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

Robbins, although almost completely forgotten today, sold 750 million books and for decades was the bestselling novelist on the planet. He wrote a lot of trash, but he also wrote some cracking yarns. And let no one doubt that Robbins was as serious about The Carpetbaggers and The Adventurers as Hemingway was about The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms.

That is what people don’t get about the bestseller list. Everyone on it is sincere. ‘You should write one of those chick-lit books,’ I have heard numerous idiot boyfriends tell their girlfriends over the years. ‘You would make a mint.’

But Bridget Jones was not written that way. Bridget Jones came from somewhere deep inside Helen Fielding, and its genius was that it wrapped up the fears and aspirations of a generation of women — women worried about never becoming mothers, women worried that they were past their sell-by date, women worried about how many more inappropriate men they would have to sleep with before Mr Good Enough came along — and it struck a chord in women all over the world.

The books that Harold Robbins wrote for money are the books that nobody ever read. Anything that gets on to the bestseller list deserves to be there. And even if it is not your cup of Darjeeling, never doubt that the author of The Da Vinci Code is as serious in his intent as the author of Atonement.

Every bestseller is an act of will from somewhere real. A bestseller is organic. Often it is an idea — an incident, a hunch, a headline — that will just not let you go. In 1964 a journalist called Peter Benchley read about a fisherman called Frank Mundus catching a 4,550-pound great white shark off Long Island. But it was ten years before Benchley published Jaws.

Erich Segal knocked about Hollywood doing well-paid but anonymous work such as the screenplay for the Beatles cartoon Yellow Submarine. Segal had a screenplay about a Harvard frat boy falling in love with a Radcliffe brainbox. Nobody wanted to know. His agent told him to bang it out as a novel. Love Story sold 21 million copies and — naturally — got turned into a Hollywood movie.

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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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