Hot Buttons Topics and Hit Novels
Write Better Now
Life threw me into a chaotic blender swirl this week, and I apologize. This is going to be the free writing post of the week and the one for paid subscribers (just $45 a year to help me keep my house and feed the puppies-cough-cough) will be tomorrow. That’s going to begin the process of talking about how to construct a novel with a hot button topic.
Today, we get to talk hot buttons! Get some oven mitts and protect your fingers, okay? I’m going to dive right in.
HOT BUTTON TOPICS
Hot button topics: they are controversial; they can get you haters and trolls; they can also propel your novel into the world of bestsellers.
Is that something you’re interested in? Afraid of?
We’re going to start talking about hot button topics and novels here, okay?
We’ve started a series of paid and free posts about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here.
HOT BUTTON DEFINED AND UNDERSTOOD
What even is a hot button topic?
Mental Floss explains:
“These days, the phrase hot-button issue or hot-button topic refers to any matter that is fraught with emotion, especially the visceral type. If a subject gets people upset, agitated, excited, or out of sorts, the button temperature is high.
“Some of the most searing hot-button topics are abortion, immigration, politicians, war, and religion. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the first known use of hot button was recorded about the latter subject in a 1966 New York Times article: ‘Dr. Martin E. Marty, Lutheran theologian … acknowledges that the “God Is Dead” theologians have their finger on the “hot button.”’”
Hot button issues make strong reactions. They can be global or national like the ones mentioned above; they can be community wide (like our community and cruise ships right now); they can be personal.
In Psychology Today, Jim Taylor explains,
“Hot buttons as strong, negative emotional reactions (e.g., irritation, frustration, anger, sadness, despair) to people or situations that touch old psychological or emotional wounds, such as self-doubt, worry, insecurity, the fear of failure or rejection, feeling out of control, the need to be perfect, or the pressure of expectations. Because of this intense emotional connection between the present and the past, the reaction is usually out of proportion to the reality of the situation.”
So what triggers that response is a person or situation that reminds us of something horrible.
Is this why we cry at all dog videos? Because we remember our own dog dying and that massive grief and loss? Possibly, but most of us don’t think of a ‘hot button’ that way. Whatever we are seeing now, makes us feel threatened a bit, we relive the past a bit (even when we don’t realize it.
“Those hot emotions that are felt by that unconscious reenactment further trigger your fight-or-flight reaction to the perceived threat,” Taylor says.
Our amygdala is a part of our brain that processes and filters what we’re inputting, what’s happening, from the world around us.
It’s job is to notice threats.
When it sees a potential threat our amygdala puts us into fight or flight
“Unfortunately, the amygdala doesn’t know the difference between a threat to our physical existence on the Serengeti 250,000 years ago and a perceived threat to our psychological existence in the 21st century,” Taylor says.
Super interesting, right? But what does this have to do with making hit novels? Or even decent novels? We’ll go into that more tomorrow but as William Hazlitt once wrote . . .
“When a thing ceases to be subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.”