The key to writing bestsellers (IMO) isn’t a clever premise or something no one has ever thought of before. It happens when a writer creates characters that resonate with readers. When readers get emotionally invested in a book, it’s usually because of a character or characters. They gobble up the book and then get the next one. They tell Start with a big idea. Bestsellers are built on a big idea. Not just some old thing regurgitated in a new way. It’s Write with the audience in mind. Bestsellers are sticky. The book needs to be written in a way where it can be easily Edit for clarity, not perfection. Bestsellers are clear · Creative writing professor and novelist James W. Hall tries his hand at teasing out the magical, alchemical recipe for creating a bestseller in his new book, Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century’s Biggest Bestsellers
How to Write a Bestseller - Create If Writing
Creative writing professor and novelist James W. Hall tries his hand at teasing out the magical, alchemical recipe for creating a bestseller in his new book, Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers, writing a bestseller.
Hit Lit grew from a university course Hall began teaching years ago about about popular fiction, writing a bestseller, inspired by a collection of year-by-year lists of bestsellers he found in his university's library.
Bigger than a big. For his book, Hall analyzed Gone With the WindPeyton PlaceTo Kill a MockingbirdValley of the DollsThe GodfatherThe ExorcistJawsThe Dead ZoneThe Hunt for Red OctoberThe FirmThe Bridges of Madison County and The Da Vinci Code, writing a bestseller.
Though Hall admits, "these twelve novels have radically different settings, different characters, writing a bestseller, very different plots," he says they all share 12 common features to the point where they are "permutations of one book, written again and again for each new generation of readers.
Hall isn't the first writer to take a crack at reverse engineering the characteristics shared by highly successful novels. My Google search turned up John Harvey's academic paper published in"The Content Characteristics of Best-Selling Novels. the author has, in the research here described, sought to isolate content characteristics which differentiate best- from poor-sellers.
Although perfect prediction of book sales will require continued inquiry, he finds that certain content variables do appear to be associated with sales figures. So, what are some of those "content variables"?
According to James Hall, the protagonists in the novels he dissected all possess a "high level of emotional intensity that results in gutsy and surprising deeds.
Hall never promises that reading Hit Lit will help writers make the bestseller list. Unlike Hall, the subtitle of literary agent Donald Maass' book, Writing the Breakout Novelpromises: "Insider advice for writing a bestseller your fiction to the next level. In the '90s, year-old carpenter and struggling writer John Baldwin determined to write a bestselling medical thriller.
He spent several years analyzing the best examples of the genre, consulted with some Hollywood writers and agents, and created a step formula for creating a hit thriller:. The hero is an expert. The villain is an expert, writing a bestseller. You must watch all of the villainy over the shoulder of the villain. The hero has a team of experts in various fields behind him, etc. Two or more on the team must fall in writing a bestseller. Two or more on the team must die, writing a bestseller.
The villain must turn his attentions from his initial goal to the team. The villain and the hero must live to do battle again in the sequel. All deaths must proceed from the individual to the group: i. Start with "Jamie and Suzy were walking in the park with their grandmother when the earth opened up, writing a bestseller.
If you get bogged down, just kill somebody. Baldwin then teamed up with epidemiologist John Marr. Expressed vaguely enough to apply to radically different novels, the common features Hall discovered in the bestsellers he studied, Maass' techniques, or Baldwin's 10 steps could just as easily fit the books aimed at the bestseller list that flopped as the successes.
As a predictive strategy, writing formulas are as likely to be as useful to would-be bestselling novelists as the advice in today's astrology column is in making good decisions, writing a bestseller. How well do these formulas work when one applies them to the task of writing their own best-selling novel? Baldwin and Marr struck out. James Hall has written 17 thrillers. His biography notes, "Several of the novels have been optioned for film and Hall has written screenplays for two of those projects.
His novels have been Book-of-the-Month and Writing a bestseller Guild selections. Maass' official biography states that he is the author of 14 pseudonymous novels, none of them evidently a bestseller.
A truly big book is a perfect blend of inspired premise, larger-than-life characters, high-stakes story, deeply felt themes, vivid setting and much more. It is a kind of literary gestalt, a welling up of inspired material Hall says that the novels he studied are "unique and creative mash-ups of traditional genres. So is creativity. So is inspiration. I like W. Somerset Maugham's wry advice on the subject: "There are three rules for writing the writing a bestseller. Unfortunately, writing a bestseller, no one knows what they are.
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· Creative writing professor and novelist James W. Hall tries his hand at teasing out the magical, alchemical recipe for creating a bestseller in his new book, Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century’s Biggest Bestsellers The key to writing bestsellers (IMO) isn’t a clever premise or something no one has ever thought of before. It happens when a writer creates characters that resonate with readers. When readers get emotionally invested in a book, it’s usually because of a character or characters. They gobble up the book and then get the next one. They tell Start with a big idea. Bestsellers are built on a big idea. Not just some old thing regurgitated in a new way. It’s Write with the audience in mind. Bestsellers are sticky. The book needs to be written in a way where it can be easily Edit for clarity, not perfection. Bestsellers are clear
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