The remainder of the best seller list is chiefly composed of books with certain qualities common to best sellers — and here we find ourselves on marshy terrain indeed, because I don’t feel it’s proper to think in terms of a best seller class or category. Certainly there’s no magic formula, and certainly these books differ enormously from one another. By familiarizing yourself with best-selling fiction, you’ll get a sense of what qualities they have in common.
Perhaps more important, you’ll find that you like best sellers of one sort while disliking others. And, somewhere along the line, you’ll find one or more best-selling novels that spark that identification with the author we’ve talked about. You’ll realize you could have written a particular book, or one a good deal like it. When this happens, you will have found a direction for your writing which holds the promise of the rewards you seek while remaining compatible with your own literary inclinations.
That last point is worth a digression.
A great many people seem to believe that all it takes for a talented writer to produce a best-selling novel is a sound idea and the will to carry it out. Writers frequently make the mistake of believing this themselves, and the results can be markedly unsuccessful.
The writers who consistently produce best-selling fiction are not writing down to their audience. They are not making deliberate compromises between the books they’d like to write and what the public wants. On the contrary, they are turning out precisely the books they were born to write, working at the top of their form, and while they may wistfully wish they were geared to write the kind of thing that wins awards and sparks doctoral theses, just as Norman Rockwell occasionally expressed regret that he didn’t paint like Picasso, they have become successes by being themselves.
Best sellers are occasionally written cynically. William Faulkner batted out Sanctuary with the intention of producing a potboiler that would make him rich; he remained an artist in spite of himself, and while Sanctuary did sell impressively it remained quintessential Faulkner. On the other hand, it’s probably safe to assume that John Updike wrote Couples out of comparable cupidity. Couples did sell very well, but it’s hardly vintage Updike, and the author’s own detachment from it is evident throughout.
I’ve known several writers of category fiction who have tried to break through into the world of bestsellerdom, a natural ambition in a world where success is largely measured in dollars and cents. Some writers manage this rather neatly; they’d written category fiction as an apprenticeship, or their development carried them to a point where they are comfortable working on a broader canvas — for one reason or another, their books work. Others of us have found ourselves trying to be something we’re not in order to attain a goal to which we unwisely aspire. The result, more often than not, is a book which is satisfying to neither its authors nor its readers, a financial and artistic failure. The Peter Principle seems to apply; we extend our literary horizons until we reach our level of incompetence.
I’m sorry to say that I know whereof I speak, and the knowledge was not gained painlessly. What I have learned to my cost is that I do my best work when all I am trying to do is my best work. And it is when I do this that I incidentally achieve the most critical and financial success in the bargain.
There’s a moral there somewhere, and I have a hunch it shouldn’t be too hard to spot.
Suppose I don’t want to write category fiction? I want to write a serious mainstream novel. But I don’t know what I want to write about. I don’t have a setting or a plot or a character. I just know that I want to write a serious novel. How do I get started?
Maybe you’re not ready yet.
Give yourself time. Read the sorts of novels you enjoy and admire, and try to spot those which afford a measure of the author-identification we’ve discussed. You may not want to write books which specifically resemble what you’ve read, but this identification process, this reading from the writer’s point of view, may help your subconscious mind to begin formulating ideas for your own book.
Sooner or later, you’ll begin to get ideas — out of your own background and experience, out of your imagination, out of some well of story material within yourself. This process will happen when the time is right. Until it does, there’s not very much you can do.
Chapter 3
Read... Study... Analyze
How to read, as a writer. Taking books apart to see how they work. Applying these principles in structuring your own novel
Let’s suppose that you’ve managed to zoom in on a type of novel you think might make for comfortable writing. You don’t know that you’re ready to embark on a lifelong career as a writer of sweet savage romances, say, or shoot-’em-up westerns, but you feel it might be worthwhile to take a shot at writing one of them. You’ve found something you enjoy reading and it’s also something you can see yourself writing. The talent you perceive yourself having seems likely to lend itself to this particular sort of book.
Now what do you do?
Well, it’s possible you’re ready to sit down and go to work at the typewriter. Maybe you’ve already got your book firmly in mind, plot and characters and all. If that’s the case, by all means sit down and start hitting the keys. The book may or may not work, depending on the extent of your readiness, but in any event you’ll learn a great deal from the experience.
It’s very likely, though, that you’d do well to take another step before plunging in. This step consists of subjecting your chosen field to a detailed analysis by reading extensively and submerging yourself in what you read. The analytical process is such that you wind up with both an ingrained gut-level understanding of what constitutes a successful novel of your chosen type and a mind trained to conceive, produce and develop the ideas for such a novel.
I can’t think of a better name for this process than “market analysis,” yet something in me recoils at the term. It’s too clinical, for one thing, and it seems to imply that writing a salable gothic novel lends itself to the Harvard Business School case-study approach. We’re talking about writing, for Pete’s sake. We’re dealing with creativity. We’re artists, aren’t we? Market analysis is something they do in Wall Street offices, not Greenwich Village garrets.
Besides, the process I’m talking about is oriented more to the work than to the market. What we study here is the individual novel, and our concern is in discovering what makes it work, not what has induced some particular editor to publish it or some group of readers to buy it.
Okay. Whatever you call it, I want to do it. What do I do first?
Good question.
As I said, what you do is you read.
When you picked a type of book to write, one of the criteria was that it was one you were capable of reading with a certain degree of pleasure. This had better be the case, because you’re going to have to do some intensive reading. Fortunately, the odds are that reading is a habit for you from the start. That’s true for most people who want to write, and it’s especially true for most of those who wind up successful at it. Some of us find ourselves reading less fiction as time passes, and many of us are inclined to avoid reading other people’s novels while writing our own, but I rarely encounter a writer who’s not a pretty enthusiastic reader by nature.
So there’s a fair chance that you’ve been reading books in your chosen field for some time now, beginning long before you selected this field for your own novelistic endeavors. I’d had this sort of prior experience with suspense novels, for example, before I seriously attempted one of my own. On the other hand, I had not read widely in the soft-core sex novel field when the opportunity arose for me to write one. Few people had; the genre was just beginning to emerge.