How to write a bestseller

It is will, not greed, that makes you write a bestseller

Tony Parsons

15 December 2007

Your heart must be in it

When Ernest Hemingway met Harold Robbins, the grand old man of American literature asked the alpha male of the bestseller list why he wrote. ‘Wealth,’ said Harold Robbins. ‘And I got it.’ Of all the lies that Harold Robbins told in his life — the fantasy most often repeated as fact is that his first wife was a Chinese dancer who died of a parrot bite — this was the most outrageous.

Harold Robbins — who liked to boast that he was the only author ‘with his own goddamn yacht’ — did not write for money. Nobody on the bestseller list writes for money. The people who write for money never make it to the bestseller list.

Harold Robbins’s remains are in the Palm Springs Mortuary and Mausoleum, and they rest in an urn made in the form of one of his fat, feisty blockbusters. That is not the act of a man with contempt for either his readers or his craft. Robbins wrote the best books he could, and he wrote them because he had to.

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Patoba Ipririm

December 12th, 2007 5:40pm Report this comment

I must confess, I decided to read this article for a laugh. I assumed Mr Parsons would produce some self-righteous rant to justify his chosen literary path. Turns out it's actually one of the best articles about writing I've ever come across. I copied the third from end para into a file for future inspiration. Bravo Tony! I might even read one of your novels now.

Ray

December 19th, 2007 8:54am Report this comment

Sadly, so many first time authors are being frozen out of the literary world by agents and publishers who prefer to either milk the existing big names, or to hype up ghost-written tosh penned by barely-literate 'celebrities'. It's nigh on impossible to get anyone to even look at your work nowadays unless your name is Beckham, Goody or Madonna.

Jonathan E

January 9th, 2008 1:21pm Report this comment

For my money Forsyth did actually observe the rules of the airport novel formula. The characters play for very high stakes, the hero is sexually successful, there is a story point on every single page to keep you turning them. And the ending was a mystery, because although you know de Gaulle didn't die, you cannot see how Forsyth's assassin can possibly fail, so fearsomely efficient is he. It is that, I think, that drives you on to his ending. It's not that you don't know what will happen - you do; it's that you don't see how it possibly can happen, and you have to finish the book to find out.

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