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Wednesday 9 July 2008

How to write a bestseller

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

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.

More articles from: Tony Parsons | this section

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