Synopsis as Friend by Tracy Alexander

 As I contemplated cracking on with my novel this morning – I’m only on Chapter Three – I had a comforting thought. The exact words in my head were Synopsis as friend. My mind’s circuitry led me straight to a case study from my long gone life as a marketer. The subject was dog food.

For ten years I was a proper PAYE employee, selling the likes of frozen food, tennis shoes and booze. For the next ten years I was freelance, selling money in the form of mortgages and investments. At some point I was invited to give a guest lecture at the Chartered Institute of Marketing. Given that I was seven months pregnant, I probably should have declined. Instead I pulled on a pair of black trousers with an oh-so-attractive stretchy panel fetchingly topped by an elastic waistband (for that little known waist that is in fact directly beneath your breasts), buttoned the matching black maternity waistcoat (what joker thought of that) and drove to Cookham.

I wasn’t nervous, until I opened my mouth and realised that my lung capacity, whilst adequate for conversations where you only have every other turn and the person is close by, wasn’t up to the job. I cut short my introduction, offering the delegates a chance to say a little about themselves while I recovered my composure.

My subject was segmentation. Bread and butter stuff. I had all sorts of examples from the world known as FMCG (fast moving consumer goods), from retail and from financial services. All I had to do was teach the theory, show examples – the brilliant dog food slides were ready and waiting – and then relate it to the fields they were working in. I could do that with or without oxygen.

The first attendee mumbled her name and said that she worked on treated mosquito nets. My mind gave a sarcastic ‘yippee!’ Never mind. The others were bound to be working on cars, shampoo, biscuits . . . something I could relate to.

The conch was passed round the room. My confidence ebbed. My smile became as fixed and unresponsive as my twenty-something pupils.

It turned out that I had a global monopoly on marketers of mosquito related products.

Inside I did the equivalent of a refusal at Becher’s Brook.           

Whether it was the peppering of the content with irritating little breaths, the hideousness of my maternity waistcoat or my lack of engagement with the mosquito market, by the time I got to the segmentation of the dog food market, I’d lost them. A shame, because it was my favourite part.

Here’s the gist:

Categorising dog food in terms of form – dry, wet, raw – or flavour – lamb, rabbit, chicken – didn’t help marketers understand how to make their products attractive to dog owners. Nor did using the breed, age or size of dog. Research showed that the most meaningful way of sorting the market was by looking at how dog owners thought about their dogs.

Four segments were identified that most influenced the type of dog food chosen:

Dog as grandchild – indulgence

Dog as child – love

Dog as friend – health and nutrition

Dog as dog – cheap and convenient.

My audience woke up slightly. Proof that a pet can always be relied on to liven things up, be it in business or school visits. We had our first interaction of any length, a welcome reprieve for my pulmonary gas exchange. The treated net marketers had never considered the relationship between dog and master.

Had they not read The Call of the Wild? Seen Bill Sykes mistreat Bull’s Eye?  Or Hagrid berate cowardly Fang? Timmy was surely as much a friend as Anne, Dick, Julian and George. 

They eagerly volunteered product names and quickly slotted them into the four segments.

Cesar Mini Fillets in a foil tray – Dog as grandchild

Asda Smartprice Dog Meal. – Dog as dog

Pedigree Chum Chicken – the clues in the name . . .

In what was overall a pretty grey-with-clouds lecture, I enjoyed the little spell of sunshine. Motivation wasn’t something mosquito experts thought a lot about. They thought about geography and insects and shelter and disease and mosquito net fixing kits. They didn’t think about what might be on the mind of the traveller, setting off alone to try and find traces of the Hairy-nosed Otter in Borneo, or maybe the traveller’s nervous father, buying the very best treated mosquito net for his passionate but impractical son.

Marketers often end up segmenting by demographics e.g. age, gender, income, despite the power of psychographics like motivation, personality and attitude. Perhaps writers should lecture at the Chartered Institute of Marketing instead . . .

Quite why my inner voice chose the words Synopsis as friend, inextricably linked in my hippocampus to Dog as friend, who knows, but it made me reflect on my changed relationship with synopses.

My first few books grew in a free spirit sort of way, meandering towards a vague nirvana shrouded in uncertainty. The synopses written afterwards, if at all. 

This was: Synopsis as bureaucrat.

My new book, Hacked, out in November, was the product of a synopsis I HAD to write because the publisher, Piccadilly Press, was interested in an idea I’d mooted and wanted it fleshed out.

This was: Synopsis as unwanted dependant.

I developed the beginning, middle and end of the story, my lovely publisher made a few suggestions and then I forgot about the four-page plan until there was a problem, at which point I reluctantly referred to it.

The synopsis for the sequel, however, is printed out and has its own space on my desk. It feels reassuring. Trustworthy, but not prescriptive. 

857 words in, with 50 000 ish to go, I’m glad that I’m not alone.

This is: Synopsis as friend

I even enjoyed the discipline of writing it.

  

Tracy Alexander

www.tmalexander.co.uk

One Girl And Her Dog: Top Dog Stories in Children's Fiction - by Emma Barnes

Some themes crop up over and over in children’s literature. My new book takes lift-off from one of them: the powerful bond that exists between girl (or boy) and their pet dog.

Why are dogs so important to children? Although they plead to have them, in practise most parents know it will be they who do most of the work, while dogs often work out where their walks and sustenance are coming from, and relegate the junior members to mere puppy rank. Yet despite that, from Lassie to Eva Ibbotson’s last novel, there remains something special about the relationship between child and hound.

In my new book, Wolfie, Lucie has always wanted a dog, and her wish is finally granted when her Uncle turns up with a large, toothy, furry “dog”. But is it a dog? Lucie is not sure, although the grown-ups (never good at seeing what is under their noses) mock her claim that the new pet is actually a wolf...

Wolfie is a more dangerous proposition than the average domestic dog. And that’s even before you take into account the fact that she can talk. But in the end, dogs and wolves are both pack animals, and it is the strong attachments they form to their group, and the uncomplicated nature of their affections, that makes them such precious companions, real or imagined, to children.

Some Different Kinds of Books About Dogs 

1) Dog as Friend

For a lonely, often an only, child a dog becomes an essential companion. Perhaps the most famous example (note my pun here!) is George of the Famous Five. A spiky, difficult girl who wants to be a boy, and feels misunderstood by her parents, George is deeply attached to her dog, Timmy. Indeed it is her determination to constantly defend Timmy which sparks off many of her adventures.

My Sam in Sam and the Griswalds is a timid and lacking in confidence – quite unlike George. But acquiring a dog, Biter, is a crucial ingredient in pepping up Sam’s life. And the support of a dog can be important even in adolescence: as in the wonderfully funny but poignant Feeling Sorry for Celia, where Elizabeth has a better relationship with her collie than her own parents.

2) Dog as Ally

Dogs can be equally important to children who, while they have siblings (maybe lots of siblings) are seeking refuge from the rivalry that often brings. Helen Cresswell’s Ordinary Jack has a closer, less demanding relationship with his mongrel dog, Zero, than with his overly talented siblings. OK, so Zero is far from bright, inclined to wee on the floor when nervous and scared of almost everything. But he makes Jack, the only ordinary member of the Bagthorpe tribe, feel tonnes better about himself.

For Peter Hatcher, narrator of Judy Blume’s classic Fudge books, having a dog is offered as compensation for having to put up with endlessly demanding, troublesome younger brother, Fudge.

3) The Dog Weepy 

My primary school reading book was not usually of much interest to me – but then I read Bedgellert. This was the tale of the hound, Gellert, who saved Prince Llewellyn’s baby son from a wolf attack. But his master, returning home, thought that Gellert had killed the baby – and slew the dog, only to realise his mistake when he found the child unharmed.

This story absolutely devastated me. My heartbreak was only matched a few years later with the death of the boy Stephen’s hound, Amile, in Barbara Leonie Picard’s medieval novel, One is One. It’s a wonderful story and still in print – recommended to all with an interest in dogs, monasteries or painting.

Somehow, terrible to say, it’s always worse when an animal dies. Even today, as I watch the (definitely not for children) series Game of Thrones, it’s not the growing pile of human corpses that upsets me: it’s what happens to the dog (ok, it's a dire-wolf - same thing).

4) The Naughty Dog 

Being animals, dogs cannot be blamed for being naughty – and so children can revel in all the things that a bad dog can get up to (and which they might fancy themselves). Dogs run away, dig up flower beds, chase cats, jump fences, trip up the postman, steal food, and generally cause all kinds of enjoyable domestic chaos. I especially like Rose Impey’s Houdini Dog books, where the two sisters remind me of myself and my sister. We badly wanted a dog, and (as in Impey’s book) we decided that a protracted nagging campaign was the best way to get one. When we finally got one - a beautiful, stupid, but very good-natured Samoyed –  like Houdini dog he was given to occasional escapes, and led us a merry dance finding him again.

My favourite naughty dog of all is probably “the dog” (unnamed) in Adrian Mole. He is sick, he eats model ships, he throws up, he jumps on policemen, he runs away to Grandma’s, he licks his stitches, he is scared of alsations, he gets concrete stuck in his paws – he is thoroughly delightful. Who wouldn't fall for a dog like that?

Long may canines rule in children's fiction: may their barks never grow faint!

Check out Emma Barnes's web-site
Wolfie is published in August 2012 and Emma will be talking about it at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.