Digging Into the Pleasure Points of Your Novel to Hook Readers

No, I'm not talking about writing spicy though sex is one of the points

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You should have seen the other images that came up when I searched for pleasure. Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

Last week in the Artist’s Way class, one of Julia Cameron’s exercises (she offers several at the end of each chapter) instructed creatives to make a list of things we cherished. And I immediately thought of my old friend, the ID list. As sometimes happens with old friends, I’d grown distant from my ID list and, dare I say it, even forgotten about it. But a lightbulb went off and I blabbed about it to my class and made them make lists. I don’t think I explained it very well, though, because from the looks on their faces, most seemed unimpressed. (Not to diss the students, because they are the best.)

And then this Sunday, Leigh Stein wrote about ID lists and their best buddies, pleasure points¹. And this time I got serious about re-friending my ID list and went on a deep dive into the concepts.

(I also must confess that somewhere in the depths of my brain a wee bell rang and I went back to notes from a class I took last fall from Camille Pagan. And yes, she had mentioned universal themes at well. It’s my bad that they got filed away in a file cabinet in a dusty corner of my brain. But, you know, sometimes things just hit in a certain way and finally you get it.)

ID lists and Pleasure Points, what the hell are you talking about?

—ID lists are things personal to you that light you up while you’re writing.

—Pleasure points are universal and light readers up while they are reading.

Both come from the work of Jennifer Lynn Barnes, a freaking prolific writer and psychologist, who, after receiving her doctorate at Yale, taught for a decade at the University of Oklahoma. She recently retired from academia to focus on writing fiction full-time.

Her psychological research focused on what makes readers love stories and how certain authors attract rabid fan bases. What are the elements of fictional work that makes readers stand in long lines to get their hands on, say, a copy of Rebecca Yaross’s Oynx Storm when it goes on sale at midnight?

Let’s discuss.

Pleasure Points

The pleasure points are the big kahuna here. They are also sometimes called universal themes, and there’s a writing craft book that calls them butter. But basically, they are themes that make your reader’s brain light up and want to keep the pages turning. Barnes has grouped them into broad topics:

—Wealth

—Beauty (

—Competition

—Danger

—Power

—Touch

If you can get some aspect of these broad themes into your stories, your readers won’t be able to turn the pages fast enough. And yes, I hear you yelling. The books you want are classier than that, have more depth and more emotion. You don’t want to write to a formula, for God’s sake.

But think about this: you can take these themes and incorporate them into your work in a way that doesn’t mean you’re selling out or changing how you write. Competition can mean jealousy, for instance. The opposite of danger is grasping for survival. Beauty can be shown in your characters or settings. Power comes in many forms. And touch, which a book called The Bestseller’s Code calls the most important of all universal themes, includes community and relationships.

And isn’t the end goal of your writing to produce something you want readers to read? By adding even a little bit more of this butter, you’re increasing the odds of that happening.

ID lists

By ID here, I mean your ID as in Freud’s theory of what goes in inside our heads, not identification, although that is an element of it. Your ID, in very simplified layman’s terms, is that part of you that lights up with excitement at certain things.

I like rainy days but you might hate them. I love the color purple, but blue is my absolute favorite. I love popcorn and red wine. Peanut butter and caramel. Post-it notes in bright colors and thinking about life in outer space. The beach, specifically the beaches on the Oregon Coast, and taking long road trips. Maybe you hate driving long distances!

The point is, by including your ID list favorites in your stories, you’re sharing who you are and that’s an important part of honing your writer’s voice. The universal is in the specific, which is why writing instructors are always yammering on about using specific detail.

And besides, it’s fun.

How to use both ID lists and pleasure points in your novel

Pleasure points first. You could easily sit down and plan yourself a novel that hit all the points listed above. And go for it, if you want to. But you don’t have to. Because you probably have those universal themes in your novel already. They’re called universal for a reason.

What you need to do is bump them up. See how you can heighten what’s already on the page.

Here’s how I approached it when I decided I was going to go all in on this. (And that was, um two days ago, so, yeah, haven’t made a lot of progress on it yet.)

1. I made a list of my WIPs. (I refuse to tell you how many on the grounds that it might incriminate me.)

2. I figured out where the pleasure points already existed in the novels by listing the universal themes and noting if there was any sign of them in my story.

3. Then I looked scene by scene, chapter by chapter, to find places to heighten the points. (An ongoing process.)

4. And now that I’m aware of them, I can keep an eye out for ways to incorporate as I move forward.

ID lists.

First of all, make a list of them. This list can and should be ongoing.

And then, say you are stuck. Ask yourself, what would make me excited to write this scene? In one of the podcasts I listened to read the transcript of Jennifer Lynn Barnes said she was bored with a scene. Then she looked at her ID list and one of the items was rooftops. So she decided to set a scene on a rooftop and the whole thing opened up. See how that works?

By putting the things you love in a story, it makes you happy to write it.

But also: the universal is in the specific. Your reader may not share your passion for carving wood spoons, but she will recognize your passion for it and equate it to her love of making pots.

Links

Jennifer Lynn Barnes website (mostly about her books).

An article on the ID list

Grammar Girl transcript of talk with Jennifer Lynn Barnes:

Use psychology to write a bestseller:

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Okay, that’s all for now. As a reminder, I’m at AWP in Los Angeles this week, so I may not have a Sunday Love Letter for you. I will have your prompts for April next Monday, though, so stay tuned.

1. Honestly, I almost didn’t read the post because the title seemed a little cringe. Hope my title didn’t scare you off. But of course if it had, you wouldn’t be reading this, so never mind. Anyway, her subtitle referenced Romancing the Stone, the 1984 movie and I loved that flick so I kept reading.