what they bring to the pages.
Web of Intrigue
“No one is asking you to be original. We’re asking you to be generous and brave.” — Seth Godin
Amazing Times
How’d we end up here together? Maybe a detour off the dark web! But I’m hoping it’s because you subscribed to this share-out of projects I’m working on plus things that have me jazzed. I’m D.G. Chichester. Which sounds very pretentious, and tweed jacket and pipe — so feel free to just call me “Dan”, and have a go at the last name as Chai (like the tea) Chester (just like it looks). I earned my word-cred writing comic book titles like Daredevil, Terror Inc., Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD and Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, along with all manner of digital widgets and websites in the world wide web of advertising. I keep my storytelling cred by trying new things — this is one of ‘em, with more on the way. I like weird and sometimes creepy tales, so if things here bend that way — now you know why!
Folks seem to like the comic book adventures I’ve written, so if you haven’t checked one out — please do. Many are now available in fab collected editions.
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