Maurice Stoker On Writing a Prize Winning Best Seller - 5

The Coming Future

Note that the above techniques are among the guiding factors in book packaging, AKA (akaaka?) writing by committee. If as an author you have not been approached by a packaging crew to be the designated fill-in-with-words-by-number minion, then you are not likely to write any best-sellers. This is the new trend, the "author" selected by a market-driven process revolving around the correct "authorial" look.

The next logical step is to automate the entire process of authoring genre fiction via parameter-driven software, since it is largely mechanistic anyway. Such software could mix and match plots and characters and ape any style, even forgotten ones, blending them by degrees into new voices. Input the requirements, turn the crank, and out pops a book, with the possibility of an entirely new work every millisecond if desired. Of course, to flood the (diminishing in both size and reading ability) public with this much canned material would be counter-productive. However, using polling data, much as with television, it could be fine-tuned to hit market waves and ride crests for years, resurrecting old ideas (why hasn't 77 Sunset Strip with Ed "Kooky"been revived?). Genre-fiction will soon be an entirely computer automated industry, with no need for living humans to place the words into the pre-numbered packages. (For more on this, see the Crackerjack Report, by Credulinha Crackerjack.)

Those writing fiction outside genre, though their existence be denied by agents and editors and large publishing houses, will not be marginalized by this process any more than would be a mathematician, since there is no algorithm for creating a new art form, just as there is no algorithm for proving the theorems of first-order logic. (However, they are already marginalized by an industry demanding machine-like work.)

Since genre fiction is algorithmic, we can teach how to write a best-selling prize winner, but not how to create an original novel. Nonetheless, no matter how well one learns the basics of writing by the numbers, the rest is pure luck. All of it. A total crapshoot. Unless you can snag the attention of a book packager. Then you have the literary equivalent of payola on your side.

Good luck. Get on it before all generic fiction is produced by computer programs in India or China. If you hurry, perhaps it is possible to make a reputation for works abiding by the laws of derivative fiction and become one of the repetitive styles in the database. Maybe such styles can become protected intellectual property, as did business processes like one-click ordering (patented?), and you can claim a royalty payment whenever your style is aped, assuming it can be identified.

Maurice Stoker

© 2006

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