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

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.

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.