Monday, January 27, 2014

How to Write a Bestselling Novel

According to many, ''If it were that easy, everyone would do it.'' I do not mean to suggest that writing a bestseller is easy, only that I have some insights that tilt the odds in your favor. Here are some things to think about as you either write your own novel or read one written by someone else.

Bestsellers set off whisper campaigns.

What creates a bestseller? It's a novel that compels readers to recommend it enthusiastically (actually, compulsively) to their friends and relatives. What motivates someone to do that? It happens when readers encounter an intensely enjoyable and satisfying entertainment, a story that moves them to identify and bond with the principal character of the novel (or more specifically, the situations in which the principal character finds him or herself and the ways the character responds to those situations).

My thesis is simple: A bestseller hooks a reader in precisely the same way as any one of us might become hooked when we meet a stranger in real life, begin talking to the person and realize we want to find out more about him or her. We find the person fascinating, or (to use the word I find more telling in these cases) intriguing. We don't necessarily wish to become friends with the person. In the case of menacing or dangerous characters, we're grateful we're meeting them in the pages of a book and not in real life.

Here are the essential preconditions for a bestseller:

1. Empathy.For starters, we identify with the main character. We quickly find ourselves developing empathy because we find it easy to put ourselves in that person's shoes. A good example: Catness in The Hunger Games. Look at the qualities she demonstrates: competitiveness, coolness-under-pressure, selflessness and competence. These qualities elevate her to heroine status. (I'm using movies as touchstones for the sake of convenience.)

We know the narrator can't possibly tell us the entire truth, no one point of view can, but we don't care. We like the voice telling us the story. We like the main character. In a way, we don't want to know the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We want to know the entire story from beginning to end. No, it's not the complete truth, but do we really care? Not until the story goes against the main character and threatens his life. Then we really care.

2. Misfortune. Chaos is a writer's best friend. If a character does not overcome bad things, how can we know for sure that he or she is made of sterner stuff? The worse the bad things are, the sweeter the redemption we can hope for at the end of the story. Not that we always get redemption at the end, rather we're sometimes like the owner of a used car that keeps breaking down. We're overly invested in a character who can't get a break, and then the story ends. For we, the readers, that's the worse break of all, and it's the basis of a lot of noir fiction, yes, very dark indeed.

3. Conundrum. Bestsellers have a mystery, a dilemma or a riddle at the heart of them that attracts readers and draws them in. A good example is Donna Tartt's novel The Goldfinch, which I recently read. Although her writing is contemporary, her novel (which is truly a great one!) reminded me of what I love about many of Charles Dickens's works. No one could create mystery and intrigue at the heart of a character better than Dickens.

4. Trust. When a novel is effective, we perceive the main character to be a person. That is quite a trick for any writer to pull off in itself because, obviously, the character on the page is comprised of wordspure fiction or fantasy. When it's done well, for example, in The Silver Lining Playbook, (the novel) we marvel at how the complexity of the characters we meet on the page resembles real people we've known in our lives with impulses, both rational and irrational, and with familiar flaws, fears and obsessions. In the case of Silver Lining the two principal characters, Pat, Jr. and Tiffany, could not come together with less likelihood of reaching each other, yet, impossibly, they wind up saving each other. With all their flaws, we are rooting for them from the first page to the last. I read Matthew Quick's novel that the movie is based on, and I recommend it. It's better than the movie. And the movie was excellent.

The sad truth is that a bestseller ropes us in by revealing flaws in a character. As readers we may use those flaws as reasons to trust the character and believe he's trustworthy. The mantra we say to ourselves as we read about one horrible disclosure after another: Well, if he is admitting to us that he is a drunk, a cheat and a scoundrel, then can he be all bad? At least he's telling us the truth, right? Trust me, he's not telling the whole truth, but if we like the main character, we don't let that bother us.

5. Story. A bestseller tells a story that has legs (it goes places) and depth (it reflects the human condition). What the characters do in the story, their actions (the plot) give us insight into their character and a sense of who they are. When it's done right, they have complexity that allows their personalities to take shape in our minds.

What do I mean by a story that has legs? It's a story that takes us places. One example: A story that is not about what at first it seems to be about. For example, The Dallas Buyers Club might seem to be about an HIV infected man, who devises a scheme to acquire the medicines to keep him and others in similar circumstances alive. What it actually is: The story of a man who goes from being a homophobe to accepting and helping the GLBT community. That's a story with legs.

In my opinion a story that lacks depth is 12 Years a Slave because the principal protagonist, Solomon Northup, does very little to free himself. Yes, he finds a white man willing to help him, but that is all. The film does a brilliant job of portraying the horrors of slavery. Imagine how much better the story would have been if the last third of the film had been devoted to Northup escaping the plantation and embarking on a journey along the underground railway north. We would have seen Solomon Northup's actions building character. Or what if the story ended with Solomon going on to work in the underground railway, which, by the way, he actually did in fact. Why didn't the movie let us be inspired at the end? If it had, the ending would have been far more effective and redemptive.

6. Dark, evil shadows. This is why I prefer using the word intrigue over the word fascination when it comes to characters coming to life on the page. Consider all the darker meanings of the word intrigue. It is defined as, ''secret plan, plotting, plot, conspiracy, collusion, conniving, scheme, scheming, stratagem, machination, trick, double-dealing, underhandedness or subterfuge…'' The best novels give us the sense that evil lurks all around the principal character, or has infected and corrupted him or her. A good example is Bram Stoker'sDracula where the evil is intimated in effective ways rather than ever being spelled out to the reader.

7. Imagination. I think readers want to have their imaginations stretched, to be placed in situations they've never thought of or considered before. Consider The Life of Pi. We're given semi-plausible explanations of a series of circumstances that taken together are extremely unlikely. We believe in the story because it's presented to us in a very matter-of-fact way, a little a time so we're forced to admit to ourselves, Well, people do own zoos. Sometimes a zoo has to be transported halfway around the world, I suppose. Ship do sink on occasion. Tigers can get loose. The ending dares us to reconstruct the story in a new way, which counteracts our belief that we've built up in the story and causes us to feel in the end as though we don't know what we believe. It may be a bit over the top, but, without doubt, it definitely challenges us to stretch our imagination.