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

For every novelist in the world, the money is always less than you might think or more than you could imagine. Dan Brown read Sidney Sheldon’s The Doomsday Conspiracy while on holiday in Tahiti in 1994 and was convinced he could do better, yet his first three novels had print runs of fewer than 10,000 copies. Assuming those books took about 12 months to write, that means that for a very long time Dan Brown’s fiction earned him less than the minimum wage. But when he wrote The Da Vinci Code and sold 60 million copies, the flop backlist was pulled out of the remainder rack and quickly annexed to the bestseller list. Last year Brown’s income was estimated at $76.5 million.

An act of will from somewhere real — even if you need the money, even if you are desperate for the loot, even if you are on your uppers — still has to be done with fire in your belly and an idea that wakes you in the middle of the night. John Grisham, the embodiment of the airport novelist, took three years to write his first book, A Time To Kill, after witnessing the harrowing testimony of a 12-year-old rape victim. Grisham’s legal thrillers make him over £10 million per annum, but it began with that little girl in the De Soto County Courthouse in Mississippi, and for Grisham it had absolutely nothing to do with light entertainment.

They say write about what you know but that’s not quite it. J.K. Rowling has no particular interest in the occult. ‘I believe in God, not magic,’ she says. Yet Harry Potter has made Rowling £7 billion, and introduced a generation of children to the joys of the printed word.

The first Harry Potter book was famously written by hand in an Edinburgh café when Rowling had walked around for long enough to get her baby daughter to nod off. Those were hard times. Rowling was not long divorced, she had just seen her mother die and she was an unemployed single parent living on benefits. How do you find the time and energy to write a book with all that stacked against you? Because Harry Potter fed some profound need in Rowling’s soul, perhaps a need for — what? Escape? Transcendence? Innocence? Old certainties? Do not write about what you know — write about the things that will not let you go.

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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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