Desire Path… of workarounds and walking where we need to go
by Damon Suede
(A-game Advice was a monthly column offering practical
tips for winning promo that fits your personal style, strategy,
and measure of success.
There's an old bit of ranch wisdom: give
a job to the laziest person and they'll find the easiest way to get
it done.
That's just human nature. The more
slothful the worker, the fewer steps they’ll take, the less effort
they’ll invest, the shorter the path from Alpha to Omega on any
project. When someone is completely opposed to effort on principle,
they'll always look for the wasted steps, flabby planning, and
unnecessary bother that can go bye-bye.
Because of evolution and neuroplasticity,
humans are hardwired to create “desire paths.”
Literally, a desire path (also known as a
footpath, goat track, game trail) is a crude walkway created by the
erosion via regular usage of the shortest or easiest distance
between two points. In other words, it’s a user-created solution to
a design flaw or creative opportunity in an environment. The wild
alchemy of ingenuity and our natural aversion to pointless
complication and drudgery saves us hours of pointless work.
Desire paths are organic workarounds and
they tend to offer logical shortcuts that work around sanctioned or
artificial roads and structures. When kids cut across the grass or
animals wear a hole through a hedge, they’re creating a desire path.
They know where they need to go; it’s only the well-intentioned
dummies who designed the road who got it wrong.
The more people use a desire path, the
more permanent it becomes as passage erodes the soil and widens the
egress through plants and obstacles knocked aside to clear the way.
That’s just basic primate behavior. Folks tend to want what they
can’t have, and as soon as they can have it easily they have less
incentive to find sources further afield.
Often landscapers and architects will
incorporate existing desire paths as a matter of efficiency: if
folks have already told you where the road goes, then for best
results follow their lead. Desire paths allow
use to dictate design, so
there’s a commonsensical, on-the-fly elegance to them.
There’s a hive-mind quality to desire
paths, an invisible hand that reveals the will of the community
regardless of fences or shrubbery. Like water, people will follow
the path of least resistance to travel where they must. Trends are
desire paths across pop culture and genres reveal the shifting foot
traffic of fandom moment by moment.
Of course, not all paths cut across an
unweeded lot with creepy clowns hiding in the trees. Workarounds
come in many shapes and scales. Sometimes desire paths traverse
shores, relationships, negotiations, systems, or trauma. In our
problem-solving monkey mind, we instinctively seek out the path of
least irritation.
Buying habits, outsourcing, crowdfunding,
and dynamic programming all operate as
virtual desire paths by memorializing popular solutions to common
problems and improving on systems responsively. Most consumer
decisions and marketing efforts involve exploitation and redirection
of desire paths, reducing the friction between intention and the
desired outcome. When you want people to do stuff, you remove every
possible impediment so that compliance is a matter of convenience.
Readers follow desire paths constantly
which is why certain genres explode “out of nowhere.” The audience
already existed and the once those readers found the books they
wanted, the back and forth of enthusiastic customers and creators
cuts a wide swath across the market floor. Savvy acquisition can set
a publisher or agency up to capitalize on an explosion of foot
traffic, but only if they pay attention and can act swiftly.
Learn to spot the organic flow of
attention and enthusiasm in your vicinity. As an author, you should
always be on the lookout for desire past that cut across your
intellectual property:
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Who has created this desire path and why?
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Where is the traffic coming from and where is it headed?
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What elements of your voice and your work provides egress and access for this group of people?
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How can you satisfy the relevant desire and establish authentic relationships with them?
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What opportunities can you identify that would allow you to adapt to the organic traffic crossing your niche or turf?
Desire paths are also why oversaturation
kills a genre or subgenre: when you can get what you want
everywhere, effort isn’t
required and its desirability lowers. You don’t need a shortcut to
acquire something that’s constantly underfoot. Every marketing
disaster and product fiasco resulted from folks ignoring desire
paths, often in plain sight.
The tidal wave of box sets and freemium
titles has taught readers books can be had for less. For name-brand
authors that’s a plus, for folks starting out, that’s indentured
servitude to the Muse. If
anyone can get published, almost no one will get noticed because
those desire paths simply reroute to avoid what audiences already
have or don’t want. Tough noogies. Worse, the perception of easy
money also creates a desire path for lazy writers ready to grind out
dreck for a buck…until the audience dries up and that path to E-Z
lucre fades. #SorryNotSorry
For that matter, desire paths also
explain the challenges of pirating and plagiarism. To people with
few scruples, DRMs and takedown notices are just another fence to
jump. Folks who don’t want to pay or work for stuff they want decide
to simply cut across the lawn wherever and whenever they feel like
it. Others will inevitably follow in their footsteps, which is why
copyright law and stern warnings have done so little to discourage
piracy and plagiarism in the era of electronic media.
Desire paths also affect your output and
promotional efforts. Every artist learns workarounds that make the
most of their unique skill set and inherent weaknesses. Knowing your
strengths and flaws, your opportunities and threats, makes you more
efficient and encourages creative risks.
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When writing and promoting, what steps do you find yourself skipping and why?
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What benefits do you forfeit because of those shortcuts and sidesteps?
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What unexpected allies and assets can you access because of the time and energy you save?
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Have respected colleagues already identified useful desire paths that save steps, improve results, or boost productivity?
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How do your desire paths shape the projects you choose and the success they find?
Like landscape architects who simply
formalize informal footpaths, our industry has begun to address
these challenges by experimenting with price points, release
calendars, and fan access to exclusive content. If anything desire
paths are reshaping the way entertainment does business and how fans
find content creators. The time required to read a book, to actually
sit down and decode a text and find pleasure in the act of literacy,
has become one of the greatest impediments to audience development.
Places to go, people to be.
Originally published as part of A Game Advice for the Romance Writers Report.
If you wish to republish this article, just drop me a line.