Finding Stories in Popular Non-Fiction

Greetings Lovely Readers! 

This is Shelley, writing today about finding mystery story ideas in unlikely non-fiction places. I'm not talking about a "true crime" narratives or newspaper stories. I'm talking about pop science, pop psychology, or any other pop non-fiction books. Health and wellness? Personal finance? Technology? Yup, yup, and yup.

I've found ideas for various fiction stories from books on all three of those last topics. Today a mystery plot blazed into being while I was reading a book about technology. The 2018 book, Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms, led to a eureka moment this morning while I was casually drinking my coffee and reading on my balcony. 

In Hello World, author Hannah Fry wrote about how supermarkets first began using customer reward cards to collect data, the success of which led, eventually, to the huge data broker businesses and affairs we've heard about in recent years, including the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal. Basically, we are being tracked everywhere online and then fed advertisements that our data indicates will most likely result in a sale. 

Or a vote, as it turns out.  

But I'm not here today to talk about political shenanigans. It was a supermarket data collection example Fry gave that set  my author antennae vibrating. Early on, sending coupons via email was a tempting and useful marketing strategy for supermarkets and other retail stores (still is, judging by my inbox). Data analysis gave retailers a way to pinpoint what offers and coupons to offer to which customers. But they didn't stop to think about how these rewards programs and subsequent offers would impact humans on the other end. 

One story was about an angry father who telephoned a company that had been sending pregnancy-related product coupons to his teenage daughter based on her online searches for products like vitamins and moisturizer for stretch marks. He accused the company of "encouraging teenage pregnancy." The company apologized and took a note to stop sending the coupons. 

I bet you know where this story goes. 

Yes, he called back later and said he'd had an interesting discussion with said daughter. In other words, the retail store knew before he did that he was gonna be a grandaddy. 

Immediately, an idea for a murder mystery short story popped into my head with the "twist" being that a "wronged" person finds "incriminating" email offers sent to someone in his family and takes drastic action...but of course, he's misinterpreted why his family member was getting those offers and he's now grievously ruined his family and his life. Now I just need to figure out who is solving the crime. 

I could write it from the criminal's pov. I've never tried that. On second thought, I think it might be more fun for someone else to figure it out. I don't do police procedurals. Maybe I'll try an amateur sleuth.

As authors we have to make all these decisions. It's hard to know ahead of time what will work unless you have a large body of work and a readership that expects a certain type of story. Then they might be upset if you tried something new. 

So, you see, there are pros and cons to every success or lack of. 

The point is, stories are everywhere, and fiction writers might think they are wasting time if they read about topics seemingly unrelated to their genre. Yes, we definitely should read great fiction in the crime genres. It's essential to do so if we want to improve on our craft.  

We also should consider cleansing our creative palates with some non-fiction every so often, as well. I think it stimulates brain activity in different ways. You never know when the next exciting plot will pop up in the pop non-fiction section of your local library, bookstore, or bookswap. 

Check out my revamped blog/writer journal at shelleyburbank.wordpress.com where I wrote more about my non-fiction reading this week. 

Also, check out the new look of my website, shelleyburbank.com. I'll write more on this change in my next Type M blog. I think this is going to be an exciting chapter in my writing life. Stay tuned! 

The Thin Line

I'm working on a book about American gangster movies. All my writing career I've moved back and forth between "real life" or "true crime" or "nonfiction" (pick your term). In fact, when I decided to write a mystery novel, I gave my first protagonist, Lizzie Stuart, a profession that would provide both a focus for her sleuthing and a systematic way of going about it. Like me, Lizzie is a criminal justice professor who specializes in crime in American history and culture. To be precise, she focuses on Southern crime and culture, and she teaches at a fictional university in a city that bears some resemble to my hometown.  

This book about gangster movies require me to deal with the thin line between fact and fiction. It is in a series that my academic publisher is doing about history and movie. As have the other genre authors, I've selected the 8-10 important films and I've provided the backstory. One aspect of my assignment is to discuss the historical era and the cultural forces that were at work when each movie was released. The other -- much more challenging -- is to distinguish fact from fiction. 

As any fan of the genre knows, gangster movies came of age during the era of Prohibition and the

Great Depression. Real-life gangsters (such as Al Capone), and the "G-men" who pursued them,

participated in the "social construction" of the "public enemy." During the same era as the urban "gangster" or "mobster," the "rural outlaws" such as Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger were also being pursued by lawmen. This era of myth-making coincided with the era when "talkies" were drawing even cash-strapped Depression-era audiences into theaters.

In the aftermath of Prohibition, real-life gangsters expanded their activities and so did movie gangsters. Eventually, the focus was on urban gangs and organized criminals who were involved in trafficking drugs, sex trafficking, and other activities that were depicted in much more graphic detail than the movies of the 1920s-40s. But the references to those earlier movies were still there. The rise and fall of the gangster was still the most common plot trajectory even though the Production Code had been replaced by a movie rating system.

And all of this makes it particularly challenging to separate fact from fiction. As with movies about the American west (westerns), I am dealing with decades of movie storytelling that has drawn on and contributed to real-life mythology. Real-life gangsters have inspired movie-makers; movies have influenced the style of real-life gangsters. Early films that produced their own mythology that influenced later movies. Writers and directors has sometimes attributed what was done or said by one gangster to another. Fiction hasn't required that they be accurate.

At the same time, the real-life people have told their stories. In interviews and memoirs each has offered his or her own perspective on events. This is like any eyewitness testimony. What a witness sees and remembers -- and is willing to share -- depends all any number of factors. Witnesses disagree.

My challenge is not to go down the rabbit hole with each movie and spend the same amount of time that I would on an book trying to disentangle fact from fiction. I could spend months following each gangster from birth to death. I am not going to do that. I am going to stay focused, finish this, and get back to my historical thriller -- and go back down that rabbit hole.

Did I mention I love research. But I am going to get this book done and gone. 

Marketing for Fiction Writers

I wanted to follow the eloquent posts this week by Donis and Barbara with my own thoughts about Women's History Month. But I'm going to wait until next time and think a bit more. This post will be about marketing. I suspect I may be more susceptible to a sales pitch than my colleagues on Type M because I study mass media/popular culture. I am sometimes drawn in while I'm analyzing what is happening. A really good marketing strategy leaves me wanting to see if the product lives up to the hype. Yesterday morning, I watched a marketing master at work.

I tuned into a webinar conducted by publishing executive and life coach, Michael Hyatt. I discovered Hyatt because he was mentioned in a non-fiction author's blog post. She had a link to his website, and I found him interesting enough to read a few of his posts -- and ended up on his mailing list. I received an invitation to join his webinar, offered at several convenient times. He promised to tell me the three questions I needed to ask and answer to set my life priorities. Now, I should say here that he caught me at a vulnerable moment. Within the past couple of weeks, I'd almost said "yes" to something that I knew would be stressful and require a learning curve. I managed to step back and ask myself if I was the best person to do this and, more important, how would this affect all the others things I had committed to getting done within the next few years. But it was a close call, and it made me aware of those time management issues that I am always trying to balance. That made me an excellent prospect for Hyatt's webinar.

I tuned in -- but I almost logged out in the first ten minutes. Hyatt began his presentation by jarring his listeners to attention. In his conversational tone, he mentioned his friend who was an actuary. He had asked his friend how many of the thousands of people attending the webinar were likely to be dead in the next two years. He shared the statistics. Only a few, but not what you want to hear as you're sipping your morning coffee. Before his listeners could flee in horror, Hyatt followed up with the acknowledgment that he had delivered unsettling news. Knowing he was going to do that he had looked for humor in the situation and found it in the form of amusing last words on tombstones. As we were recovering from the "Boo!" we'd just gotten from the Grim Reaper and chuckling along, Hyatt moved into his presentation -- about having an opportunity to design the legacy we would leave behind. During the next 40 minutes or so, Hyatt provided a blueprint for identifying priorities and staying on track. When he was done, he offered his book for sale -- sharing the major league blurbs and early sales ranking. He also offered more giveaways to those who would make their purchase and enter the information from the sales receipt.

I was impressed by Hyatt's marketing, but I didn't buy -- until I was in a bookstore later in the day. I remembered his book, but didn't see it. I asked about it as I was checking out and was told the book was just out and not in stock. Asked if I wanted to order, I said yes. Even though I hadn't ordered his book after his webinar, Hyatt had found a way to influence my buying behavior. At the end of his presentation, he had quoted psychological research on failure to follow through. I had linked failing to buy his book with failing to set my priorities and being vulnerable to "opportunities" that were not right for me. The fascinating aspect of his strategy was that he had given me enough information during the webinar to be able to implement his blueprint. But I thought I would do it better with his book in hand.

Hyatt hooked me because he tapped into a universal fear. Then he offered  me a way to harness the anxiety he had induced. He convinced me that he had the solution to my problem. He could be confident that I and other members of his webinar audience would be receptive because we were the people who allowed him to reach out to us.

The challenge for fiction writers is to identify the readers who respond to us the way I did to Hyatt. We have to identify the readers who would be interested in our books and then get their attention in a crowded marketplace. We blog, we tweet, we do YouTube trailers. We sign in bookstores, do talks in libraries. Attend conferences and participate in panels. We Skype, send out newsletters, and do workshops. Most of us try not to shout "buy my book" or become spammers. But are there lessons we can learn from a master marketer like Hyatt about offering something of value and connecting with readers at a deeper level?