Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers (28 page)

Written in earthy, simple, earnest, transparent prose with plots that are driven by a “high concept” and a minimum of backstory or psychological introspection, they are peopled by characters whose burning emotions drive them to commit bold and decisive actions. The various motives that drive the characters to such passion are clear and precise and easy to sympathize with. Early on in each narrative, the hero seems to be in well over his (or her) head, which helps to stir the reader’s sense of pity and dread.

Within the first quarter of the story, though usually sooner,
some threat of danger inevitably occurs, and that danger grows in intensity as the story progresses, while simultaneously the relentless pressure of time increases the stress on the characters.

Each of these novels explores some controversial or divisive issue of its day, an issue that is rooted in some larger national clash that has existed for a long time and still continues to trouble the heart of American culture.

Bestsellers are novels of scope, which means the stakes are large, the cast of characters represents a broad demographic spectrum, and the small story told in the foreground is set against a sweeping backdrop of epic consequence.

Images of nature or wilderness that might be described as Edenic occur with regularity. Usually these wild places are sexually charged or they glow with an idealized sense of innocence and purity before they are violently transformed.

Bestsellers assume a didactic role and are full of facts and information. They teach the reader while they entertain. The facts might be as mundane as descriptions of the nuts and bolts of a submarine or the more subtle rituals and manners governing the social interactions of a small southern town or a pre–Civil War plantation. These novels all plunge us into exotic worlds and give us the road maps for how one would survive or flourish within them.

Each novel features some form of secret society. In true American fashion, the heroes of these novels penetrate and expose the workings of these clandestine groups and battle to neutralize their corrosive effects.

The heroes and heroines often move between rural landscapes and urban centers, a journey that dramatizes a clash between agrarian values and the cultural norms of the city.

Conventional religious beliefs and practices are often the
object of criticism in these novels. Commonsense or secular viewpoints are offered up as better alternatives.

These novels either celebrate or harshly critique some of America’s most cherished myths. For instance, the notion that the poorest and most disenfranchised among us can achieve prosperity, material wealth, and personal freedom is frequently glorified and just as frequently mocked as false.

Rebels and loners and mavericks play the leading parts in all of these novels. These outcasts struggle mightily against the pressures of conformity and conventionality, often risking their lives to do so.

Broken families are spotlighted in all the books, and their faults and eccentricities and neurotic group dynamics threaten the well-being of the heroes and heroines and force them to find remedies or methods of escape.

In all the novels, sexual incidents play pivotal roles. The story’s outcome is frequently dependent on the hero or heroine coping successfully with the result of some extreme sexual act.

B
ack when I first had the bright idea to teach a course in popular novels, I was also trying to publish a novel of my own. In fact, I’d written four of them by the time I taught that first bestseller class. Modeled on the experimental fiction I was teaching, my novels were populated by flamboyantly absurd characters and were rendered in surreal and disjointed narratives and lavish prose, and the narrators were all smug and self-conscious critics of many aspects of modern culture, including the novel form.

By the time I first taught
Gone with the Wind
, those four experimental novels had collected some fabulous rejection letters, but no publisher had seen fit to put any of them into print.

After that first eye-opening semester, while I was flush with newfound admiration for bestsellers, I decided to make
a radical course correction in my creative life. Instead of imitating those hip, high-culture novels I’d been teaching, I drew a deep breath and decided to take a crack at a crime thriller like the ones I’d been sinfully snacking on in private for years.

My semester of reading these popular books had been so liberating, the decision seemed inescapable. Two years after I completed that original bestseller class, my first crime thriller,
Under Cover of Daylight
, was published. It got some great reviews and sold several times what the average first novel sells, winding up on a number of bestseller lists. My metafiction days were officially over. I was now a crime novelist, and a bestselling one at that.

Of course, I give a lot of credit for this success to the techniques I absorbed in that first bestseller class. But there was something else I discovered in the long hours that I labored over that first thriller. Simply using the recurring features as a paint-by-numbers template wasn’t good enough. The early drafts of that novel were flat and dull—not exactly the characteristics you want in a thriller. It took a while, but I finally saw that by depending too heavily on the recurring features, using them as a formula, I had allowed my writing to become little more than a mechanical process.

“No tears for the writer,” said Robert Frost, “no tears for the reader.” From the beginning of my writing career, this had been an article of faith. All writing was personal. Without something emotionally at stake, the writing process is a sham, and the resulting work is likely to be nothing but a sterile exercise. It had to matter to me before it could matter to anyone else. This was the value I’d temporarily lost sight of as I struggled to employ the bestseller techniques.

So before I turned back to that early draft of
Under Cover of Daylight
, I spent a while trying to discover how these elements
might be linked to my personal concerns and passions. How did the story I was trying to tell dovetail with the elements at the core of so many commercially successful novels, and how were my own passions connected to the themes and approaches my class and I had spotted in those bestsellers of the past?

In my teens, when I started reading for pleasure, I found that books could teach me secrets about the real world that I could discover nowhere else. Over the years, as my study of literature became more academic and sophisticated, the objective of reading turned into an intellectual exercise that emphasized literary dissection and careful analysis of the storytelling process. In short, I lost my connection with one of the simple joys of reading—experiencing some new corner of our common world.

After that first bestseller class, I decided I needed to do more than just write beautiful sentences. I needed to know a few things that were worthy of communicating. This shift in my goals as a writer changed my creative process in a fundamental way. I began to place a greater value on the nonfiction aspects of fiction writing.

Today, each of my sixteen novels is invested with a high dose of factual information, which means I spend a month or two before starting each novel doing research in some area the novel will feature. My research has led me to some exotic places, from Borneo, where I investigated international animal smuggling, to the Gulf Stream, where I got firsthand
knowledge of big-game marlin fishing, and to police departments and newspaper offices and rape clinics in big-city hospitals.

That month or two of fact-finding, of acquainting myself with my chosen subject, is now one of the most fruitful periods in my writing cycle. It’s the time when I accumulate characters and settings as well as facts and start to test my enthusiasm for the dynamics of my chosen subject. It’s also the time when, much to my dismay, I sometimes realize I’ve taken up the wrong subject entirely and have to start fresh.

Since it takes me around a year to research and write a book, the nonfiction subject I choose has to meet a rigorous standard. It cannot be simply a subject that might have topical or popular interest to others. My chosen field of study must be sufficiently rich to sustain my interest for a long stretch—a year to explore, refine, and dig deep into one of my passions.

Another result of my bestseller studies is that Edenic imagery has become a mainstay of my work. Nothing gets me churning like watching the desecration of paradise. Of course, living in Florida makes such research easy. As a lover and student of the natural world, an outdoorsman since my youth, I’ve had an intimate education in the subject. For forty years this feature has been in my blood. Depicting the strangely beautiful flora and fauna, birds and fish, weather and light, and fragile landscapes of my adopted homeland also allows me to keep my poetic muscles toned. Describing the loss of the unspoiled landscape inevitably suggests other forms of innocence lost, a theme that the best crime novels regularly explore.

When my students and I spotted the recurring tensions between rural and urban values in those first bestsellers, it struck
a chord with me. I was born and raised in a small town in Kentucky but have lived all my adult life in America’s urban centers. The conflicts between those two Americas is very real to me, and as I came to discover, it’s fertile creative ground.

Most of my novels are set in Key Largo, where I lived for years—a small island community fifty miles south of Miami. The clash between the city life of Miami and the island life of Key Largo has come to play an organic role in most of my novels and expresses a deep-seated tension in my own heart. I am a country boy who has relocated to the city, and though I move about freely in both environments, I also regularly experience twinges of that modern malaise known as cognitive dissonance. That feeling of being a half step removed from the place I call home.

Many of the families in my novels are royally dysfunctional, another subject I come by naturally. I’ll spare you the particulars, but as Flannery O’Connor liked to say, I believe that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his life.

All my novels explore the complicated dynamics of fathers and sons and daughters and mothers and brothers and sisters. Those endless permutations of conflicts among loved ones continue to fuel my imagination. Even after using families as a centerpiece of the plots in seventeen novels, I’m still fascinated by the subject, all the varied ways that blood relations can turn deadly and the many heroic means that families use to heal even the deepest wounds.

Perhaps because I was raised in a religious home, my earliest career goal was to be a preacher. Though I must admit the attraction was based largely on my misperception that a preacher worked only one day a week. Seemed like a pretty good gig. The college I attended was Presbyterian in name
only, for as I came to discover, its curriculum was devoted largely to a questioning of conventional faith. My faith didn’t hold up long to such close inspection, and gradually I decided to swap a religious career for an academic one. The perks weren’t quite as good—three days a week of teaching instead of one day preaching—but it still looked better than five days slaving in an office. In any case, my formative years were marked by religious considerations. And in my fiction, the conflicts between secular and religious views of justice and the ways in which men of different moral orientations face down evil have become two of my most productive themes.

I could go on, but surely you get it. The missing ingredient, the magic elixir that breathed life into my first novel, was personal passion. Knowing the twelve elements was not enough. I had to figure out how each expressed a deeply rooted emotion of my own.

Without this one last ingredient, a novel might easily contain all the recurring features but still remain a lifeless pile of mush. So call it the yeast or call it the magic powder that catalyzes these inert ingredients—this last recurring feature is key.

It is the author’s honest passion that breathes life into Scarlett and Scout and Mitch and dear old Professor Langdon. It’s an earnest, wholehearted devotion to the material at hand. As sentimental as the story of Robert Kincaid and Francesca may be, it’s honest sentimentality. And sure, the girls of
Valley of the Dolls
are a dopey bunch, but they are as genuine as the three young women sharing the apartment down the hall. No amount of fakery would have produced the desired results.

While it may sound self-evident that writers should choose subjects that honestly stir their own hearts, I’ve been repeatedly
surprised to find in my best writing students a tendency to select story lines and characters they have little interest in themselves, solely because they think these ingredients will stir the passions of their teachers or potential editors.

The writers of these twelve bestsellers, however, did not make that mistake. They all tapped some wellspring of feeling in themselves. They believed deeply in Scout and Francesca and Michael Corleone and Sheriff Brody, and they felt pity and fear for their predicaments. And in so doing, they managed to stir the hearts of millions of readers.

T
here were several early readers of this book who provided invaluable, though often daunting, criticisms and guidance. Chief among them was my wife, Evelyn Crovo-Hall, whose suggestions were crucial in correcting some early wrong turns. At every stage Les Standiford, my colleague and friend, gave sage and practical advice about the focus of this book, helping to rescue it from academic stuffiness. I must give special thanks to John Unsworth, dean and professor of library and information science at the University of Illinois, who kindly posted his extensive website describing his bestseller class at the University of Virginia. This site proved to be an invaluable tool for my own teaching and research over the years. Chuck Elkins, professor emeritus at Florida International University, read an early draft of the manuscript and
provided critical and incisive suggestions that greatly improved the final product. David Gonzalez, who wrote the plot summaries at the end of this book, was also a helpful sounding board as the book was taking shape. Without the inspired editing and excellent judgment of Millicent Bennett and Kate Medina, I would never have found the real book hiding inside the early drafts.