Notes from Liam’s Lair
12 Topics Common to Top Seller Manuscripts
1. An Offer You Can’t Refuse
2. Hot Buttons
3. The Big Picture
4. The Golden Country
5. Nothing but the Facts, Ma’am
6. Secret Societies
7. Bumpkins versus Slickers
8. God is Great … or is He?
9. American Dream/American Nightmare
10. A Dozen Mavericks
11. Fractured Families
12. The Juicy Parts
Formula:
- Popular novels appeal unapologetically to the baser emotions
Use hot-Button social issue
Use intriguing high-concept premise
Enhance the Speed
Use pressure of time
Unrelenting suspense
Favor action over introspection
Matters of heart dominate
Protagonists passionate in their devotion
Passion grows hotter as premise grows more complex and challenges become more difficult
● An Offer You Can’t Refuse
Magnetic Resonance
- All the men and women in these novels are men and women of deep conviction and fervent, stubborn resolve, capable of passions that rise well beyond the normal range of human experience.
- find the strength within themselves to become men of action as the danger before them erupts. In the end, this clarity and intensity of purpose, and the decisive actions these men and women undertake, differentiates the main characters of bestsellers from those thoughtful, inward Hamlet types.
- A connection between the activity levels in the brain and those novels that require the reader to decipher the secret thoughts and motives of their central characters.
- Protagonists share a high level of emotional intensity that results in gutsy and surprising deeds.
- Not one of these protagonists sits idly on the sidelines pondering or lights endless matches to watch them burn while stewing about the great issues of the universe. There’s nary a navel that gets gazed upon. Our heroes and heroines act – decisively.
- They are all pushed to their emotional breaking point – and beyond – and forced to stay on the outer limits of what they can endure for page after page.
Matters of the Heart
- The fierce loyalty readers feel for certain characters grows out of a shared connection for the character’s emotional journey. A reader has to understand and sympathize with driving force behind the character’s actions – i.e. – we start to care.
- What matters most to Scarlett is something that matters greatly to many of us
- It is the worthiness of Scarlett’s love for Tara that makes a reader’s fierce loyalty to her possible
- In The Dead Zone, Jonny’s fall is everyone’s fall – horrors we can identify with
- Pity and fear – Aristotle said – are the great emotional engines for tragedy – each of our novels are powered by that engine
- In Peyton Place, we pity her naiveté and fear for her safety as she navigates that treacherous town
- In Valley of the Dolls, her tragic fall is all the more painful to watch because she seemed to be doing nearly everything right
- We pity and fear for her certain loss of innocence - worse than we could ever have imagined
- So when Michael Corleone crosses the fateful line and commits his first act of violence, we cringe. Michael isn’t going to be able to break free after all. Michael, like his father, has taken this step to protect his family’s survival, a goal most of us would consider worthy, and as this becomes increasingly clear, our emotional bond with him solidifies again.
- The task before him appears so daunting as to be nearly impossible. We can’t imagine what strengths of character he will summon to survive the savagery and duplicity of an all-out Mafia war
- The emotional dynamics of these twelve bestsellers are similar. A character’s intense commitment to his or her cause – ultimately a goal many of us find worthy and important.
- Bestsellers have a primal aim – to stir the reader/s heart and to make us forge a powerful emotional bond with a fictional character that is – more often than not – composed of one part pity and one part fear
Mechanics of Speed
- By streamlining the narratives and minimizing backstory, the novels keep the reader’s eye on the page
A Serious Bump
-Arrhythmia gradually accelerates
- Half of the biggest bestsellers of all time are novels of suspense. The techniques are remarkably similar.
- In To Kill a Mockingbird, it would be difficult to give the novel its moral heft to capture our attention without the load-bearing underpinning of the suspenseful story
- In The Firm, the reader is privy to facts that Mitch and Abby are not – when it’s working well, we can create increased sympathy in the reader’s heart for the unsuspecting hero
The Big Clock
- Medieval and modern human usefulness was measured by the merciless heartbeat of a machine. Modern man has come to react to the pressures of time.
- Without this ever-moving second hand constantly raising the anxiety level, all the romantic skirmishes might easily become tedious and harebrained
- find an ingenious way to up the ante by forcing your characters to beat the clock
● Hot Buttons
When a subject ceases to be an object of controversy, it ceases to become an object of interest
- Select an issue that makes American’s blood boil, use the loaded language on that subject, idealize one position and demonize the other
For a hot button to have impact, it must be about a large, deep-seated unresolved conflict in
the national psyche
- Film Critic Molly Haskell said about Scarlet: You must both love her and hate her
- Give a photo negative of the American success story
- Hit a cultural nerve that is already raw
- Jaws: Police want to protect the people from the shark, but city officials want tourist money
- Use News that always stays news
- National secrets
- Make both sides of an argument both bad and good: Greed is bad, but greed can also be good
- Nuclear family: Single woman raising child alone
- Bridges of Madison County: Stimulate fond memories over loves lost and paths not taken
against righteous sensibilities against infidelity
● The Big Picture
Colossal characters doing magnificent things on a sweeping stage
- Men and women work out their destinies within large groups and communities rather than alone
- American bestsellers depict the broad affairs and actions of men, their customs, their beliefs, placing them on expansive historical or social stages
- There is a seesaw effect between action and characterization. When one goes up, the other goes down
- Wide angled scope has been a feature of the most popular and some of the most grudgingly respected novels
- Set their characters against backdrops of enormous scale and consequences
- A small story told against a sweeping backdrop occurs repeatedly
- Readers are carried away by big stories of importance set on a large stage that feature a large assortment of social classes
- Today, the most commercially successful American novels appeal to the middle class and focus on the same issues: social mobility; racial, gender and class fairness; the struggles and triumphs of the poor set alongside the similar struggles of the powerful
- Readers want to gorge on big, bustling, manifest destiny. We want our books to measure up to our own supersized sense of what matters most. What they lack in emotional intensity the make up for in scale. They want ordinary American folks from humble roots who have answered some resounding call and risen above their limitations to impossible heights.
● The Golden Country
America as paradise is a key motif in the twelve bestsellers
- Images of a lost Eden, for all their beauty, are both ephemeral and dangerous and must be mastered
- Americans have a powerful hankering for stories grounded in the earth irself
- A land of second chances, fresh beginnings in virginal wilderness
- For Americans, nature is not just some sublime mountain peak awash in a misty glow, it is also the bronco that needs breaking, the field that needs tree stumps cleared, or a mountain range blocking westward expansion that must be conquered. It is the dense forest which hides savages, grizzlies, rattlesnakes and other unfriendly critters.
- The Golden Country is a blend of place and time: either some splendid natural location, some wild or secret place that forms the backdrop for an innocent, frequently sensuous idyll, or else a time before it got so complicated, before the turmoil, the heartbreak and the deadened senses. It’s a nostalgic, wistful zone, appealing perhaps to some sense of regret and longing, a vague sense that something crucial slipped away when we weren’t looking, our childhood, our dreams, our purity, our sexual innocence, our national identity.
- We must remember: in every Eden, there is always a snake
● Just the Facts, Ma’am
The didactic function is as old as the novel
- The social arrangements, class distinctions, and codes of behavior, are the central topics in male-dominated novels
- The other form of information bestsellers frequently contain is the sort of factualism that today we associate with nonfiction
- Readers love to be taken somewhere they’ve never been before by an authority on that alien subculture
- Fact is one thing, truth quite another
- In large part, people read to improve themselves or further their education, to peer into secret places not open to them otherwise. There is an ingrained pragmatism in our culture, a desire to improve themselves.
- There is an importance of the Protestant work ethic in shaping our ideas
- They want to be instructed and informed, to emerge from the novel with a wider understanding of some grand or esoteric subject matter
● Secret Societies
A paranoid sensibility seems to be a staple of American culture
- Pitting Them against Us seems to be one of the sure-fire ways to incite an audience, the threat of the power of other groups that feed on hatred and prejudice are a threat to our way of life
- Bestselling novels mine this craving by regularly sliding aside the curtain and exposing their secrets
- A secret society is any group that, for one reason or another, has isolated itself from the rest of the world by creating a collection of rules, rites, sacraments and covert behaviors that reinforces its separation from the larger population. This group is exclusive, usually powerful in some domain, with its own initiation rituals and its own sense of justice and duty.
- The kind of exclusivity we normally find in novels is rarely a function of class status alone, but rather an earned seniority
- A rise from poverty to a position of great influence is typical of novels
- The blue-collar ethos repeats regularly in novels
- American readers are drawn to novels of secret societies for a simple reason: they want to comprehend the silent forces that shape our destiny. We have a natural suspicion of institutions. We’re distrustful of organizations that lack transparency and conduct their rituals behind closed doors.
● Bumpkins versus Slickers
The same mythic paradigm forms the bone structure underlying most popular fiction: send their heroes back and forth between the city and the countryside
- explores the clash between city values and country ones, described as a relentless yearning to find the true American home
- a conflict between urban and rural American values
- Kincaid’s ruthlessness is a manifestation of a familiar type, a peripatetic American. Our westward-ho pioneer ancestors were the sons and daughters of the hearty sould who braved the Atlantic to find a new home. It’s as though we’ve been bioengineering our culture for the last three centuries, selecting for a wandering gene. But for every incurable rover, there seems to be another American who decided he’d had enough rambling, unsaddled his team of oxen, and staked his claim to a piece of land and stayed put. The clash between these two prototypes is a recurring theme in our popular fiction.
- The book “A Nation of Strangers” warns the the growing American rootlessness was resulting in “a society coming apart at the seams.”
- At times, we American glamorize city life and demonize the heartland. But when it suits our purposes, we’re happy to flip the script to the exact opposite. There seems to be no middle way for us.
- While the city is a place of opportunity, it is also a place of unspeakable corruption and moral turpitude
- Country boys go to the city to gain wealth, but city boys go to the country for moral regeneration. While we all know these labels are bogus, they are so ingrained in our sense of national identity that we reflexively embrace them even as we discount their accuracy.
- Urban life is portrayed as the mythic proving ground.
- Money is in the city. Values are in the country.
- We honor our immigrant past. It has shaped our psyche, our mythology and our metaphors
- Popular art is often portrayed as the glue that holds us together. In that regard, popular fiction belies that notion, for bestselling novels argue both sides
● God is Great … or is He?
Man is a religious animal. However, the twelve bestsellers consistently critique orthodox religious practice and the dangers of zealotry
- Novels that place a heavy emphasis on religious themes certainly attract readers who might otherwise avoid novels
- A novel needs to capture the attention of a large number of infrequent book buyers, and the religiously inclined are a common audience
- Almost all the national bestsellers have a strong religious ingredient, with skepticism being the shared religious stance
- The focus is on the worldly consequences of religious practice rather then the spiritual beliefs. In a word, the morality of bestsellers is rooted in a vision of culture known as secularism
- The American inclination is to raise doubts about religious doctrine
- Bigotry and false piety often march together under the banner of Christianity
- The religious stance most bestsellers adopt is a narrow range between doubter and agnostic
- “God’s silence drives him nuts. Why won’t He reveal Himself?”
● American Dream/Nightmare
Americans delight in reenactments of our national myths. The rise from humble roots to become rich and powerful. A character struggling against injustice and, finally, triumphing over oppression. And we are also grimly fascinated by the flip side of these stories.
- The image of down and out ragamuffins who, through sweat and labor, determination, and a hard-nosed sense of justice, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and achieved some level of wealth and social success.
- At the same time, Americans seem to take a grim satisfaction in watching the opposite pattern unfold. We love with equal fervor to see our national myths foiled.
- If any single creed serves as the foundation of our national sense of self, it’s the promise of social mobility. That hard work and fair play will be rewarded. Conversely, it all too possible for stardom to turn into a hellish fall from grace.
- In these bestsellers there is a right way and a wrong way to attain the American dream.
- The dark side of the American dream is an equal and opposite force in nearly all of these mega-bestsellers.
- In “the Dead Zone,” the linked destinies of John Smith and Greg Stillson is a fitting metaphor for the way the American dream and the American nightmare intertwine. John Smith sacrifices his own life to spare the world the cataclysm of Stillson’s presidency. The good boy neutralizes the bad.
- The American belief in the “rags to riches” possibilities of our nation is an honorable and compelling pillar of our national identity. On the other hand, there are those who regularly exploit these worthy dreams.
● A Dozen Mavericks
The heroes and heroines of our twelve bestsellers are all rebels, loners, misfits or mavericks. They don’t fit it, and that’s one of the reasons we love them so much.
- The recurring hero of many American novels is “placed outside the structure of civilization and therefore represents the force of physical nature, amoral or ruthless, yet with a sense of power, and often leadership, that society has impoverished itself by rejecting – he’s a maverick.
- In our popular culture, this term has a venerable status.
- The tension between mavericks and conventionalists operates at the core of bestsellers.
- Social scientists who chart such things have long been fascinated with the American tendency to tout individualism in one decade, then conformity in the next – reliable mood swings that seem to occur every ten years or so.
- A renegade is one who abandons one set of beliefs for another. A maverick rejects the status quo. A maverick is fully independent from the herd.
- In “The Da Vinci Code,” Langdon just barely gets by, and that parts of the charm of this hero subcategory.
- Americans like to view themselves as humble and self-effacing, able to make do with what they’ve got, using Yankee ingenuity.
- Bookish types appear with regular frequency in bestselling novels. Book readers are by nature oddballs, flakey loners – a bit in the maverick side.
● Fractured Families
In each of our bestsellers, a member of a broken family finds an ingenuous way to transcend hie or her crazy status.
- There is an emphasis placed on the emotional struggles characters experience within the family structure.
- Mass culture looks to popular novels for good counsel and insight into affairs of the heart.
- The “Stress Score” makes a handy checklist of dramatic situations that might find their way into almost any novel.
- Family tensions and parental legacies underpin the events in all these bestsellers. Missing fathers, mothers or wives propel most of these characters to greater achievements.
● The Juicy Parts
May West – When I’m good, I’m very, very good, but when I’m bad, I’m better.
- Sex sells, they say. And they’re right.
- Books about sex are second in sales only to historical novels and are about as frequent as spies and intrigue (American Bestsellers: A Readers Guide to Popular Fiction)
- One key sexual encounter, no matter how slight, inevitably plays a decisive role in the outcome of the plot and the transformation of the main character.
- More often than not, bestsellers reenact one of America’s most dramatic social movements, yje struggle of women for empowerment, equality and independence.
- For the two young people, sex was not an opening of a door to the future, but the closing of the door to the past. It reminds them of what they’d lost and what they might have had if fate had been kinder.
- Why does a single sexual act play such a pivotal role in many bestsellers? It may have something to do with our deeply rooted national ambivalence about sex and adultery.
- At the very least, we can say that Americans are deeply conflicted about sex.
- Bestselling novels often channel the Biblical story of Eden: Once the snake has done its sneaky job, a new world dawns.
- Puritanism is alive and well in mainstream America. Many of us, despite a private devotion to the multibillion dollar business of pornography, are still just a short distance away from our book burning ancestors
- What’s unique about the way sexuality is handled in the blockbusters is the descriptive language is euphemistic and chaste, but it still plays a pivotal role in the outcomes of these stories.