7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER

Revised and Expanded Edition

Tam Mossman

Copyright © 2011 Leah C. Mossman

ISBN 978-1-61434-475-9

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

Printed in the United States of America.

BookLocker.com, Inc. 2011

First Edition Contents

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INTRODUCTION - How Books Go Far with No P.R...... 1

STRATEGY # 1 - The Paranoia Formula ...... 23

STRATEGY # 2 - Best Seats in the House ...... 57

STRATEGY # 3 - Gifted Underdogs ...... 91

STRATEGY # 4 - A Kind and Trusty Guide ...... 135

STRATEGY # 5 - Every Fact Tells a Story ...... 185

STRATEGY # 6 - The Slope of Curiosity ...... 207

STRATEGY # 7 - Progress, Wisdom, Evolution ...... 257

STRATEGY # 7.625 – The One to Keep in Mind ...... 285

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iii

INTRODUCTION How Books Go Far with No P.R.

I had thought that you were going to be interested in literature and the value of the word, and not all this being so obsessed with money. —HARRY EVANS, as President of Random House [1]

WRITING A HIT NOVEL OR NON-FICTION BEST-SELLER is one of the few ways you can become a millionaire, quickly and legally. Nor is there any glass ceiling: A glance at a recent hardcover best-seller list reveals that more than half the novels were written by women. If you hope for a sale to a major Hollywood studio, six- figure paperback floor bid, and translations into foreign languages, chances are startlingly good that you’ll score a home run during your first time at bat. Among the many examples: Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (1955), Bel Kaufman’s Up the Down Staircase (1964), Lynn V. Andrews’s Medicine Woman (1978), John Gray’s Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus (1992), John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994) and Nicholas Evans’s The Horse Whisperer (1995). Each of these best-sellers was the author’s very first book. In 1997, this trend became hard to ignore when Cold Mountain (the year before, #1 on the New York Times’s fiction best-seller list) won the National Book Award, and Angela’s Ashes (1999, fresh from the Times’s #1 non-fiction slot) took home the Pulitzer Prize. Neither author had published a book before! And in 2002, the Pulitzer went to Three Junes, yet another first novel of that same year. [2]

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What is a Best-Seller, Anyway?

Whenever a book surfaces on some local best-seller list compiled by a newspaper like the Philadelphia Inquirer or the Miami Herald, its publisher can trumpet it as a best-seller. But before that title can attract the interest of book clubs, mass- market reprinters, foreign publishers and Hollywood, it must show up on a coast-to-coast radar screen—preferably the one compiled each week by the New York Times Book Review (or the TBR for short, as editors and publishers call it). Some books (like those “Instant” paperbacks that Bantam used to publish) spike onto the national lists by exploiting a breaking news story. A year later, they’re typically out of print. For example, O.J. Simpson’s I Want to Tell You (1995) sold briskly, buoyed by the buzz over his upcoming murder trial. Then sales dwindled—fast! After a civil jury found O.J. guilty of “wrongful death” in the Brown/Goldman double murder, Los Angeles bookstores put copies of I Want to Tell You (originally published at $17.95) on remainder—for 99 cents each. To call that book a best-seller is like saying that a softball is a bird, simply because it flies through the air. Baseballs fall to earth; birds remain aloft. To qualify for my definition of best-seller, a book must soar onto the TBR’s list and stay there, month after month—purely under its own steam. With no print or radio ads. With no cover blurb, endorsement, or introduction by a literary superstar. Without the author appearing on talk shows, or having to sign copies in bookstores coast to coast. Every publisher hopes for a celebrity slam-dunk like Jerry Seinfeld’s SeinLanguage (1993) or Ellen DeGeneres’s My Point . . . and I Do Have One (1995). Sooner or later, even a #1 best-seller must slide off the list. But in the long run, the

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Royalty Race is not to the swiftest. Some few books remain in print, selling several thousand copies a year—earning their lucky authors ongoing royalties, endlessly and effortlessly. Steady, dependable backlist titles like Gone with the Wind (never out of print since 1936), Atlas Shrugged (since 1957) and Mastering the Art of French Cooking (since 1961) give publishers found money to gamble on new, unproven manuscripts—like yours! Back in 1996, Independence Day played in movie theaters for more than four months. During that summer, other films took turns at being #1 at the box office and managed to gross more ticket sales in any given weekend. But ID4 drew repeat audiences who paid to see it again and again—so that over those same months, it earned far more than any other #1 hit film. In Hollywood lingo, such a picture “has legs.” All enduring best-sellers have legs too—and thus, will reward a closer look at their unique anatomy.

Dizzy Heights and Lower Depths

You can compare the literary landscape to a mountain range. High up on Parnassus’s heady summit sit a few sharp authors who provide us with dazzling views and peak experiences. From there, it’s downhill all the way. The slopes and foothills are thick with amateurs. The fruits of their labors—unripe, unfocused, wordy—constitute the slush pile, that endless flood of unsolicited (or “over the transom”) submissions that every publisher receives. A beginning editorial trainee in James Michener’s The Novel (1991) is warned that “only one manuscript in the nine hundred that come in over the transom ever becomes a book.”

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[3] That statistic is wildly generous! Over 18 years, as an editor at three different publishing houses, I thought myself lucky to find one publishable submission out of two or three thousand. Of the three publishing houses I worked for, each received at least 20 unsolicited submissions a day. That’s not counting the glop from second-tier literary agents. Digging into a typical week’s slush, what would you find? Roughly 40% of the submissions would be fiction, much of it experimental. Most of the novels were exactly as blah as their titles suggested (actual example: In the Middle Distance). In the 60% non-fiction portion, titles often alerted the reviewer (heck, anybody!) that these projects would be impossible to market. More true-life examples: A Field Guide to Dog Turds (humor) and How to Spot a Drug Addict (dead serious). Lots of home-brewed theology. How can we deduce that God frowns on nuclear war? Because the word abomination begins with “A-bom[b].” Always a few aimless private journals, scribbled at the dictation of inner demons. One woman took her previous rejection from Random House a little too personally. Using Day-Glo markers, she filled a notebook with murderous fantasies about Bennett Cerf—unaware that the man had been dead for years. For some reason, she enclosed a color photo of herself wearing only a feather boa, inscribed “For you, Mr. Cerf.” No writer’s too young to dream: One 13-year-old girl sent in a “complete selection” of her poetry, assertively titled Samantha Trent: The Early Works. Another kid offered us a 300-page novel about an ancient Roman legion. Typical dialogue: “I come not to give you advice, but my plan.” As actor/rapper Ice Cube says, growing older means becoming “a little wiser about how the world works.” [4] Yet

4 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER many adult amateurs get rejected because they still haven’t immersed themselves in their chosen topic. Back when postage was cheaper, we sent unsolicited authors a laundry list of various reasons why we’d turned them down. The one most often checked was, “Your topic requires professional credentials.” (Our office satirist offered up other excuses like, “We couldn’t penetrate the layers of Bubble Wrap enclosing your manuscript,” and “Never claim to have cured a disease you still can’t spell.”) One woman argued that cheating boyfriends should have molten lead funneled into their skulls. Her manuscript earned a pre-printed rejection slip: “Your proposal doesn’t seem right for us at this time.”

Slush Pile Lesson #1: By Itself, Sex Doesn’t Sell

Lester was a crusty old editor who always wore a three- piece suit. One morning, parked on his desk was a manuscript hand-delivered to our front desk. Author was Stanley Fisher, the fast-talking leader of the Middle of Silence Gallery, a Lower East Side commune where private romances were forbidden: Every man had to sleep with every woman who asked him, and vice versa. Stanley’s screed was an anthologized diary of sorts—first-person testimonials from some two dozen commune members, most of them women who ooh’d and ahh’d over Stanley’s prowess. Long before the morning coffee wagon came by, Lester had tucked the manuscript back in its box and routed it back to the mailroom. As soon as Stanley read the bad news, he telephoned Lester in hostile amazement: “Obviously, you don’t like sex!” “I certainly do,” Lester replied.

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“Then how can you say my book is boring?” “I never said your book was boring,” Lester retorted. “I’m saying I was bored.” [5] Slush-pile authors tend to gaze inward, not outward at the world with all its fascinations. These beginners seldom touch on—much less aim for—any widespread passion or universal instinct. So back go their manuscripts, along with some pre-printed message like “Other houses have different policies. We wish you the best of luck in placing your work elsewhere.” Like this one, rejection sips are inscrutably vague— deliberately, so as not to ignite any ongoing debates. As an Assistant Editor, still new to the profession, I opened a fat Manila envelope from an author I’ll call Roger. “My novel, Leather Chaps, is a book you can publish with no risk!” his cover letter insisted. I scanned his three sample chapters: Thunder over the mesa, skittish horses. Lonesome cowpoke named Luke in a dingy saloon. Mark, a tall dark stranger dressed all in leather, introduces himself: “Ah’m no rustler, just a hustler.” “Not a project we could handle successfully,” I wrote back. “We do very little fiction and have no experience publishing Westerns.” A week later, in came an even thicker Manila envelope with more Leather Chaps chapters. “I fear you’ve misjudged the market for my story,” Roger wrote. “This isn’t another Louis Lamour potboiler. Read on. I’m sure you’ll agree.” I sure did. Mark knocked back a few more whiskies in that dingy saloon, then confessed he had a yen for Luke. Rather than punch Mark’s teeth out, Luke tied him to a hitching post behind the saloon, and performed some fancy tricks he’d learned back in the big city.

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I mailed back Leather Chaps, repeating my original objections. Back came Roger’s reply, via Express Mail: “Because I believe so strongly in my novel, I’ve saved enough to pay for its typesetting and printing. I can also provide pen-and-ink illustrations, at no expense. This would eliminate any risk to you.” Actually, it would. The president of our company had bragged to a reporter what a shame it was that years back, he was never offered Valley of the Dolls (1966). He’d have been proud to turn it down as pornographic trash! “Not right for our list. . .” derives its power from being seamless, impenetrable, leaving nothing for insistent writers to dispute. Since I’d yet to learn that all-purpose mumble, my reply to Roger was much too helpful: “We’re not a vanity publisher and don’t accept subsidies from our authors. Nor can I estimate how many copies Leather Chaps would sell to justify a first printing.” But Roger thought he could. “I can send autographed copies to all the members of my class at the Theological Seminary.” This time I didn’t write back, and our correspondence ground to a halt.

Nowadays, publishers won’t even glance at any material they haven’t asked to see. Even if the senders include a self- addressed stamped envelope, their queries are usually ignored and tossed out. More than just hopes and dreams are dashed. These hapless writers have squandered months, often years they could have spent more profitably. Yet many published authors have the same problem! Again and again, best-selling authors enjoy a first-time success, only to slide sadly, steadily downhill. When Françoise Sagan was only a teenager, her first book, Bonjour Tristesse (“Hello,

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Sadness,” 1955) became an international best-seller. None of her later, world-weary novels enjoyed equal sales. Good editors must keep their standards sharp. After I’d slogged through half-baked prose all day long, too much of it started to look downright promising! So to boost my literary immune system, I spent my evenings with certified best-sellers like Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man (1959), Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973), Brett Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero (1985), Tamara Janowitz’s Slaves of New York (1986), and Michael Chabon’s Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988)—first books, every one—and durable delights like John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), written early in their authors’ careers. Then I watched, baffled, as my favorite authors coughed up puny, disappointing books that quickly appeared on tables labeled PUBLISHER’S OVERSTOCK. F. Scott Fitzgerald mourned that there are no second acts in American fiction. Ensuing decades have proved him right. After the huge success of Peyton Place (1956), Grace Metalious’ first book, she wrote The Tight, White Collar (1960)—soon out of print. After Louis Gould’s Such Good Friends (1970) became a movie, her novels steadily dwindled in sales. [6] With Bright Lights, Big City (1984), Jay McInerney became an instant celebrity. He went on to publish Ransom (1985), Story of My Life (1988), and Brightness Falls (1992). All three had briskly funny, memorable scenes. All three were duds. How come? In 1970, I signed up a manuscript that 21 publishers (including my former boss!) had rejected. W.C. Fields & Me startled us all by erupting into a national best-seller. In 1977, I

8 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER won the lottery again, with The Amityville Horror. Our first clue of its appeal came when secretaries began photocopying the manuscript to read at home. Both books had features in common. Both were co- authored. Both were true stories. I was able to contract each for an advance of only $5,000. Both received generous offers from paperback reprint houses. Both were adapted into films starring Rod Steiger. Encouraged by these two successes (but with no real idea of why they’d sold so well), I signed up other projects that looked like sure winners, only to see them all fail—badly! That forced me to wonder: Why do unknown authors keep bobbling to the top of the TBR’s best-seller list? Why can’t more of them coax loyal readers back for second helpings? And above all, the bottom-line questions that keep editors awake at night: Why do most books fail to sell? And why do s few stay in print for years, often long after their authors are dead, with no promotion or advertising? This phenomenon is hardly new. In How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), Dale Carnegie wrote that since 1900, American publishing houses had printed more than 200,000 different titles: “Most . . . were deadly dull, and many were financial failures. The president of one of the largest publishing houses confessed to me that his company, after 75 years of publishing experience, still lost money on seven out of every eight books it published.” [7] Over the past 110 years, hasn’t market research improved the situation? Not by much. In any publisher’s catalog, at least half of those new titles never earn back their advances. The average hardcover now bears a cover price of at least $21.95. Even well-heeled buyers are balking.

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Recently a friend of mine visited a Barnes & Noble near Seattle. Down the aisle was a famous software mogul, buying the one of the last, thickest Harry Potter books in hardcover for his son. Even though his company’s stock price was gyrating at the time, his net worth was comfortably in the hundreds of millions. Upon seeing the book’s cover price, he gasped. “Whoa, this is expensive!” More and more readers hold out for a lower-priced paperback edition, or visit their local library where they can check out best-sellers for nothing. Acknowledging this trend, publishers—who used to wait at least one calendar year before issuing a paperback that would “compete” with cloth sales— now issue their own Trade paperback editions only seven to eight months on the heels of the cloth edition. Meanwhile, national bookstore chains (called “jobbers” in the trade) woo customers with discounts of up to 33% off list price. Yet they still wind up returning thousands of unsold copies to publishers’ warehouses—for full credit! That’s one reason why publishers view hand-held reading devices like Kindle as a mixed blessing. Every digital copy downloaded is a copy sold, and none are sitting idle in a warehouse, where they get taxed as unsold inventory. Desperate to improve the odds that a new title will appeal to wide enough readers, publishers resort to one of two game plans: They either play it safe, or they go hog wild.

Shooting Fish in Narrow Barrels

Romance novels issued as softcover originals, art books, biographies, histories, and other special-interest titles turn a modest profit by aiming at a dependable niche readership. It’s a tradeoff. In exchange for near-guaranteed sales of perhaps

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10,000 copies, their publisher abandons all hope of a widespread popular hit. Books that follow this straight and narrow path are the literary equivalents of a smart bomb. The better to reach their target audience, they bear numbingly accurate titles like The History of the Barometer, and Where to Watch Birds in Portugal and Spain, and Raising Milk Goats the Modern Way (all actual titles, published back in 1997).

Shooting the Moon

Feeling confident of an upcoming winner, publishers often pull out all the stops. But there aren’t too many stops to pull! Print advertising is expensive and not very effective— except with those special-interest and self-help books, whose sales points can be summed up in two or three lines of copy. After Jane Roberts had earned a broad readership with Seth Speaks (1972), Prentice-Hall gave her later books a full- page ad in the TBR. But her sales didn’t improve one bit! Sending authors on book tours is an even more costly risk. Too often, the local media don’t give the appearance any coverage, so unless authors are already popular, their bookstore signings fail to draw a crowd. For first-time authors, existing visibility is a huge advantage. One major publisher won’t even look at your proposal unless you’ve earned a niche on the lecture circuit. Telephone a certain West Coast agent to represent you, and his first question is “How many books can you sell on your own?” That’s why editors pay six-figure advances for books that offer instant name recognition and thus, built-in publicity. This trend goes back at least 20 years: $2.5 million to Dick Morris for Beyond the Oval Office (1996). $4.2 million to O.J. prosecutor Marcia Clark for Without a Doubt (1997). $5 million

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to Marlon Brando for Songs My Mother Taught Me (1994). $6.5 million to Colin Powell for My American Journey (1995). But how many of these titles did you ever buy, at full list price? Morris’s, Clark’s, and Brando’s memoirs were all costly disasters. Only Colin Powell’s sold well. Meanwhile, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994) by John Berendt—whose name was virtually unknown outside the magazine world—rode the NYT’s hardcover best- seller list for more than three years, outselling all four of those celebrity books combined.

After resigning my job as an acquisitions editor (under the gun to contract at least 12 profitable titles a year, or else), I spent several years editing selections from yet-unpublished books for magazine publication (first serializations, as they’re called). Working on a small scale this way, I saw more clearly why some narratives sizzled and others fizzled, and how even experienced authors steered into the ditch. Around the same time, I offered my services as a book doctor, fixing manuscripts hung up on various snags. Many hopeful authors asked me to line-edit their work, giving it that spit-’n’-polish that every “final” draft needs. Though I needed the money, I turned down many manuscripts that struck me as wrong-headed from the very first page. No editor can bring a manuscript back from the dead, or breathe life where there was none to begin with. If the car has no engine, a wax job and new tires can’t help it run. If amateurs have trouble getting manuscripts accepted, so do pros! I’ve had long conversations with three different authors whose best-sellers had sold millions of copies. You could find mass-market reprints of their earlier hits in virtually every bookstore. Now suddenly, their publishers had rejected their new efforts. Could I help them figure out why?

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I knew these authors’ work and had read their earlier books with eager delight. But their new manuscripts practically dared me to lay them aside for good. The main symptoms? Aimless detail and description, but no rooting interest to seize any reader’s imagination. Often I had to condense chapters to half their length, suggest new subplots to liven things up, and even rewriting entire chapters—aping the authors’ own distinctive style. After my makeovers, the publishers accepted these “problem” manuscripts and quickly published them. All three books now offered the basics that any reader could ask for: drama, conflict, colorful dialogue, and vivid characterization— but no strong motivation to keep turning the pages [8]. None of the three ever became a best-seller. Whenever revisions have to come in under a deadline, there’s a limit to the improvements that anyone can accomplish. [9] Why, I wondered, did the novels of Danielle Steel, J.K. Rowling, and Janet Evanovich sell so dependably? I decided that all writers, pros and amateurs alike, deserved a deeper inquiry into what makes a book enjoyable to read. Could these essentials be detected, isolated, defined? Curious, I began catching up on best-sellers I’d missed when they originally climbed to the top of the charts.

À la Recherche de Je Ne Sais Quoi

My first dismaying discovery was that eloquence counts for so very little. Authors can perpetrate some truly wretched prose and still enjoy healthy sales. From the first page of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971): “Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that register dimly on blind men’s eyes . . .” [10] When a star goes nova, it sometimes shines for weeks. And the blind, by

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definition, can perceive no light at all. In every one of her novels, Jackie Collins uses all seven Strategies with unusual clarity and to solid effect. Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages, with total sales of nearly 200 million copies. But here’s an excerpt from The Bitch (1979), an early effort of hers: “They made love for hours. It seemed like hours. It probably was hours.” [11] From Dean Koontz’s Intensity (1995): “Dead girls lie as troubled in the dark as in the light.” [12] Or was I comparing books whose authors had won a loyal reader base? As a controlled experiment, I matched hits like James Michener’s Hawaii (1959) and Tom Tryon’s The Other (1971) against weak, flawed efforts by those same authors—Michener’s Space (1982) and Tryon’s Night of the Moonbow (1989). Certain features and techniques (okay, ploys!) were always present in the top sellers, always missing from the flops. As I read on, still other patterns became recognizable— and began to sort themselves out into various categories. Or was my critical radar locking onto recent fads, tracking quirks peculiar to the late 20th century? To be on the safe side, I turned to enduringly popular works—novels and non-fiction alike—that have stayed in print for centuries. My test group went way back, starting with the Greek myths of Jason and the Argonauts, Theseus, and Ulysses; as well as the biblical narratives of Moses, King David, and Jesus. I noted that The Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2,000 BCE) employs many of the “secret ingredients” in last summer’s blockbuster movies. At the local library, books that enjoyed wild successful when first published—centuries ago—were often checked out or on reserve, forcing me to buy copies on Amazon.com. Long after their hoopla (and their authors) died, these works are still enthralling new generations of readers.

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In the next chapter, I’ll explain the first of these seven “Strats”—as I call them for short—and exactly why it’s so compelling and effective. But first, let me field the questions and objections that I hear most often.

Does every best-seller contain all seven of your, uh, Strats? Yep! In every riveting page-turner, these specific elements crop up repeatedly. Unfortunately, they are not the guidelines touted in many creative writing courses. I once read of an instructor who was charging $200 for a three-day workshop on “Establishing a Sense of Place”—a very minor aspect of Strategy #2.

Are the Strats hard to spot? Not if you know where to look. To demonstrate each one in action, I’ll be quoting examples from writers like Carlos Castaneda, Jackie Collins, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ian Fleming, Dean Koontz, William Shakespeare, Benjamin Spock, M.D., Mark Twain, Tom Wolfe, and other name-brand authors who remain on sale, year after year.

Why hasn’t anyone detected these Strats before? We’ve been taught to look in all the wrong places. English majors are typically assigned works by Ben Jonson, John Dryden, Henry James, James Joyce, and Lawrence Sterne. No student reads them to enjoy them, only to pass the course. And so, they graduate under the lethal misconception that any “serious” author should be a stoic pessimist like Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, or Franz Kafka—a tradition dutifully carried on by Jonathan Franzen in Freedom (2010).

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Worse yet, creative-writing instructors often warn that currying reader enjoyment is a secondary, lowbrow pursuit. Stephen King’s It (1986) plunks aspiring author Bill Denbrough into a seminar whose instructor has “published four books of poetry and his master’s thesis, all with the University Press. He smokes pot and wears a peace medallion.” One of Denbrough’s fellow students “wants to write novels about the grim lives of the poor in blank verse.” The class spends an hour and ten minutes analyzing a “sallow young woman’s vignette about a cow’s examination of a discarded engine block in a deserted field,” which, she insists, “is a socio- political statement in the manner of the early Orwell.” After the instructor slaps an F on Bill’s latest story, Bill promptly sells it to a magazine for $200. He flunks the seminar but even before he graduates, signs a contract with Viking Press, a house respected for its literary titles. [13] So there! And too often, when writers start looking in all the right places—in books they actually enjoy—they’re shamed into feeling guilty. In 1800, William Wordsworth, England’s future Poet Laureate, denounced the top-selling tomes of his day as “frantic,” “sickly,” “stupid,” “idle,” and “extravagant.” [14] This snobbish distaste of pop culture persists at several New York publishing houses. Publisher Henry Regnery was quoted as saying, “If you’re making money, you’re publishing the wrong kind of book.” [15] Certainly you can argue with success. But first, why not learn what it can teach you?

Then when the Strats go in, does quality go down? No way! Being neither squeamish nor elitist, I’ll point out Strats wherever they’re most visible. They’re easy to spot in trashy potboilers, top-grossing Hollywood movies, even comic

16 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER books. But they’re equally obvious in Homer and Sophocles, Dante and Dickens. All seven are front and center in Romeo and Juliet (1597), Hamlet (1603), Paradise Lost (1667), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (in French, Nôtre Dame de Paris, 1831), Oliver Twist (1837), Jane Eyre (1847), Crime and Punishment (1866), Wagner’s Das Rheingold (1869), The Sun Also Rises (1926), The Catcher in the Rye (1951), The Confessions of Nat Turner (1968), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) and plenty of other classic and critically acclaimed works.

Do the Strats energize non-fiction as well? Absolutely! Actually, fiction and fact are far more alike than you might suppose. Truman Capote claimed that with In Cold Blood (1965), he’d invented what he called the “non-fiction novel.” Actually, those two genres have been cross-pollinating ever since Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe (1719) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)—and passed off both books as real-life memoirs. “The characters in this book are real,” John Berendt assures us the end of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, but adds, “I have used pseudonyms for a number of them to protect their privacy, and in a few cases I have gone a step further by altering their descriptions.” He also confesses to having “taken certain storytelling liberties, particularly . . . with the timing of events. Where the narrative strays from strict non- fiction, my intention has been to remain faithful to the characters and to the essential drift of events as they really happened.”[16] In short, he’s tweaked and shuffled facts for greater impact, exactly like any good novelist!

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How-to manuals and self-help titles can also use novelistic tricks to grab readers. The presence—or absence—of Strats helps explain why the average PTA cookbook sells only a few dozen copies, while The Joy of Cooking (1975) has sold millions. I’ve even heard from a technical writer who claimed that the Strats helped him compose user’s manuals that are clearer and better organized!

Can using all your Strats guarantee a best-seller? Unfortunately, there are no foolproof ingredients for literary success. That’s why I call them Strategies. Including all seven gives you a far better shot at healthy sales. But skimp on even one, and your book may not earn back its advance—if it ever gets a contract in the first place. To dramatize exactly what happens when a Strat goes missing, I offer various “Slush Pile Lessons”—cautionary tales of submissions that failed in gruesome but instructive ways. Very simply, the Strats are what people yearn for, in fiction and non-fiction alike. Reward and delight your readers, and they’ll tend to recommend your book to their friends. This self-generating word of mouth—“critical mass,” one executive editor called it—results in the ongoing sales that keep your title in print. Of course TV and radio appearances and bookstore signings help move recently published books. (Autographed copies can’t be returned to the publisher, hee, hee!) But by itself, no promotion or publicity can create the steady, healthy orders required for long-term success. As you’ll learn in the final chapter, readers have grown increasingly skeptical of publishers’ jacket copy and now ignore advertising hype. Before committing any time and money, they’ll investigate a books flaws and virtues from actual readers’ reviews on Amazon.com.

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Won’t the Strats result in a trite, predictable book? No! A successful book needn’t (indeed, shouldn’t) follow any pat formula. It should simply satisfy the timeless essentials that readers have always hungered for. Just as you can obtain your Vitamin C from different daily sources, so you can supply any given Strat in different ways. Some are more “nourishing” than others. A few are so very effective that they’ve devolved into over-used clichés. Yet their sheer familiarity makes them even more effective—as with the three backstage knocks that announce the imminent rise of the curtain in Paris [17], or in “Once upon a time . . .” To see hackneyed, hidebound prose in action, see any the countless paperback romances where stock characters’ personality traits are all prescribed by editorial fiat. [18] Richard Bach claimed that his best-selling Jonathan Livingston Seagull “just wrote itself.” As any veteran will tell you, a bad book is much harder to write than a good one! If you’ve ever faced a project that wouldn’t leap to life, I’ll bet it was missing at least two crucial Strats. That “vitamin deficiency” left you struggling to write what you thought you should, not what you wanted to. Using all seven Strategies will help you avoid those wrongheaded assumptions, false starts, and dead ends that can waste weeks of effort. Employing some of the many tricks and shortcuts they suggest can make your work lots easier—and definitely more rewarding! As the old cliché says, you get no second chance to make a first impression. And one definite, dependable way to start things humming is with Strategy #1.

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Notes and References

Unless noted otherwise, all publishers are located in New York City.

[1] Quoted by Suzanna Andrews in “Random Anxiety,” New York magazine, July 7, 1997, pages 31 and 90. [2] Accolades like this are useful for alerting readers who might otherwise never learn of a book. But by themselves, prizes and awards can’t create best-sellers. How often have you opened some committee-approved finalist, only to find it self- consciously artsy and disappointing? [3] James Michener, The Novel (first published 1991). Random House, 1991, p. 123. [4] Quoted in “Renaissance Rapper Plays it Cool,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 22, 2002, p. P-5. [5] As Lester told me afterward, “Good sex isn’t compulsory. Stanley’s manuscript described dozens of couplings, but none was sexy—much less suspenseful. Why bother to flirt, if the outcome is pre-ordained?” In popular narratives, lust usually disguises what really fuels the story. Movies like My Fair Lady (1964) and Pretty Woman (1990) are founded on an age-old male rescue fantasy: Out of goodness and compassion, our hero lifts the heroine out of the gutter, sets her upright, dusts her off—and is surprised to discover that she’s ravishing! Henry Higgins never even kisses Eliza because the goal here is redemption, not seduction Catholic tradition identifies the woman “taken in adultery” (John 8: 3-4) as Mary Magdalene, out of whom Jesus drove seven devils and who was the first to witness his Resurrection. In 1950s Westerns, the hero saves the schoolmarm, then gallops off as fast as he can.

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[6] In Hollywood, you’re only as good as your last movie. This adage now holds true in publishing if your last book didn’t earn back its advance against royalties. [7] Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936). Pocket Books, 1982, p. xiii. [8] Authors working on their second manuscript often freeze up under the pressure of contract deadlines—especially if their first book was written “on spec,” with no delivery date, giving them all the time they wanted to ponder and revise. [9] Editors refer to readers’ motivations as a book’s sales points. A successful title needs two or three compelling ones, which only its author can supply. Many manuscripts with flabby sales points do see print. But if the sales reps doubt that a new title can win readers, they’ll quietly skip it when pitching their seasonal catalog to wholesalers. In stores, few readers will find that blackballed title because stores never ordered it in the first place. [10] Jackie Collins, The Bitch (1979). Pocket, 1984, p. 56. [11] Dean Koontz, Intensity (1996). Knopf, 1996, p. 49. [12] William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist (1971). Bantam 1972, p. 11. [13] Stephen King, It (1986). Signet, 1990, pages 199- 122. [14] William Wordsworth, in his Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), available in various reprints and anthologies. [15] Jane Mayer, “Solid-Gold Dish,” The New Yorker, May 26, 1997, p. 34. [16] John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story (1994). Random House, 1994, p. 389. [17] Thanks to the Third Law of Reader Reaction (see Strategy #3), this venerable tradition has inspired irreverent

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jokes. After the French stage actress Sarah Bernhardt had her leg amputated, she was fitted with a wooden prosthesis. Then came the night of her brave return to the stage. When the three knocks sounded, one wag in the audience shouted, “Here she comes!” [18] In the early 1980s, the editors at Silhouette Romances drew up hard-and-fast authors’ guidelines for the benefit of Barbara Cartland wannabes. For example: “The HEROINE is always young (19 to 27), basically an ingénue, usually petite and slight of build, and wears modest make-up and clothes. In spite of her fragile appearance, she is independent, high-spirited, and not too subservient. She should not be mousey [sic] or weepy. Almost always a virgin, she never truly believes that the Hero loves her until the final chapter. “The HERO is self-assured, masterful, hot-tempered, capable of violence, passion and tenderness. Often mysteriously moody, always 8 to 12 years older than the Heroine. Usually in his early or late 30s, he is always tall, muscular (not muscle- bound) with craggy features. He is not necessarily handsome, but is, above all, virile. He is usually dark, although we have seen some great Nordic types and, recently, a gorgeous redhead.” And so on.

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22 STRATEGY # 1 The Paranoia Formula

But the beginning of things . . . is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult! —KATE CHOPIN, The Awakening [1]

EVERY BEST-SELLER THREATENS DIRE CONSEQUENCES if you don’t keep reading. National Lampoon satirized this strategy on one famous cover: “Buy this Magazine, or We’ll Shoot this Dog!” But along with a bludgeon, every best-seller also offers tempting glimpses of the benefits that might be yours, if you do read on—and presumably, buy the book! [2] Back in the 1950s, Charles Atlas used this same one-two punch in his Dynamic Tension bodybuilding course. First the Stick: Remain a 97-pound weakling and let bullies kick sand in your face. Next the Carrot: In only minutes a day, you can impress the prettiest girl on the beach. Just fill out this little coupon . . . Every successful book employs this same two-stroke motivation. Repulsion vs. attraction, danger vs. rescue, malady vs. remedy, yoked together from the outset, but—and this is crucial!—without negating each other or canceling each other out. In Gone with the Wind (1936), 16-year-old Scarlett O’Hara is hardly impressed by her first sight of Rhett Butler. If anything, she’s repelled:

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He looked quite old, at least thirty-five. He was . . . almost too heavy for gentility. He was dark of face, swarthy as a pirate, and his eyes were as bold and black as any pirate’s appraising . . . a maiden to be ravished. There was a cool recklessness in his face and a cynical humor in his mouth as he smiled at her . . . A very disagreeable smile, Scarlett thought. [3]

This passage is a fine example of counter-grounding (see “Suffer the Villains” in Strategy #3). Margaret Mitchell’s blockbuster clearly inspired (more likely, jump-started) Kathleen Winsor’s more skillful Forever Amber, published eight years later (1944). For any novelist—romance, historical, thriller, or otherwise—I recommend Amber as a textbook of how to employ the Paranoia Formula in canny and inventive ways. The novel has barely begun when Amber, age 15, “half- hoped and half-feared that she would become pregnant.” [4] Of course she does, thereby achieving both the Carrot and the Stick, redoubling the reader’s hopes and fears. Suspense must withhold important data (most famously in Frank Stockton’s 1882 short story, “The Lady or the Tiger?”), so that characters lack enough information to resolve their dilemmas. Of course, real life keeps us all in the dark, which is why the Paranoia Formula is so effective—we can relate to that queasy anticipation. Some 16,000 years ago, by the light of animal-fat lamps, Paleolithic artists painted dynamic murals on the limestone walls of the Lascaux Cave in southwestern France. Some images show game animals bristling with spears or arrows. The Carrot is obvious: Meat for everybody! One vignette shows an angry bison, horns lowered. In front of him, an injured man topples over backward, his limbs

24 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER rigid with pain. Out of his head projects a horizontal line, perhaps representing a spurt of blood or sliver of skull. [5] The Stick is graphic: Severe injury, possibly death—showing the risk that every hunter must take. For centuries, each Egyptian pharaoh was depicted grasping a flail to scourge enemies and punish miscreants—as well as a crook, to draw the righteous and deserving into the god-king’s presence. The ruler never promised to be a good shepherd, just an effective one. After Gautama Buddha’s enlightenment, his first sermon employed the Paranoia Formula. Repeated incarnations bring inevitable suffering (Stick); but following the Eightfold Path can free individuals from the wheel of rebirth (Carrot). By around 483 BCE, when Buddha died of food poisoning, his bad news/good news teaching had earned him thousands of lay followers, as well as the sangha of monks who lived by his teachings. By the time Jesus died circa 33 CE, his followers numbered no more than a few hundred. [6] But by 405 CE, when Patrick—former slave and future saint—came home to Ireland, generations of missionaries had been preaching the threat of Hell and hope of Heaven, converting entire populations from Spain to Asia Minor. Damnation or salvation? That fearsome choice—and choice it must be, or suspense and conflict are impossible—has fueled dozens of enduring works, from The Divine Comedy (circa 1350), Doctor Faustus (1604), Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Ben-Hur (1880), The Robe (1942) and The Devil’s Advocate (1959), up through The Exorcist (1971). First the Paranoia Formula boosts dramatic stakes by yoking a negative with a positive. Then, for as long as possible, the combat remains in doubt. The game goes into extra innings, with thunder on the horizon. The little white ball skitters over

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the roulette wheel, bouncing, skittering, hovering—before its final plunge to determine who’s won and who’s lost. Logically, the Stick usually precedes the Carrot. Consider the opening of Andrew Weil, M.D.’s #1 best-seller, Spontaneous Healing (1995):

A man whose lungs are filled with cancer is sent home to die, having been told that medicine can do nothing for him. Six months later, he reappears in his doctor’s office, tumor-free . . . A neurosurgeon tells grieving parents that their son . . . in a coma following a motorcycle accident and severe head injury, will never regain consciousness. The son is now fine. [7]

Self-help books first warn you about the threat of Jail before explaining how to Pass Go and collect $200. In her preface to Reviving Ophelia (1994), a #1 best-seller in its paperback edition, Mary Pipher, Ph.D., makes the glum observation that

girls today . . . are coming of age in a more dangerous, sexualized, and media-saturated culture. They face incredible pressures to be beautiful and sophisticated, which in junior high means using chemicals and being sexual. . . . America today limits girls’ development, truncates their wholeness and leaves many of them traumatized.

Five paragraphs later, here’s her ringing reassurance:

We can strengthen girls so that they will be ready. We can encourage emotional toughness and self- protection. We can support and guide them [and] build

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a culture that is less complicated and more nurturing, less violent and sexualized and more growth-producing . . . in which all their gifts can be developed and appreciated. [8]

Ever seen a B-movie Western filmed in the 1950s? First war whoops and flaming arrows, then the Cavalry. Once you’ve run across the hot summer sand in your bare feet, cool surf feels delicious. In novels and non-fiction alike, most effective narratives exploit this exact same tactic. In The Amityville Horror (1977), the Lutz family must dodge attacks by malevolent spirits while trying to settle in to their bargain-priced Dutch Colonial (with that bonus “extra” room in the basement). In Alive (1974), downed passengers must not only survive (Carrot) but grapple with the moral dilemma of having to eat their less fortune companions (Stick)—and either way, still respect themselves in the morning (Carrot #2). Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus (1992), a hardcover best-seller for nearly five years, reverses the usual Stick/Carrot sequence. Dr. John Gray tucks a fleeting Carrot into his Acknowledgments. I’ve bold-faced his operative words:

I thank my wife, Bonnie, for sharing the journeys of developing this book with me . . . and especially for expanding my understanding and ability to honor the female point of view. [9]

Gray’s implication is that men should be grateful to learn from their women. But because readers tend to zoom right past an author’s acknowledgments [10], his promise/premise is easy to miss. He writes that he and his wife are on the best of terms, but quickly admits it was not always so. Here comes the Stick:

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A week after our daughter . . . was born, my wife Bonnie and I were completely exhausted . . . [She] was taking painkillers [and] could barely walk. After five days of staying home to help, I went back to work.

A relative forgets to bring Bonnie her pain medication. Gray finally returns home, tired and irritable, to face her complaint: “I’ve been stranded in bed, and nobody cares! I feel so deserted!” “Angry” that she didn’t call him at work, “furious” at her for blaming him, Gray admits that he “exploded.” As he’s heading for the door, Bonnie suddenly switches gears:

“This,” she said, “is when I need you the most . . . to feel your arms around me. . . . Please don’t go.” [11]

If husband and wife can overcome this heat-of-the- moment brawl and reconcile with each other, there’s hope (and a Carrot) for every reader. Best-selling history books also use this approach. In the opening pages of How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995), you’ll see the Paranoia Formula in spades:

. . . as all through Europe matted, unwashed barbarians descended on the Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books, the Irish, who were just learning to read and write, took up the great labor of copying all of western literature . . . . Not for a thousand years—not since the Spartan Legion had perished at the Hot Gates of Thermopylae—had western civilization been put to such a test or faced such odds. [12]

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Any out-of-nowhere best-seller typically offers some stowaway Carrot that its publisher overlooked. Often it’s a best- case scenario—warm fuzzy optimism or reassurance. The Greening of America (1970), All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (1988), and The Book of Virtues (1993) assured readers that they’d been right all along, that what they’d always hoped was really so. The worst-case scenario works too, but overwhelmingly in fiction. Nuclear doomsday novels like Fail-Safe and Seven Days in May (both 1962) served as lightning rods for Cold-War paranoia. Such books succeed because bundling free-floating worry into some vivid, specific event helps diminish the reader’s anxiety. In any horror movie, for example, the monster’s first entrance makes the audience gasp—but only that one time. Thereafter, the shark, demon, or T. rex has become a known quantity and is shown with no blurry jump cuts. To build suspense, directors postpone that first glimpse for as long as they can. The movie Alien (1979) recycled the same creature through its metamorphosis, giving the audience a fresh frisson with each new stage of its development. [13]

Slush Pile Lesson #2: More Answers than Problems

To title his 1978 novel, James Kirkwood borrowed the punch line of an old joke about a dad who worried that his son was too optimistic. Rather than buy the boy any Christmas presents, he shoveled a load of fresh manure under the tree. Christmas morning, the boy grinned with delight: “Wow, with all this horseshit, There Must be a Pony!” When amateurs bemoan social and environmental woes, their submissions read like Letters to the Editor on steroids. Remedies (if any) are predictable from the get-go: Celebrate

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diversity. Less TV, more exercise. Don’t drill wells next to your septic tank. We editors call them “Ain’t-it-Awful?” books, after one of the ploys defined by Eric Berne in Games People Play (1959). A hand-wringing title can succeed if it warns of some threat terribly close to home—ideally in the reader’s own backyard (Silent Spring, 1962) or garage (Unsafe at Any Speed, 1965). To Destroy You is No Loss (1987), documenting the plight of Cambodian refugees, was never a best-seller.

Your Reader Abhors a Vacuum

Life can grow so intricate, seem so overwhelming, that readers will buy books claiming to solve some basic puzzle, even by oversimplifying it. That explains why the advice from horoscopes and Tarot cards is perennially popular. Both Games People Play and Mars/Venus were hardcover best-sellers for years because they streamlined psychological complexities, boiling them down into principles that any reader could grasp. Not that such “explanations” must be of any practical use! The metaphysical speculations of George Gurdjieff and Helena P. Blavatsky are outlandish and unwieldy. Cosmic Forces of Mu (1934) and The Urantia Book (1955) have no scientific proof to back up their assertions. The author of Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs (1968) was mentally unstable. But these titles kept right on selling by offering simple answers to confusing mysteries—by projecting a treasure map over the baffling grid of humdrum daily life. To refute Chariots of the Gods? (1969), Clifford A. Wilson published Crash Go the Chariots: An Alternative to Chariots of the Gods? (1972), dismantling Erich von Daniken’s thesis point by point. Never a success, Crash was twice re- published by small houses and fell out of print each time.

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Meanwhile, Chariots got translated into 32 languages and kept on selling in its English translation. Reports of alien abductions, like Raymond Fowler’s The Andreasson Affair (1979) and Budd Hopkins’s Intruders (1987) enjoyed long lives in paperback, but skeptic Philip J. Klass’s UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game (updated in 1989) went out of print. Some experts have dismissed Julian Jaynes’s elaborations in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) as “ingenious fantasy.” [14] But countless readers didn’t seem to mind one bit. Gerald Posner’s Case Closed (1993) gave overwhelming evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. But conspiracy theories are simply too enthralling to be argued away! Visiting a bookstore soon after Case Closed was published, I found only one single copy—but several of Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment (in print since 1965, with more than a million copies sold). A few naysayers can succeed by repealing Prohibition, as in Calories Don’t Count (1961) and Open Marriage (1972). But along with the Stick of “You’ve been hoodwinked!” these books offer a Carrot that’s far tastier than the strict traditional wisdom it seeks trying to replace. This is why the debunking best-seller is often a biography, documenting the flaws of some dead celebrity who’s been lionized a little too long (think Lenny Bruce, Elvis, Picasso, JFK). But any scandalous tell-all must presume that readers want to hear it all. One unsuccessful biography told of Grace Kelly’s promiscuity with her Hollywood leading men. Most readers were more curious about her hothouse reign as Princess of Monaco.

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Judging a Book by its Subtitle

Non-fiction best-sellers seldom wait for browsers to peek inside. They flaunt their Carrots and Sticks up front, in their titles. Probably the longest example to date is David R. Reuben, M.D.’s Everything You Always Wanted [Carrot #1] to Know About Sex [Carrot #2] but Were Afraid [Stick] to Ask (1969). Howard Ruff’s How to Prosper [Carrot] During the Coming Bad Years [Stick] (1977) is more succinct. Shorter still: Norman F. Dacey’s How to Avoid [Carrot] Probate! [Stick] (fifth edition, 1993). If not the briefest, then among the top ten is Charles Fort’s Lo! (1941). No Sticks, but a big gee-whiz Carrot. Effective titles are punchy, no more than six words long—with few syllables. For this reason, publishers often insert a colon (the equivalent of a deep breath) before explaining their Carrots in a longer subtitle. In the old days, R.R. Bowker’s Books in Print dutifully included every book’s complete subtitle, so a good one could provide the publisher with free advertising. For example, Dr. Atkins’s Diet Revolution (1972) crammed three Carrots into its subtitle: The High Calorie [1] Way to Stay Thin [2] Forever [3]. The subtitle of Mars/Venus explains that the book is A Practical [1] Guide for Improving [2] Communications and Getting What You Want [3] in Your Relationships. It’s not easy to cram both pro and con into the tile of a novel. Irving Stone managed it with The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961), as did Rosemary Rogers in Sweet Savage Love (1974). Best-selling titles like Treasure Island (1883) can emphasize the positive, but more often the negative, as in C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (1946) or Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears (1991).

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Fictional Sticks are usually more compelling, since their do-or-die motivation is loaded onto a very few characters, who must then seek triumph and avert disaster as best they can. The Paranoia Formula demands that the protagonists face both a hideous fate and an exhilarating reward. When worst-case and best-case scenarios can wobble either way, they boost heads-or-tails suspense to an absolute peak. Even if the resulting scenario foams over the top, readers rarely complain. Rather, they applaud with their credit cards. Consider the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t scenarios of most classic Greek tragedies. The title heroine of Sophocles’s Antigone (written circa 450 BCE) feels honor- bound to bury her rebellious brother Polynices—even though her Uncle Creon has decreed the death penalty for anyone who dares to give the traitor’s corpse a decent burial. Her do-and-die dilemma is typical of many classical tragedies, in two ways: 1) The protagonist must do the right thing, even if— especially if—it threatens personal ruin and possible death. (2,500 years later, most of John Grisham’s legal protagonists run a similar gauntlet.) 2) Background circumstances are contrived, highly unlikely. One scholar calls them “preposterous cases, leaning toward the exceptional and the bizarre.” [15] In Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis (staged around 405 BCE), the Greek ships waiting to embark for Troy lie becalmed. An oracle declares that no wind will fill their sails until their commander, Agamemnon, offers his own daughter as a human sacrifice. In Oedipus Rex (circa 450 BCE)—the prequel to Antigone—the title character has killed his father and married his mother years before the play begins. [16] Nowadays, such far-fetched premises become targets for parody, as in one collegiate production of Featherpuss Tex.

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Back in 1946, The Oxford Companion to English Literature snorted that The Monk (1796), Matthew G. Lewis’s best-selling horror-Gothic novel, boasts a “mixture of the supernatural, the horrible, and the indecent” that “makes the book unreadable to-day. But it has power . . . and attained a considerable vogue.” [17] Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), is a fevered brew of romantic philosophy, arctic travel, and overwrought nervous systems. But even in today’s era of test-tube babies and cloned animals, audiences enjoy watching Dr. Victor Frankenstein create life the old- fashioned way, one stitch at a time. (Wisely, most screenwriters relocate him from his squeaky-clean home town of Geneva, Switzerland.) Under the hood, the engine that keeps Frankenstein running is every parent’s fear that our cherished offspring won’t turn out quite the way we hoped. Later in the 19th century, English fiction grew more refined, fussing and dithering over dilemmas that often seemed trivial—even by Victorian standards. Novels like Mansfield Park (1814) led Mark Twain to declare that “any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book.” In an 1898 letter to Joseph Twitchell, he wrote, “Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” Part of Twain’s enduring popularity lies in his gleeful refusal to flinch from literary cruelty and mayhem. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) piles up a body count of 25,000 in Chapter 43 alone, but—in perfect alignment with the Paranoia Formula—also boasts a dazzling goal: to dispel the Dark Ages by giving the Industrial Revolution a 1,000-year head start.

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As in real life, death on the page always draws a crowd. To keep readers riveted, popular English novelists had no qualms about knocking off sympathetic characters, or at least threatening to—as does Dickens in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) and A Christmas Carol (1843); as do the Brontë sisters in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (both 1847). Ever since, best-selling authors have followed in their heartless footsteps.

Slush Pile Lesson #3: Paranoia Isn’t Patient

To paraphrase the Red Queen in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), maybe fun a few chapters ahead, but never fun right now! Many of England’s Victorian novelists trusted in the virtues of delayed gratification for their hapless characters— and too often, for the reader as well. The entire first chapter of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878) is a description of empty, barren Egdon Heath. Not until the final paragraph does a human being appear. And even then, he’s a mere speck on the horizon. Many amateurs are similarly long-winded, mistaking the readers for captive schoolchildren who, once they open a book, are compelled to finish it. Quite often, these writers have a gratifying surprise or two up their sleeves. But because they have all those blank pages to fill up, why spill the beans too soon? Real life can be ordinary and mundane—so writers try to duplicate real life by presenting average, ordinary characters. In sheer bravado, Flannery O’Connor steers straight for a brick wall of boredom in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1953). Only a carload of escaped convicts saves her short story from certain death. For modern readers, elegant syntax and exquisite insights aren’t enough. They’ll lay your book aside if you don’t

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immediately come to the point and start building serious interest. Peter Straub’s Ghost Story (1979) lays its groundwork in far less space, with crisper characterizations, than does Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898). Not that Straub is the better writer, but reader expectations have changed. Poised at the starting gate, an author can’t afford to dawdle and smell the roses. Scan the opening pages of any recent best-seller and you’ll find the Paranoia Formula running at full throttle. One dependable ploy is to have time running out on page 1, as in The Stand (1978), when Frannie Goldsmith finds herself pregnant and unwilling to marry the father. Very often, this Stick-and-Carrot opening is simply a temporary attention-grabber—quick-burning straw to ignite reader interest. The author soon switches to dilemmas that reveal themselves as more solid and intricate, whose resolutions consume the rest of the plot. Forever Amber opens in 1644, when a “tiny red baby” girl is born. England is racked by Civil War. Her mother’s family is Royalist, but her father is a Parliamentarian—who wanted his firstborn to be a boy! [18] When the narrative resumes in 1660, none of those opening threads is followed up: Our 15-year-old heroine faces a whole new snarl of problems, all of her own making. In a best-seller, no high hope or desperate fear needs come to pass, as long as its possibility is there to keep the reader seated. In attorney F. Lee Bailey’s best-selling memoir, The Defense Never Rests (1971), his life is never in danger—except at the book’s very opening, when he’s a 23-year-old Marine fighter pilot:

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I leveled off about a mile above the earth and swung the Saberjet parallel to the [Carolina] coast, looking for a beach picnic to buzz or a pair of young lovers to startle. Then I . . . saw the red warning light flashing: FIRE . . . I had to make a decision: I could use the ejection seat and bail out, or I could shut down the engine and try for a dead-stick landing.

His seemingly easy choice is anything but:

If I bailed out . . . the airplane might crash in a populated area. I could always point [my plane out] to sea. But there was no guarantee that it wouldn’t turn and come back to shore. And suppose the parachute was defective—the terminal velocity of a free-falling human being is 125 mph . . . I hauled back on the stick, turned toward the base, and yanked the throttle back to idle cut-off . . . I had made my decision—a flame-out approach. [19]

Later in the book, Bailey takes to the air only once, in a prop-driven Cessna. But his jet-powered opening has grabbed our attention, while deftly establishing him as a Kind and Trusty Guide—playful but honorable, who places strangers’ welfare above his own. Better yet, raising the stakes suspends disbelief. You’ll see this principle at work every time the grand prize in a state lottery ratchets up past $100 million. Suddenly, thousands more people—including residents of neighboring states—line up to buy tickets, even though their chances of winning are no better than when the jackpot stood at $5,000 or less.

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The Best Way to Play Keep-Away

Even if characters are confined or incarcerated, they can still hold our attention—unless they get bored. Before Dante reaches Paradise in Book Three of his Divine Comedy, he must wend a treacherous path down to Hell’s icy Ninth Circle, then up through Mount Purgatory, where each level crammed with original sinners and even more original torments. The journey should be more absorbing than the goal. The subtitle of The Hobbit (1937) is “There and Back Again.” Planning a prison break is more than half the fun, as in Papillon (1970) and Midnight Express (1977); and in films like The Great Escape (1963), The Getaway (1972), and The Shawshank Redemption (1994). For obvious reasons, protagonists’ freedom must be withheld as long as possible. Early release is permitted only if the convict can enjoy good behavior on the outside—as does Casanova does after breaking out of jail in Venice; or if the threat of re-capture is a formidable Stick, as in Les Misérables (1862). If you don’t employ the Paranoia Formula quickly and emphatically, your publisher may do it for you. Lynn Andrews’s first book-seller, Medicine Woman (1979), is still in print. The preface to her sequel, Flight of the Seventh Moon (1984), begins this way:

I am a woman. The last several years of my life have been spent on a spiritual quest. My path led me first to many male teachers. Each of them, in their own way, gave me startling insights into my own nature. Still, something was lacking. . . . When I first met Agnes, I asked her if

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she thought it was strange for someone from Beverly Hills to be sitting in her quiet cabin in Manitoba asking for help. “There are always helpers and signs to point the way for anyone who is willing to follow them,” she said . . . .

But if you pick up the mass-market edition of Flight, these won’t be the first words you’ll read. Some clever editor found a more arresting passage on page 32, abridged it, and printed on the very first page, within a decorative border that makes it impossible to miss:

“I always told you, Lynn, once you take power, you have to keep it. The having is one thing. The holding is another.” She paused and held her left hand up, palm open, and then placed her right hand over it, palm down. Then she held both up in a triumphant gesture. “But how could the spiritual part of the basket be taken from me? It’s a part of me now.” “By killing you.” Agnes saw the terror in my eyes. “If Red Dog can. He must deceive you. You have stolen his woman power, and he wants her back. He’ll do almost anything. Remember he’s a great sorcerer and totally dedicated to his art.” [20]

This is conflict, this is suspense! Via the publisher’s sleight of hand, artificial hindsight affords us a peek into the heart of Andrews’s story. Now that we’re warned of the threat she soon will face, her low-key opening serves as flashback—though she never intended it as such.

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Never trust your editor to be this canny or creative. Better perform this trick yourself, by shaping your prologue or first chapter into a sneak preview of coming distractions. But never cut to the dramatic climax—as when RMS Titanic begins its final plunge. That scene gives away too much, and is a tough act to follow. Instead, learn from A Night to Remember (1955), which opens with the lethal iceberg looming into view. The narrative is immediately up to speed, but it still has room to accelerate—before a flashback recounts how the great ship was originally constructed. With his reader securely hooked, Walter Lord can take his own sweet time.

Many mass-market paperbacks waste their opening pages with rave reviews of the original hardcover publication. But readers buy books, not praise. One tantalizing excerpt is more persuasive than some blurb from The Fresno Bee. This ploy—offering a bite of steak, rather than its sizzle—is routine in sci-fi novels and spy thrillers where action must often simmer for a few pages before rising to a boil. The Prologue of Jackie Collins’s Lucky (1985) shows that her title character has a past. But does she have a future?

The jury filed silently into the courtroom . . . . Lucky Santangelo stood tensely in the dock. She stared straight ahead. Impassive. Wildly, darkly beautiful. In spite of everything . . . . “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached your verdict?” . . . “Yes, we have, Your Honor.” She, Lucky Santangelo, was accused of murder, and the next few minutes would decide her fate . . . She held her head high . . . After all, she was innocent. Wasn’t she? Wasn’t she . . . ? [21]

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Here’s the Prologue of Collins’s sequel, Lady Boss (1990)—in its entirety:

“Kill her,” the voice said. “Who?” “Lucky Santangelo, that’s who.” “It’s as good as done.” “I hope so.” “Don’t worry—the lady is already dead.” [22]

Of course, flashbacks are nothing new. Paradise Lost (1667) “hastes into the midst of things” and opens with Satan’s fall from Heaven. Milton borrowed this tactic from Homer, who uses it repeatedly in the Odyssey, well before 600 BCE. Flashbacks and flash-forwards are highly effective because they direct the reader’s curiosity in two directions at once: to has happened, and to what will. Two sources of paranoia are better than one! To further blur the line between fiction and non-fiction, some New-Age novels offer the same kind of personal growth that’s traditionally promised in self-help books. The novel, Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970) debuted on the non-fiction side of the TBR’s best-seller list and stayed there for several weeks! The Celestine Prophecy (1993) may be the only novel whose “sequel” was a non-fiction workbook—The Celestine Prophecy: An Experiential Guide (1995)—for putting its Nine Insights to work in everyday life. In his preface to The Return of Merlin (1995), Deepak Chopra confides that his novel is an allegory whose secrets can transform the reader:

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As you read this book, I hope you will see in the characters of Arthur and Lady Guinevere . . . and all the others, the different roles you play . . . As the story unfolds for you, I ask you to look at the characters and the incidents as symbols of your own life experiences, and, bit by bit, as you traverse the vast landscape of your own consciousness, you will awaken the Merlin inside you.

This Carrot would lose some of its impact without a nearby Stick. So Chopra brandishes a few:

But before you encounter Merlin—the spirit—you must go past the dark alleys, the secret passages, and the ghost-filled attics of your own mind. You must confront your own . . . shadow self [who] accompanies you wherever you go. [23]

To be on the safe side, the opening of his first chapter brandishes the Paranoia Formula: “The old women of Camelot were sure the world was coming to an end.” [24]

The Virtue of Literary Altruism

Reading a diet book, we root for the patient who wants to slim down in time for his 25th wedding anniversary. We’ll cheer even harder for the author who helps him do that. In many popular novels like A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Sophie’s Choice (1979), characters gaze beyond their personal woes to focus on the welfare of others. High-minded as this may seem, it’s simply a trick to boost the stakes. Now you know why Stephen King so often depicts parents who must protect their children against vampires, a wizard, a clown in the

42 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER sewer, a rabid St. Bernard, or a highway patrolman possessed by aliens. Jack Ryan, hero of Tom Clancy’s best-sellers, manages to protect his family and fulfill his personal goals while, like James Bond before him, helping to preserve the Free World. Conversely, characters trying to save only their own skins are treated severely. The title character in Lord Jim (1900) puts his own survival ahead of the 800 passengers aboard the rusting Patna—and earns the crushing shame that brands him a pariah. The hero of What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) isn’t the amoral Sammy Glick, but the decent, compassionate, long- suffering narrator Al Manheim. This principle can be effectively inverted if accepted conventions are branded as evil, as in Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1882) and Any Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957). One sure-fire premise is to force a few ill-assorted misfits band together for the greater good of all. This concept— derring-do as group therapy!—has been packing them in ever since Aeschylus’s The Oresteia in the 5th century BCE; in WWII movies like Casablanca (1942) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957); and in more recent box-office hits like The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), Star Wars (1977), Independence Day (1996), and Saving Private Ryan (1999).

More Hostages Enforce a Richer Ransom

In the genteel 1920s and ’30s, detective novels featured only a single corpse. Back then, the social outrage of “murder most foul” was grave enough to demand redress. Mystery writers like Agatha Christie and Earle Stanley Gardner spent the rest of their plots planting Carrots—having Miss Marple uncover a clue, letting Perry Mason clear an innocent suspect— before finally bringing the culprit to justice.

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Later authors added another Stick: physical mayhem. In Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane, the private eye (and narrator) is usually knocked unconscious at least once and threatened with far worse. Ever since then, the fictional body count has kept pace with inflation. Ever since The First Deadly Sin (1973) and The Silence of the Lambs (1988), mysteries have featured serial killers. (Another crucial change: Early on, the reader learns who the murderer is, long before the authorities do.) Collaring the perp doesn’t only satisfy justice, it saves lives—thus boosting the stakes still higher.

Once is Seldom Enough

Best-sellers renew the Paranoia Formula in chapter after chapter, through to the very end. Best-case and worst-case scenarios, fear of loss and hope of gain, are kept in clear focus. In R.L. Stine’s wildly successful “Goosebumps” series, every chapter ends with a shock or cliffhanger. In two non- fiction best-sellers by therapists—The Road Less Traveled (1986) and Love’s Executioner (1989)—each chapter introduces a different patient or a new constellation of symptoms, offering a new chance for healing and redemption. “The Ride across Lake Constance” is a European folktale in which a winter traveler gallops across a level, snowy plain. Taking shelter in an inn, he is stunned to learn that he has just crossed the surface of a frozen lake. At any moment, his horse could have broken through the ice, drowning them both. Similarly, A Separate Reality (1971) keeps raising the stakes after the fact. Over and again, don Juan warns Carlos Castaneda that he’s just avoided some hideous fate by sheer dumb luck. (That’s no misprint: Castaneda lower-cases the honorific don, except at the beginning of a sentence.) The

44 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER following quotes come from the Pocket Books paperback edition:

Page 34: Don Juan shook his head [and] expressed his bewilderment at what he called “my baffling good luck.” He said that my visiting don Vicente was like walking into a lion’s den armed with a twig.

Page 131: “You were lucky that the color was on the guardian’s back,” he said. “Had it been on the front part of its body . . . you would be dead by now.”

Page 178: “If I had not been around, you might have wandered off and never returned . . . all that would be left of you now would be your dead body on the side of the stream.”

Page 191: “The ally would have come to you and scared you stiff. If you had been alone, he might have killed you.”

Page 193: “If you were to wander off now, chances are that you would find a terrible disaster.”

Page 227: “Later on, the spirit nearly lured you to your death. . . The spirit took you by surprise and you nearly succumbed.”

Page 243: There was no doubt in my mind that through my blundering stupidity, I had unleashed something terrible on myself. [25]

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From Moses to Melville

Since Moby-Dick was published in 1851, critics have pondered its true meaning. Is it an allegory of human pride? An inquiry into good and evil? A meditation on an impersonal universe? A more practical question is why so many editions are currently in print—and presumably, selling. Very simply, Melville employs an age-old way to ignite a plot, using a type of character more recently visible in comic strips like “Beetle Bailey” and “Dilbert.” Sooner or later, some character whispers, “Could it be our CEO is nuts?” Another character nods grimly/ Whereupon everybody else starts biting his fingernails. This queasy doubt helps energize the Book of Exodus. After persuading Pharaoh to “Let my people go,” [26] Moses leads the Hebrews into the wilderness. If they are to reach the Promised Land, it’s crucial that he prove himself level-headed and reliable. His first challenge soon comes. The Israelites are catching their breath by the seaside at Pi Hahiroth when they see Pharaoh’s army galloping toward them and berate Moses: “Were there not enough graves in Egypt that you led us here, to die in the desert?”[27] They have good reason to be skeptical. Already they’ve had to endure one demented CEO—Pharaoh, whose heart Jehovah “hardened” so that he “and his officials changed their minds” about freeing them. [28] Rather than split hairs, Moses parts the Red Sea. That silences the malcontents—but not for long! Cecil B. De Mille’s remake of The Ten Commandments (1956) stresses this rebellious subplot: Even while Charlton Heston is up on Mount Sinai receiving the Tablets of the Law, Edward G. Robinson is goading the Hebrews into worshiping the Golden Calf. Upon his descent, Heston quashes this

46 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER mutinous heresy in a blaze of pyrotechnics, thus reaffirming his authority. In nearly every other version of this dynamic, the CEO is eccentric and unpredictable, if not downright insane. After David kills Goliath and becomes a hero, King Saul tries to “pin him to the wall with his spear”—not once, but three times! [29] Shakespeare’s “difficult” kings include Lear, Macbeth, Richard II, and Richard III. Captains outrageous include Bligh, Nemo, Queeg, and the submarine skipper in the movie Crimson Tide (1995). In Star Wars (1977), there’s Darth Vader and in Return of the Jedi (1983), the Emperor Palpatine, who bears a sneaky resemblance to the ruthless tycoon Armand Hammer. The film version of The Madness of King George (1994) ends with the monarch regaining his sanity. Just before the closing credits, a notice informs us that George III soon relapsed and died barking mad. Once again, our sympathy reverts—if uncomfortably—to the disloyal politicians who plotted against their demented monarch. Why is Moses the lone, healthy exception to this pattern? Partly because of the need for foreshadowing. The Israelites’ mutinous grumbling early on prepares the reader for their later disobedience when they drift away from obeying Jehovah’s commandments. Presenting Moses as wise, fair, and divinely inspired puts his opponents clearly in the wrong. But even in Exodus, a hostile setting (fully explained in Strategy #2) plays a vital role. Loony leaders usually come unglued in claustrophobic quarters, where the least eccentricity can wreak the worst damage: on a ship in mid-ocean, as in Mutiny on the Bounty (1932), The Caine Mutiny (1951), or Raise the Titanic (1976). Or in a submarine—20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1869), The Hunt for Red October (1984), and Crimson Tide (1995). Or aboard an aircraft or spaceship—

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Airport (1968) and the movies 2001 (1968) and Star Trek: First Contact (1997). This setting needs not be physical, as long as it restricts its characters’ mobility and freedom of choice. Hell—as in Dante’s Inferno, or Sartre’s No Exit (1945)—will serve nicely. So will any close-knit organization where resisting discipline means the sacrifice of something valuable: status and income (Clear and Present Danger, 1989); water to drink (Bridge Over the River Kwai); free will (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1962). Or a drug, like heroin in William S. Burroughs’s Junkie (1953) or the addictive “spice” that turns one’s eyeballs blue in Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965). Unexpected best-sellers often succeed by upending some hackneyed cliché. (They exploit the Third Law of Reader Reaction, explored later in Strategy #3). The Tempest (1623) remains one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. Never a season goes by without new productions somewhere in the world. In the second scene, we learn that Prospero’s been stripped of his title as Duke of Milan, having endured years of political exile on a deserted island. He’s a single father who claims to talk to spirits. (As a single father myself, I can’t blame him.) Yet with all the ingredients to be a world-class fruitcake, Prospero proves to be refreshingly, magnanimously sane.

Slush Pile Lesson #4: Believable Isn’t Much Fun

First-time novelists worry about being viewed as liars, as any spinner of make-believe must be. Desperate to be trusted, they often present the reader with too-ordinary characters whom nobody would find objectionable or implausible. They’re familiar: normal and law-abiding, predictable and tedious. Their

48 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER every contradictory or eccentric impulse is bulldozed flat, lest some reader find it too unlikely. But “unlikely” is precisely what’s needed to galvanize your audience. Successful writers never sidestep the bizarre. Usually they kiss it on both cheeks. Here’s the opening chapter of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997):

As he sat in the usual morning traffic jam, he couldn’t help noticing . . . a lot of strangely dressed people about. People in cloaks . . . a huddle of these weirdoes whispering excitedly together. Mr. Dursley was enraged to see that . . . man had to be older than he was, and wearing an emerald-green cloak! [30]

Plausible gets boring! Study some 17th-century artist like Poussin who depicted every leaf on every tree. Then move along to an Impressionist landscape by Monet, Renoir, or Van Gogh. Those works are sloppier technically, far less “accurate”—yet far more convincing. Interest drives from the paradoxical flotsam that Real Life leaves around in plain sight. (Whenever my central air conditioning conks out, it’s always on a Saturday night after 9:00 PM.). Actual events are messy, asymmetrical—yet wield their own weird logic. So does any good start: “Today, the Army recovered a second crashed flying saucer in Roswell, New Mexico . . .” Will readers doubt or debate that opening premise? It doesn’t matter! You simply want to get them to (as the motorcycle bumper sticker has it) “Get on, sit down, shut up, and hold on.” Pretend you’re a journalist, driving into the desert to reach your next assignment. Logically, what would you want to

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have in the trunk of your car, in case of an emergency in the middle of nowhere? Here’s Hunter S. Thompson’s inventory from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971):

We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-power blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers . . . [31]

Faced with the unlikely and improbable, your reader’s imagination expands, as do the pupils of your eyes when you perceive something you like. That explains why classic sci-fi wastes no time in flaunting its other-worldliness. On the first page of 1984 (1948), George Orwell tells us that “all the clocks were striking thirteen.” [32] Weirdness flies in the face of the norm, upending everything you might hope, assume, or fear. To pack a greater wallop, the better to rivet the reader, any best-seller must offer as many extremes as possible: sweet/sour, tragedy/laughter, darkness/light. Even the smallest contradiction can strike sparks. Nicholas of Cusa, a medieval theologian, taught that “since the infinite is all, it has no opposite and no contrary. It is at once the maximum and the minimum, and is the perfect coincidence of all contraries. Cusa, like the Zen masters, affirms and denies the same thing at the same time.” [33] And so do many best-sellers. As with an Impressionist painting, the more contrasts crammed within its frame, the more vivid and dazzling its overall impact. Typically, you’ll find these contrasts and contradictions reflected in the settings where the narrative takes place. An

50 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER exotic, glamorous, inherently dramatic locale is sure to seize reader interest, but isn’t enough to maintain it. Knowing when it’s time to check out is a vital part of Strategy #2.

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Notes and References

[1] Kate Chopin, The Awakening (first published in 1899). Bantam Books, 1992, p. 17. [2] Sales reps use this Carrot—a book’s primary sales point, or “premise/promise”—to coax bookstores to accept copies on consignment. Most stores have up to 90 days to pay for copies sold and may ship back unsold books for full credit. Some stores return entire cartons without even bothering to unpack them! This explains why most publishers’ contracts mandate a three-month delay to adjust for returns before mailing out authors’ royalty checks. Books shipped between January 1 and June 30 are billed but not considered “sold” until the following September 30. Even thereafter, unexpected returns can erase any net balance due the author (namely, you). Now print-on-demand (POD) technology lets any publisher print few copies only as actual readers’ orders come in. This incurs no costs for storage or inventory. POD offers smaller publishers little incentive to publicize their books, but that’s a small price to pay. Nearly every POD copy shipped is a copy sold. Books downloaded on Kindle incur no shipping costs, and so pay a higher royalty based on list price (not net). They aren’t returnable and can’t be resold to anyone else who wants to read the book Te first version of the book you’re now reading was originally under contract to a novice publisher who listed it as “forthcoming” in her on-line catalog. A full year after I delivered the complete manuscript, she hadn’t even copyedited it! So with no advance to pay back, I terminated our contract. And year or so later she was out of business

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Moral: Be wary of any dead-tree publisher who doesn’t offer you at least a token advance against royalties. Such firms are typically low on cash and may have trouble staying afloat. [3] Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (1936). Macmillan, 1964, pages 96 and 110. [4] Kathleen Winsor, Forever Amber (1944). Ballantine, 1993, p. 58. [5] His erection might depict the result of a neck injury. Back when criminals were publicly hanged, witnesses noted that the dying men often became conspicuously tumescent and even ejaculated. Auto-asphyxiation can be a lethal aphrodisiac, as dramatized by Peter O’Toole’s on-screen father in The Ruling Class (1972), and in real life by underground cartoonist Vaughn Bodé and actor David Carradine. [6] Jesus sent out 72 followers to preach his message (Luke 10:1). Shortly after Jesus’ death, Peter spoke to a group of “believers” numbering about 120 (Acts 1:15). [7] Andrew Weil, M.D., Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body’s Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself (1995). Fawcett Columbine, 1996, p. 3. Can you spot all five Carrots in that subtitle? [8] Mary Pipher, Ph.D., Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Lives of Adolescent Girls (1994). Ballantine, 1995, pages 12 and 13. [9] John Gray, Ph.D., Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (1992). HarperCollins, 1992, p. ix. And some are from Alpha Centauri. [10] Too often, authors’ acknowledgments sound like an Oscar winner’s acceptance speech, thanking people we’ve never heard of. “Acknowledgments are difficult,” admits Harry T. Hunt. “Too few and you are an egotistical hermit, too many and the author emerges as a sort of academic sociopath.” See his

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front matter to The Multiplicity of Dreams (1989). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, p. xi. [11] Mars/Venus. See (9) above, pages 1-2. [12] Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995). Doubleday Anchor, 1996, pages 3-4. [13] Subway posters for the movie Alien (1979) featured the line, “In space, no one can hear you scream.” On one, somebody ne scribbled, “In New York, nobody can hear me scream either, so what’s the big deal?” [14] For a convincing refutation of Jaynes’s theory, see Robert Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians. Knopf, 1987, pages 108-167. [15] Jérome Carcopino, Daily Life in Ancient Rome, translated by E. O. Lorimer (1940). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968, p. 117. [16] In Oedipus Rex (circa 450 BCE), most of the “action” involves recalling past trauma and working through denial. No wonder Sigmund Freud mined the story to such advantage! One scene has a strikingly modern ring: Creon, Oedipus’s brother-in-law, suddenly discovers he’s also this man’s uncle and stepbrother! He quickly realizes that this murderous motherfucker, poking out his own eyeballs with his dead wife’s jewelry, is hardly fit to remain as King of Thebes. Speaking with the forced calm of a SWAT negotiator, Creon convinces poor Oed to step down. [17] The Oxford Companion to English Literature, compiled and edited by Sir Paul Harvey, Third Edition (1946). Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1960, p. 231. For a more approving take on what made The Monk tick, see Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1990). Vintage, 1991, pages 265-267. [18] Forever Amber. See (4) above, pages xi-xii. [19] F. Lee Bailey, The Defense Never Rests (1971). Signet, 1972, p. ix.

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[20] Lynn V. Andrews, Flight of the Seventh Moon (1984). Harper, 1991, p. xi. [21] Jackie Collins, Lucky (1985). Pocket, 1986, pages 3-4. [22] ——, Lady Boss (1990). Simon & Schuster, 1990, p. xiii. [23] Deepak Chopra, The Return of Merlin (1995). Fawcett, 1996, pages vi-vii. [24] Ibid, p. 3. [25] Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality (1971). Pocket, 1972; pages as given. Of the hundreds of rounds fired during the James Bond movies, not even one even grazes 007. Castaneda’s ectoplasmic adversaries seem similarly—and suspiciously—inept. [26] Exodus 7:16. This and all other quotes from scripture are from The Holy Bible, New International Version (1984). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing, 1984. I enjoy the majestic cadences of the King James Version. But to learn what’s really going on, I need this translation. Footnotes explain puns and poetic undertones in the original Hebrew and Greek— all lost on the Elizabethans who translated the KJV. [27] Exodus 14:11. The Ten Commandments (1956) and the animated film The Prince of Egypt (1998) both portray Moses as a Gifted Underdog. See Strategy #3. [28] I Samuel 19:10. Before each of Saul’s attacks, “an evil [or injurious] spirit from God came forcefully upon him.” Also see I Samuel 18:10 and 19:9. Like many best-sellers, the Bible makes life hard for its heroes and incites its villains to even greater malice. [29] Exodus 14:5, and earlier. Pharaoh is another conflicted leader in whom Jehovah coaxes out the worst! See “Three Strikes and They’re Still at Bat” in Strategy #7.

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[30] J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1997). Scholastic, 1998, p. 3. [31] Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971). Vintage, 1989, p. 4. [32] George Orwell, 1984 (1948). Knopf, 1992, p. 13. [33] Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters (1967). Noonday (Farrar, Straus), 1986, pages 289-290.

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56 STRATEGY # 2 Best Seats in the House

Attention, Motorists! New Jersey is CLOSED. —Billboard on Manhattan’s West Side Highway promoting “Late Night with David Letterman” and recycling W.C. Fields’s joke about Philadelphia

WHETHER IT’S A FICTIONAL SAGA like Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969) or non-fiction like And the Band Played On (1987), Randy Shilts’s chronicle of the AIDS epidemic, best- sellers whisk the reader [1] straight to where the action is—or is supposed to be. That’s why “Wall Street” and “Las Vegas” appear so frequently in the titles of popular books and hit films. That’s also why, as in Hollywood Wives (1983) and Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), the longed-for Utopia proves empty and unfulfilling, a metropolis where hopes are chronically dashed and high hearts typically wrecked. Sometimes the titles give fair warning of impending disillusionment, as in Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1837-1843) and Harold Robbins’s Dreams Die First (1977). Most popular novels exploit the old real-estate mantra: “Location, location, location.” They usher you into penthouse apartments, KGB safe houses, top-secret laboratories—the dramatic equivalent of Ground Zero, where the average Joe is denied entry. First, however, the authors whet your curiosity with a tantalizing peek at the imposing exterior. Just before narrating a confirmation hearing in the U.S. Senate, Advise and Consent (1959) lets us know how highly privileged we are to be granted a ringside seat:

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the Capitol cops had to be on duty at 7 A.M. to handle the crowd [which] began arriving shortly thereafter, and by 9:45 when the doors opened, was lined up four deep back from the doors, across the hall, and clear around the balcony of the front rotunda of the old Office Building, well over a thousand more than could possibly get in. [2]

Ironically, these exclusive corridors of power are rarely described in any great detail. But it’s crucial that one major character—serving as the reader’s surrogate—enjoys complete access. Best-selling protagonists march straight into the Oval Office, or MI5 Headquarters, or into the movie star’s dressing room. Then whoever is guarding the door 1) lowers his halberd, submachine gun, or phaser, 2) bows, kneels, or offers a warm smile, and 3) says something like “Walk in, sir!” or “Godspeed, Lady Jessica!” Like Moneypenny, M’s secretary in the 007 novels, these sentries’ only function is to demonstrate that the visitor’s familiar and welcome. This inner sanctum’s secrets will be revealed—frankly, if not entirely, while the reader eavesdrops.

Slush Pile Lesson #5: Be Where the Action Is

Editors who must endure the blizzard of awkward writing soon develop a sense of humor. We used to pass around laugh-out-loud query letters, some ignorant (“I’d like to interest you in my four-part trilogy”), others possibly clairvoyant (“My autobiography contains many events you’re already familiar with”). One writer had scoped out any competing fiction: “No other novel has been written about cattle farming in Oregon during World War II.” That letter illustrates the drawback of

58 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER seeking brand-new literary turf: If a topic or place has been ignored for very long, usually there’s some good reason. Some locales compel fascination. How are you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they wonder Is Paris Burning? (1965)? In reviews for The Winds of War (1971), author Herman Wouk caught flak for stationing his characters in improbably far-flung sites around the globe, simply to let them witness the major turning points of WWII. If this opportunism is a sin, it’s hardly original—not with Wouk, anyway. Kathleen Winsor flings Amber into Newgate prison, but lets her escape in time to watch Charles II’s coronation. When that party’s over, Amber flees town for several months, but returns to London so that she and the man she loves can catch bubonic plague. Bottom line: Never hint that any life-and-death conflict is taking place somewhere else unless you’re going to transport your reader there—soon, preferably in the very next scene. A best-seller’s main sales points are always its plot and characters, but its title often stresses the exotic setting. Wuthering Heights (1847) is even more sonorous and evocative in French translation: Les Hauts de Hurlevent, or “Highlands of the Howling Wind.” Jules Verne’s novels flaunt their travel plans: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in 80 Days (1873). If your title setting is irresistibly awesome—as in Treasure Island (1883), King Solomon’s Mines (1885), and Jurassic Park (1990)—be sure to deliver all the must-see attractions that locale implies. As you’ll soon see, keeping implicit promises to your reader is a major part of Strategy #4.

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Location, Location . . .

Quentin Crisp likened the vibrancy of New York City to the fizz of ginger ale on his scrotum. “The Magic Cottage,” a 1950s kiddie TV show, opened with the line, “Where anything can happen—and usually does.” The same can be said of Hogwarts, where Harry Potter learns wizardry. Shangri-La is only an enchanting backdrop. In fiction or non-, the ideal settings offer variety and imbalance, building energy and imminent change. They exploit the Paranoia Formula by matching grisly dangers with spectacular rewards. In Las Vegas, you can win millions and like Bugsy (1991), get riddled with bullets. On Wall Street, you can score billions and, like Gordon Gecko in Wall Street (1987) and get jailed for insider trading. Most of Dick Francis’s murder mysteries revolve around the pulse-pounding racetrack, where a jockey can wind up in the winner’s circle or just as easily get trampled to death. Exploring a locale’s downside squeezes the best out of any story. Peter Benchley’s The Deep (1976) opens on a sunny Bermuda beach, accessed by a creaking salt-corroded elevator that threatens to plunge his vacationing protagonists to their deaths. Most of Jackie Collins’s Chances (1980) takes place during a power blackout, making after-dark Manhattan even more dangerous than usual. Overwhelming odds heighten the fascination. To maintain a razor’s-edge balance, every opportunity should be counterbalanced by a threat. Every treasure should be guarded by a dragon. Your title can warn of such peril, as in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1709), Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), and Dickens’s Hard Times (1854). In inherently dicey terrain like The Lost World (1912)

60 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER or Casino Royale (1953), whatever skills a character brings to the table can’t guarantee success, much less survival. Every memorable protagonist—Odysseus, Aeneas, Dante, Hamlet, Horatio Hornblower, 007—is close kin to Michael Valentine Smith, the Martian protagonist of Stranger in a Strange Land (1961): a fish out of water, a greenhorn, an intruder on unfamiliar turf. To succeed against the odds, these characters need extra helpings of ingenuity, like the title character in TV’s “MacGyver.” Now you see why so many popular yarns take place in do-or-die settings where failure is no option: on battlefields, from Homer’s Iliad (circa 600 BCE) to Saving Private Ryan (1998). Aboard crippled ships and planes, as in films like Airport (1968), Das Boot (1982), and The Perfect Storm (non- fiction best-seller in 1997, hit film in summer 2000). Or in hospitals, as in Robin Cook’s medical thrillers ever since Coma (1977), Sidney Sheldon’s Nothing Lasts Forever (1994), and hit TV shows like “ER.” Whenever Jackie Collins and Mario Puzo want a healthy plot twist, they admit a character to Intensive Care. No matter where your characters wind up, always remind your reader what drew them there. In Vegas, greed or compulsive gambling can rivet them to the blackjack table. On Wall Street, let them witness the gut-wrenching fall of a recent IPO, which they bought only after it zoomed to $200 a share. At any minute, circumstances may change; characters can expect the reverse, or even worse. The very worst should be equally plausible.

Time to Check Out?

In his Poetics, Aristotle (384-322 BCE) decreed that stage dramas should unfold in real time, within the confines of a

61 TAM MOSSMAN single set. These strictures admit the “classical” tragedies of Corneille and Racine, but would outlaw the sweep and scope of Shakespeare’s plays. Many ancient Greek dramas, hobbled by Aristotle’s literal-minded dictum, sold short their audience’s imagination—which may explain why so many of these scripts have been lost. They were not compelling enough to be widely copied and thus, survive the centuries. Samuel Johnson’s remark, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” doesn’t hold true for fictional residents. Amber St. Clare often departs London for the countryside; at the novel’s end, she plans to embark for the American colonies. Not even Las Vegas is fascinating 24/7—as Mario Puzo’s Fools Die managed to prove, though inadvertently. No matter how idyllic, there are few locales where a reader wants to linger until the very last page. Countless best-sellers have focused on the motion- picture industry. “Lately,” writes producer Lynda Obst,

it seems as if [working in Hollywood] is the best of times and worst of times within the same day, the same hour, the same moment . . . The velocity of change is so staggering it creates a . . . revved-up struggle for survival in which one must constantly mutate to survive. I think this is why the movie business is equally popular as a spectator and participant sport. [3]

Yet in Harold Robbins’s The Carpetbaggers (1961) and Judith Krantz’s Scruples (1978), characters flee the sound stage for greener, quieter pastures. As any good screenwriter will tell you, changes of scene are not just refreshing, but mandatory. Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour never took the same Road twice.

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The Virtues of Geographical Promiscuity

The Godfather (1969) opens in a New York City courtroom, hops to a Los Angeles hotel suite and an Italian bakery, then cuts to the Long Island estate where Don Vito Corleone’s daughter is getting married. When the newlyweds depart, so does Puzo—following consigliere Tom Hagen to Los Angeles, then zipping back to lower Manhattan. And that’s all in the first chapter! Similarly, Arthur Hailey switches locations non-stop throughout his best-sellers Airport (1968), Wheels (1971) and The Moneychangers (1975). From the Acts of the Apostles (circa 90 CE) to The Alienist (1994), gripping narratives shuttle between glamour and rags, luxury and squalor, sickness and health. According to their flap copy, typical best-sellers sweep you from the reeking waterfront of Marseille to the War Room of the Pentagon, from a brothel on the Champs Elysées to the dungeons of Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison. It’s easiest to keep the action moving if your characters are too. In many romance novels, hero and heroine rack up plenty of frequent-flyer miles because travel offers predictable dangers, along with new rivals and seductive distractions. Casanova, always on the move throughout Europe, met far more women than if he’d stayed in one spot. With women, similarly: The more faithful a heroine longs to be, the farther she’s separated from the man of her dreams: Think Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1749), or Scarlett O’Hara. (In Gone with the Wind, she bears two children who never appear in the movie version.) Restless, distractible figures are fun to watch, as their impulses and appetites impel them from bed to bed, city to city. If dead broke, they stow away or get kidnapped. Or they hitchhike (like Sal Paradise in On the Road, 1957).

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Wealthier characters, with yachts and private jets at their disposal, find relocating easier, but their wanderings should still spring from some motive beyond mere whim. Are they being pursued (like Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, 1862)? Does a comeback role in a crazed director’s film shunt them from Wyoming to London? Is their band invited to play at the new president’s inaugural bash, and at the last minute, one of their roadies gets replaced by a terrorist? Many best-sellers save gas (and the reader’s patience) by locating mansions and shanties co-exist within a few blocks of each other. To facilitate Forever Amber’s shifts of scene, Charles II’s Whitehall Palace lies only a convenient stroll from rat-infested Newgate Prison. The Bonfire of the Vanities shuttles between glitz and the gutter, straddling the extremes of New York City. Sherman McCoy’s apartment on Park Avenue is worth at least $3.2 million (the price it eventually sells for). From there, we scoot south to a Wall Street investment banking firm, lavishly decorated with a

fake fireplace and antique mahogany mantelpiece with great bunches of fruit . . . carved so deep, you could feel the expense in the tips of your fingers.

Then it’s uptown to the holding cells in the Bronx’s Criminal Courts Building, constructed of white brick tiles, like a public bathroom,” reeking of vomit and human waste. [4] Such proximate contrasts offer the dramatic equivalent of one-stop shopping. Any rags-to-riches roller coaster keeps the reader on alert: What ascent—or plunge—waits around the next turn? In 1980s Manhattan, homeless men slept in cardboard boxes under the south wall of Central Park, right across 59th

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Street from the Plaza Hotel. There’s a premise that no novelist has exploited—yet! Upward and downward mobility in such close quarters would raise the stakes considerably, thereby maintaining the Paranoia Formula.

When Bad Things Happen in Good Places

In American Star (1993), Jackie Collins offers two radically different slices of Bosewell, Kansas:

Inside, [the trailer] was a crowded mess, with clutter everywhere—clothes, magazines, old newspapers and junk piled high . . . . In one corner was an unmade bed and on the floor, two moldy sleeping bags. [5] . . .

She made the tea in the spacious kitchen, putting the china cup on a tray with a matching saucer next to it containing several slices of lemon. Then she carried the tray upstairs to the master bedroom. [6]

Ironically, that elegant mansion will become a hotbed of rape and incest, while the novel’s hero and heroine enjoy their first rapturous tryst in a “threadbare” motel. This illustrates an important corollary of the Law of Contrasts, constantly employed by J.K. Rowling in her Harry Potter series. Many enduring yarns chronicle the trashing of a once idyllic site, as in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) or Michener’s Hawaii (1959). In James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970), a white-water river becomes a gauntlet of backwoods violence and depravity.

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Let appearances be deceiving. No place should be exactly what it seems. The safer it appears at first sight, the more lethal it should turn out to be, and vice versa. The Law of Contrasts explains the instinctive charm of the away-in-a-manger Nativity story. It’s why Agatha Christie typically arranges murders in posh country manors. It energizes novels like The Poseidon Adventure (1976) and Margaret Truman’s Murder in The Supreme Court (1982), where settings are both impressive and possibly lethal—and in movies like The Towering Inferno (1974), Air Force One (1997), and of course, Titanic (1998). [7] You need not serve up bliss and adversity in equal measures. If life is a bowl of cherries, one little spot of decay can threaten to spread. An oil slick only six inches wide can send a Formula racecar out of control. Eve foregoes eternal life by eating an apple. Baldur the Beautiful is slain with a dart of mistletoe. “But for a nail, the shoe was lost . . .” After drinking potion from a baby bottle, Disney’s “Hercules” (1997) becomes mortal. Peter Benchley—yet another writer whose first book became a best-seller—sets Jaws (1974) in a Long Island beach resort, with a great white shark prowling the waters offshore. Best-sellers seldom drop a fly in the ointment. They choose a scorpion instead. In the wake of Jaws’ success, dozens of me-too novelists started beating the bushes to flush out menacing varmints. In one blatant rip-off, a venomous tropical snake gets loose in Central Park—where in real life, it would soon succumb to skateboarders or carbon monoxide. In yet another also-ran, packs of feral cats are menacing suburbanites who, apparently, never heard of catnip or German shepherds. None of these critter-come-latelies were the stuff of nightmares. Any best-selling monster should be what zoning boards call an “attractive nuisance,” threateningly big and

66 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER impressively plus-sized. In fact, Benchley later rehashed Jaws’ premise in The Beast (1992): A giant squid—in reality, a denizen of the very cold, deep ocean—terrorizes the warm, shallows off Bermuda. Bad choice of title! “Beast” implies a mammal. Then again, Suckers wouldn’t work either.

The Office Where Credibility is Born

Right away, any self-help book must answer the reader’s unspoken question, Why should I trust you? That explains why, first chapters typically open in the doctor/therapist’s office or examining room. That privileged setting shows us that the author enjoys a successful practice. Furniture and decor are never described. Entire focus is on the patient who serves as a crash dummy, suffering the same complaints that may bedevil the target reader. The doctor or dietician then probes for clues that, only a page or so later, will lead to effective treatment. Authors who forego this standard preamble need considerably more time to present their credentials. In Do I Have to Give Up Me to Be Loved by You? (1983), authors Jordan and Margaret Paul identify themselves in their very first sentence: “We are psychologists and marriage counselors, married to each other.” [8] This statement offers a few slim Carrots—proven, practical techniques from veteran therapists whose marriage is alive and well. But with no case history to offer, the Pauls need several paragraphs to sum up various insights they’ve gathered over time. Because they present no testimony from clients, the reader must accept their expertise on faith. Best-selling doctors and therapists choose their case histories very carefully. Any M.D. has to put up with whiners

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and hypochondriacs, but the reader learns about only the least weepy patients, the most stoic and admirable. It’s no accident that those who get written up always agree to follow directions. In addition, they share many of the traits displayed by full-time protagonists, as spelled out in Strategy #3.

Inevitably, people change and evolve. But locales don’t, until nudged by an earthquake, tidal wave, or wayward asteroid. This is why even ordinary characters can easily upstage the most dynamic locale—and why canny authors are happy to let them. The Greek poet Homer lived sometime between 1200 and 800 BCE, though some scholars question if he ever existed at all. [9] Compare the title of his first work, the Iliad, meaning “Epic of Ilium [Troy],” with his second, the Odyssey—or “Epic of Odysseus.” His focus has narrowed from a city to an individual, from a fixed locale to one man’s journeys. Judging by the number of times these two stories have been adapted for film or TV, the Odyssey is more popular by far. Somewhere in the tangled underbrush of Paradise Lost, John Milton observes that no place is innately sacred, that only human worship makes it so. The same holds true for any “dramatic” location: As the old Broadway adage has it, No audience ever walked out whistling the scenery. Good actors can deliver superb performances on an empty stage. Soldiers create battlefields, not the other way around. In In Cold Blood (1965), murders take place in Kansas basement, playroom, and bedrooms. In The Bridges of Madison County (1992), Francesca Johnson’s affair with Robert Kincaid starts to simmer in her Iowa kitchen. Now you know why the Bible often abandons choice locales, even destroying them, before reader interest has a chance to wane. But in every case, the protagonists live on.

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Adam and Eve get evicted from Eden. Noah and family float out the Flood. Even before it’s incinerated, Sodom is a notorious hot spot. When the Lord God first gets the city in His crosshairs, Abraham wheedles and negotiates until He agrees to spare Sodom, if ten righteous citizens can be found within. To take the census, two angelic inspectors show up. Lot, recognizing them for who they are, bows down and invites the two to dinner. Soon afterward, “men from every part of the city . . . both young and old” surround Lot’s house. “Where are the men who came to you?” they call. “Bring them out so that we can have sex with them.” Rather than pimp out his guests, Lot offers to hand over his two virgin daughters (who, as we soon learn, are pledged to be married!) to “do with as you like.” Not willing to settle, the multitude tries to break in, whereupon the angels strike the intruders blind. They declare that Sodom has violated its parole, warning Lot that “we are going to destroy this place.” So well before God rains down “burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah,” Lot’s family has fled town. [10] The Pequod and Titanic go to the bottom. Many Restoration romances watch London’s burning in the Great Fire of 1666. After the climax of It (1986), a freak storm washes away most of the bedeviled town of Derry. In the film Armageddon (1998), a meteor wipes out Paris; while in Deep Impact (also 1998), bolides erase New York and Washington, D.C. Think of locations simply as bait to entice readers. But to keep them hooked, you need sharp characters. Victor Hugo titled his 1831 thick novel Nôtre Dame de Paris, after the Gothic cathedral where most of the action takes place. But because Quasimodo is the protagonist, all English

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translations and film versions are called The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Slush Pile Lesson #6: The Time Should Always Be Ripe

It’s a thrill to sit front row center in a Broadway theater —but only if the curtain is up, with actors about to come on stage. Back in 19th-century Paris, torture and public burnings were passé, so Hugo set Nôtre Dame de Paris in medieval times. If your setting’s some venerable city like Rome or Moscow, then choose those few lively weeks when the citizens endured a famine or siege, an occupation or revolt when everything was up for grabs, when—to satisfy the Paranoia Formula—too much was possible, when the weather was unsettled, and triumphs and tragedies were common every day. To make your reader feel more quickly at home, one or two figures should be already familiar, lodged in the popular imagination. For example, focus on Mrs. O’Leary, whose cow supposedly started the 1871 Chicago Fire. Dickens opens A Tale of Two Cities (1859) at a time bristling with possibilities—and boasts about it on his very first page: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness . . . .” [11]

Forever Amber’s London is “stinking dirty noisy brawling colorful”—more of an event than a city. [12] After a dour decade under Cromwell, the city welcomes a pleasure-

70 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER loving king back from exile in a frenzy of fireworks, strong drink, and testosterone. As is typical with medical best-sellers, Listening to Prozac (1993) begins in Peter D. Kramer’s office. At the time, as he makes clear, no one could be sure of this new medication’s efficacy or its possible side effects:

Toward the end of 1988, less than a year after the anti- depressant drug Prozac was introduced, I had occasion to treat an architect suffering from a prolonged bout of melancholy. [13]

Admitting his ignorance makes for suspense, as well as employing the perspective of a Gifted Underdog who must learn on the job. (As you’ll see in Strategy #3, the best way to provide exposition and background data is to tell how some character learns it, step by step.) Many aspiring amateurs pick time-space coordinates like Moscow before the 1917 revolution, or Krakatoa before its 1883 eruption. Then they simply mark time for days, even months, before the first rumble or gunshot is heard. There’s one sure-fire way to avoid this mistake. In Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983), William Goldman advises would-be screenwriters to begin any scene as late as they possibly can. By entering a story in progress, you automatically find yourself at a pivotal moment. That’s why when real-life movie stars get invited to parties, they always show up at least an hour late.

Slush Pile Lesson #7: Verify Your Active Facts

After Caitlin’s TV series was cancelled, she hoped her show-biz connections could help her become a successful

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literary agent. She sent me a historical novel with an intriguing gimmick: The author had transplanted the premise of Huckleberry Finn back to the first century CE. The opening chapter was set in the Mediterranean port of Alexandria. One night, a black slave escapes and stows away aboard a barge moored along the Nile. The skipper is a Hebrew named Jeshua. Together they float downriver, ever deeper into the African interior, where the protagonist hopes to rejoin his family, whom he hasn’t seen since he was kidnapped years before. At that point, I phoned Caitlin to remind her that the Nile flows north. If her author didn’t know that, what other background essentials had escaped him? One non-fiction best-seller of the 1970s mentions “nightingales” singing in the Province of Manitoba. But the nightingale is a European species, found nowhere in North America, much less Canada. Privately, the author assured me that she originally wrote “night birds,” which some entry-level copy editor changed. But this slip was incidental and so caused no real damage to her credibility. The Celestine Prophecy (1993), though a phenomenal best-seller, served up the archeological equivalent of a freeway pileup. First a mysterious manuscript is unearthed in Peru, in ruins built by the Maya (who never ventured south of Panama). Its nine Insights are written in Aramaic, an ancient language never spoken outside the Near East. But these impossible details remain in the background, exerting no impact on the course of the narrative. [14] Thereafter, Prophecy’s active facts are all solidly in line. For example, when the narrator arrives in present-day Peru, he hears everyone speaking Spanish, not Aramaic. Nor (conveniently!) does he ever glimpse the Manuscript itself, only copies of a (convenient!) English translation.

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In stark contrast, the northward flow of the Nile is an active fact, determining where any drifting barge can possibly wind up. Caitlin’s client could have solved his logistical problem by equipping that barge with a sail. An editor I’ll call Jack once contracted a Restoration romance, one of Forever Amber’s countless offspring. After their requisite setbacks, the lovers reunited in London on the eve of the Great Fire. To demolish wooden buildings in the path of the flames, the hero used dynamite, which Alfred Nobel wouldn’t invent for another two centuries. Jack solved the problem by deleting dynamite throughout and substituting gunpowder. The novel went on to decent reviews and a mass-market sale.

Adding Life with Killer Details

Any historical novel must feature characters who fit plausibly in their time frame—sort of sci-fi in reverse. But authors can risk getting bogged down in extraneous authenticity, like this:

On that fateful day in 1774, the Reverend Joseph Priestley was startled by the heat and fierce brightness of the flame before him. He was heating mercuric oxide. The mysterious substance, flowing from the neck of his hand-blown glass retort, vigorously supported the combustion of the candle he held nearby. Not for another thirteen years, in 1787, would a cabal of chemists across the channel in France bestow upon this gaseous element the name of oxygen, meaning acid-forming, in recognition of the ability of some oxides to form acids.

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Little did Priestley know that his new discovery—dephlogisticated air, he called it—was the same odorless, colorless gas that he’d been breathing since birth, and which he would continue to enjoy even more, in the form of fresh air, after he emigrated to Pennsylvania. [15]

This is accurate in every detail, but not much fun to read. Best-sellers flaunt their expertise with small but pungent Killer Details—counter-intuitive trivia that readers could never imagine on their own. Did you know that England’s Charles II hardly resembled his subjects?

The product of many nationalities, he looked far more a Bourbon or a Medici than . . . a Stuart. His skin was swarthy, his eyes black, and he had an abundance of black shining hair. [16]

All through Forever Amber, the 17th century gets resurrected with similar transfusions of folklore, bygone customs, and medical arcana:

Page 30: Only very little girls and professed whores were called Miss.

Page 182: “[Actors] can’t be arrested, except on a special warrant . . . they’re his Majesty’s servants and enjoy protection of the Crown.”

Page 373: It was believed to be bad luck if the bride did not weep.

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Page 455: It was characteristic of plague to vary its nature with each victim.

Page 716: Heretofore, men and women had not gone swimming together . . . one steadfast decency still respected by a wicked, decadent age.

Page 785: The auctioneer measured down an inch of candle and stuck a pin into it, the candle was lighted, and the bidding began . . . .

Page 787: In just a few moments, the pin would fall out. Whoever had made the last bid took the prize. [17]

Killer Details should be brief, snappy—and always relevant to the topic at hand. (Captive flamingos must be fed regular meals of live shrimp or their plumage will lose its vivid pink color. But that adds nothing to the point I’m trying to make.) As the voice-over narrator in The Go-Between (the 1977 film version) states, “The past is a different country. They do things differently there.” Suppose your novel transpires in Manhattan back in 1822. If your heroine says, “I walked into Bloomingdale’s this morning and never wanted to leave!” her listeners should be appalled. That was the year a unit of New York Hospital—which was known as the Bloomingdale Asylum—admitted its first mental patients. In fantasy and sci-fi, inhabitants of any alien civilization should behave in notably alien ways. In Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), Stilgar—a citizen of the dry, sandy world of Arrakis— is meeting his new off-world ruler, Duke Leto Atreides, for the first time. The mood is growing testy. Duke Leto utters a conciliatory statement to placate Stilgar—who then

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stared at the Duke, then slowly pulled aside his veil . . . Deliberately he bent over the end of the table and spat on its polished surface.

Enraged by this insult, the Duke’s men surge to their feet. Then the more knowledgeable Duncan Idaho speaks up:

“We thank you, Stilgar, for the gift of your body’s moisture. . . Remember how precious the water is here, Sire. That was a token of respect.” [18]

Like the snap of a ringmaster’s whip, this quick reversal jolts the reader to attention. Similar surprises have coaxed Dune fans to plow through nearly a dozen sequels, now being written by Herbert’s son Brian and his partner, Kevin J. Anderson. Novelists have mined known glamour spots like ancient Athens, Imperial Rome, and Victorian London to the point of familiarity. If you choose one of these oft-trodden turfs for your setting, stake a personal claim by including Killer Details of your very own. Conversely, if your setting is ho-hum and low- key (rural Nebraska, suburban New Jersey), include little- known Killer Details to jolt readers out of their complacency. Dick Francis was a former champion jockey with an encyclopedic knowledge of horses and the racetrack, but he never restricted his mystery novels to that field of expertise. His various first-person narrators always explore the arcana of some wholly unrelated discipline: fine art and arson (In the Frame, 1976), wine (Proof, 1985), or jewelry and gemstones (Straight, 1989). Before writing The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961), Irving Stone paid to have all of Michelangelo’s surviving letters translated into English for the first time and hired a North Carolina stonecutter to teach him how to carve marble. That

76 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER helped him understand—and narrate—how Michelangelo went about creating his ambitious sculptures. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994) rode the NYT’s hardcover best-seller for four years. But John Berendt’s earlier research took him twice that long. First he decided to

make Savannah my second home. I would spend perhaps a month at a time in Savannah, long enough to become more than a tourist, if not quite a full-fledged resident. I would inquire, observe, and poke around wherever my curiosity led me or wherever I was invited . . . Over a period of eight years, I did just that. [19]

Slush Pile Lesson #8: Customize Your Props

The manuscript on my desk turned out to be a disaster novel—in both senses of the term. The author had a workable premise: Earth was undergoing a spasm of its tectonic plates. In his first chapter, the CIA re-directs a spy satellite from its geocentric orbit around the equator, into a polar orbit—in three minutes flat! That calls for a hairpin 90-degree turn that not even a kid on a skateboard can manage. Later in the novel, earthquakes make a skyscraper whip back and forth, swatting helicopters out of the air. This writer’s chief problem (aside from having flunked physics) was a tin ear for plausible dialogue. In one groan-aloud scene, he convenes the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a White House briefing on this ongoing geological calamity. One general turns pale, whereupon the President whispers to an aide, “Get the general a glass of water!”

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Given that high-power setting, ordinary H2O seems far too bland. Wouldn’t the Oval Office would be equipped with bourbon, from the fictional Chief Exec’s home state of Tennessee? Cocaine, fresh from a diplomatic pouch? Maybe a Cuban cigar, not to be inhaled? If an object’s worth mentioning, let it suggest its owner’s character. Think of the pistol that murderer-to-be Jim Williams brandishes in the first chapter of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil—or later on in Midnight, of the handful of graveyard dirt that a Voodoo practitioner flings on the courthouse steps. Children’s books routinely animate objects into full- fledged characters, as in The Velveteen Rabbit (1920), Paddle- to-the-Sea (1941), and Goodnight, Moon (1947). Disney’s animated Beauty and the Beast (1991) did the same. In Stephen King’s yarns for grown-ups, seemingly harmless objects attain a creepy life all their own. Consider the wind-up toy in his short story, “The Monkey,” or the Plymouth Fury in Christine (1983). Here, in King’s description of an overgrown garden in It (1986), his anthropomorphic words appear in bold face:

To the left, a high board fence . . . lurched drunkenly in and out of the dank shrubbery. About halfway down this fence, Richie could see a monstrous grove of sunflowers . . . They had a bloated, nasty look he didn’t like. A breeze rustled them and they seemed to nod together: The boys are here, isn’t that nice? More boys. Our boys. Richie shivered. [20]

In an expert writer’s hands, even mute inert marble can assume a recognizable personality. From The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961):

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If ever a mason came to think that he was master, the stone would oppose and thwart him. And if the mason beat his stone as an ignorant contadino beat his beasts, the rich warm glowing breathing material became dull, colorless, ugly, died under his hand. To kicks and curses, to hurry and dislike, it closed a hard stone veil around its soft inner nature. It could be smashed by violence but never forced to fulfill. To sympathy, it yielded: grew even more luminous and sparkling, achieved fluid forms and symmetry. [21]

No matter how exotic a setting, its full-time residents view it as familiar, even normal. In the Arctic, the thawing of pack ice produces unearthly shrieks and groans. The Inuit are inured to this uproar every spring, so think nothing of it. So to express the wonders of any outlandish realm, you should bring in at least one Ignorant Witness—some tenderfoot new to the scene, like Lemuel Gulliver in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), who can’t take Lilliput or Brobdingnag for granted. Forever Amber’s London is populated by jaded roués who’ve done it all, or had it done to them. But because L’il Amber grew up in rural Maygreen, she views this wicked city through the naïve eyes of a 16-year-old provincial. At the wedding festivities that open The Godfather, most guests are long-time Mafiosi. So Puzo invites a WASP and total innocent, Kay Adams, to whom her fiancé Michael Corleone can confide the nuances of mob life. Later on, Puzo will expound on the Cosa Nostra in his own narrator’s voice. But this early on, to raise reader curiosity, he lets Kay ask, “You mean your father was shot by gangsters?” [22], along with other dumb questions that a reader might be too bashful to ask.

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Whether it’s The Other Side of Midnight (1974) or the latest edition of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, every best- seller is written from some single individual’s point of view. If the narrative grows complex and lengthy, as in any of James Michener’s historical sagas or Raymond Massey’s Nicholas and Alexandra (1967), points of view get parceled out among a number of different “reporters.” But each must be a keen observer, alert and able to recognize (and communicate) whatever the reader must know. As you’d expect, such “I am a Camera” figures are more numerous in novels, where they can be invented on the spot, whenever the need arises. They’re rarer in non-fiction. There, the author/reporter must either track them down or else piece together the narrative by himself, holes and all.

Slush Pile Lesson #9: Choose A-Plus Eyewitnesses

I hated to reject those might-have-been manuscripts that almost worked, but which missed by a hair—where one minor, but lethal, shortcoming scuttled the entire effort. One of my keenest disappointments was a non-fiction narrative that unfolded in Scotland, on the shores of a long glacial lake stretching 20 miles in a northeasterly direction— Loch Ness! Feeling increasingly certain this book could be a real winner, I devoured every page. A man and wife from Detroit (Bob and Joan, as I’ll call them) were vacationing in the Highlands. They’d brought along Bob’s aging father, Howard, in hopes that “a change of scene might do him some good.” They rented a car in Edinburgh and took the A82 that runs from Invergarry along the loch’s western shore. Bob wasn’t accustomed to driving on the left side of every road. He still felt mildly jetlagged, and steering his wife

80 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER and father through a looking-glass world demanded constant alertness that soon grew tiring. Shortly before noon, he was glad to pull off onto the road’s left shoulder. The weather was blustery and overcast. To their left lay a boulder-strewn meadow. To the right—across the road—was the Loch. Leaving Howard in the car, Bob and Joan clambered out and looked for a fairly level, sheltered patch of grass where they could unpack the picnic lunch from last night’s B&B. As you learned from Herman Wouk, at least one character must be ideally positioned to observe what’s going on. And Howard definitely was! From the back seat of that rental car, the old man had a clear view across the road to the water’s surface. All at once, something enormous—dark gray in color, shaped like nothing Howard had ever seen—rose from behind a clump of alders 100 yards away and flung itself into the shallows with a visible splash. “Lord have mercy!” Howard exclaimed. Then he burst into tears. Months later, back in Detroit, a professional writer interviewed Bob, Joan, and Howard, tape-recorded their recollections, and featured their accounts in a fresh inquiry into what the loch’s elusive denizen might be. Dutifully but deftly, he summed up previous sightings of Nessie, each time setting up some hypothesis for Howard’s recollections to confirm or shoot down. Was the creature a surviving plesiosaur—a marine reptile known from Cretaceous fossils? Earlier writers had speculated that it was an unknown species of long-necked seal, perhaps a fresh-water squid. (As you know, giant squids thrive in cold, deep seawater—and Loch Ness is deep and cold.)

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Howard’s sighting might be a tie-breaker. Whatever he saw—and of possibly more significance, what he didn’t see— could scuttle some theories, once and for all. The author’s buildup was informative, enthralling. Bob, a geologist by trade, had been to Scotland before. He offered Killer Details about the prehistoric glacier that scooped out the loch. Joan described tiny white daisies she’d seen blooming in the grass, and the violent squall churning up whitecaps a few miles to the north—which may have accounted for the creature’s having ventured into shallow water. Being a professional wedding photographer, she even provided shots (taken after the fact) of the water from Howard’s point of view, snapped from inside the car. But Howard was the key witness, the only one who’d glimpsed whatever it was. The manuscript’s entire success hinged on the testimony of an elderly man who dropped out of school at age 15 and worked on an auto assembly line ever since, until his retirement six years before. How big was the creature he saw? “Eeeh, I dunno!” Sizable? “Not as big as Leviathan, but pretty big.” Its color? “Gray, like I tol’ you. Or maybe brown? It warn’t black, or white or gold like the lilies of the field. Gray, about the color of the sky. . . I guess.” The writer was wonderfully tactful, supportive, and patient. But Howard clearly had problems that no change of scene could cure. During interviews, the old man wept a lot, making constant references to Scripture. He was convinced that he’d seen the Beast mentioned in the Book of Revelation. He’d been terrified, until he recalled that “Jesus was watching over me. My faith preserved me.” Getting desperate, the writer tried pandering to the old man’s obsessions. “The Beast of the Apocalypse has seven horns. Did you notice any horns or protuberances?”

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“Ennh, I didn’t see no heads. Even if I had, I would of been too skeered to count!” Howard didn’t want to remember any details, “’Cause I never hope to see nothing like that, never again.” With a pro at the helm, this manuscript took longer to fall apart than most failed offerings. But when a passenger jet disintegrates on its final approach, it’s just as deadly as one that crashes on takeoff. Given Howard’s defects as a witness, the book’s conclusion offered no solid payoff, only frustrations. Sorry, not right for us . . . .

If Loch Monsters do exist, likely one will show itself again, sooner or later. But silent film stars must remain silent forever more. In Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close-Up (1990), Bob Colacello mourns a best-seller that should have been—the memoirs of Paulette Goddard:

She wasn’t just a retired movie star, she was a real femme fatale . . . whose personal life was more interesting than anything she’d done on the screen, [although her roles in] Modern Times, The Great Dictator, The Women . . . and twenty-five other (mostly) hit films were nothing to sneeze at.

After divorcing Chaplin, Goddard had married Burgess Meredith, then novelist Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), and “had been involved with some of the major figures of the century, including George Gershwin, Henry Wallace, General George Patton, Diego Rivera, and Willy Brandt, then the chancellor of West Germany.” Various admirers had gifted her with gems amounting to “half the mineral wealth of Burma.”

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Previously, Goddard had agreed to tell her life story to Anita Loos, but the project went nowhere. In March 1974, publisher William Jovanovich gave Warhol a contract to tape- record Goddard’s recollections and transcribe the results. “If only she would tell us something!” Andy moaned. But Goddard seemed bored by what everyone else wanted to know and refused to divulge anything beyond the obvious.

No matter what we asked, Paulette seemed to find it “too psychological” or “too banal.” Whenever Chaplin came up, Paulette would say something short and vague, and then freeze her face into a frown, as if it were too painful to go any deeper. [23]

Harcourt Brace rejected the manuscript and asked for a return of their $50,000 advance. Fortunately, Warhol could afford to pay it back.

The most effective witnesses are like sponges—flexible, willing to get down and dirty, able to soak up large amounts of sensory detail and squeeze it onto the printed page. (The impressionist Claude Monet was the visual equivalent. As Paul Cézanne said of him, “He was only an eye, but what an eye!”) H.P. Lovecraft stated that “the best weird tales are those in which the narrator or central figure remains . . . largely passive and witnesses or experiences a stream of bizarre events.” [24] In Lovecraft’s stories, just as in Stephen King’s and Edgar Allan Poe’s, narrators seldom emerge as distinct personalities. They’re vaguely drawn on purpose, making it easier for any reader to identify with them and walk that last mile in their shoes, step by nervous step. But as Howard demonstrated to everyone’s sorrow, any chosen witnesses must be qualified observers. (Think of all the

84 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER paleobotanists, biochemists, and computer jockeys in Jurassic Park—or, for that matter, the technocrats in any Michael Crichton novel.) Ignorant at the outset, they don’t remain so for long. They’re fast learners, willing to spend all night in the lab to sort things out, letting no salient clue slip past. When ignorance and intelligence hook up, their offspring is hungry curiosity—as is obvious at the opening of any crime novel or murder mystery. Even if the homicide investigators are forensics experts, initially they have no idea who the culprit might be and must begin at square one—so the reader can learn right along with them. In many psychological and medical best-sellers, the author/expert often admits to ignorance, as did Dr. Kramer in Listening to Prozac. But then professional know-how kicks in, speeding the discovery process with fewer false starts. The reader can watch the puzzle assemble itself ever more quickly, as in time-lapse photography.

Slush Pile Lesson #10: Be Good Company

William Goldman warns, “If you don’t like being with Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, not all the plot skill in the world is going to make [your book] a happy journey.” [25] A New York dramaturge earns her salary by evaluating new scripts for production. “After the first two or three pages,” she says, “I can tell if a playwright likes other human beings. Are the characters special, cherished in some way? If so, that shows in the very first lines of dialogue. “When a playwright likes his characters, the audience can too. Then the script’s got a shot, and I pass it on to our director. On the other hand . . .

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“Just last week, this jerk calls me at home at 1:00 A.M. and goes, ‘Ah, but it’s only ten o’clock here in Beverly Hills! You finished my script yet?’ “ ‘Yes,’ I told him and interrupted with a long yawn. ‘It is one A.M.” “ ‘Well? What did you think?’ “ ‘I don’t think an audience wants to spend two hours with characters you sneer at for being needy and tiresome!’ He hung up on me, and I went back to bed. Fade to black.” Most beginning writers would present Ebenezer Scrooge as a sociopath. But under Dickens’s compassionate gaze, that crabbed, stunted soul displays a redemptive spark that makes his later transformation not only welcome, but plausible. (For more on dealing with your worst blackguards and miscreants, see Strategy #7.) Your reader wants to spend time with the people in your book, whether real or imagined. That explains why almost all personalities featured in best-sellers are a breed apart. They display specific—often contradictory and surprising—traits rarely found in any sample population. This observation refutes the egalitarian view voiced by Linda Loman about her husband Willy in Death of a Salesman (1949): “He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being . . . so attention must be paid.” Always beware the passive voice! No reader must pay attention to any individual character, no matter how deserving. In real life, people pay millions more to watch the Kentucky Derby than they ever donate to the various horse rescue-and- rehab charities trying to scrape by. On TV, Ralph Kramden and Archie Bunker were visibly incarnated by Jackie Gleason and Carroll O’Connor. But on the printed page, most average Joes tend to fade into stereotypes.

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In “Storm of the Century,” Stephen King’s 1999 TV miniseries, snowed-in residents of Little Tall Island are mostly sympathetic—but generic, interchangeable. Followed too long or too closely, they’d grow boring. So when fair weather returns, most are forgotten. Best-selling personalities are a delight, not a duty. They resist being stereotyped, displaying unique mixes of appearance, temperament, age, and class. Yet at the same time, they also share eight common characteristics, and at least a few of them are trait or talents that most readers can envy. Their winning, compelling psychological profile beats at the heart of Strategy #3.

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Notes and References

[1] Wherever syntax permits, I use the singular reader. After you have grown too old to have bedtime stories read aloud to you, any good book becomes a solitary pleasure that you needn’t feel ashamed of. At live plays and movies, however, audience reaction— laughter, gasps, applause—becomes part of the fun. Too many sitcoms simulate this sense of community with laugh tracks. The very best TV comedies, from “The Honeymooners” up through Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, and “All in the Family,” had the guts to record episodes in front of live audiences. But never think of your reader as part of a mob. The larger your imagined audience, the greater your risk of “page fright” in the form of writer’s block. Even if tens of thousands eventually read your book, they must do so individually, one at a time. Therefore, always address your reader as a single individual. As I’m doing with you right now. [2] Allen Drury, Advise and Consent (first published 1959). Doubleday, 1959, p. 241. [3] Lynda Obst, Hello, He Lied—and Other Truths from the Hollywood Trenches (1996). Little, Brown, 1996, p. 224. [4] Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). Farrar, Straus, 1987, pages 56 and 459. [5] Jackie Collins, American Star (1993). Pocket Books, 1993, p. 37. [6] Ibid., p. 83. [7] In line with the Law of Contrasts, several military historians note that whichever army sports the spiffier uniforms usually loses the war.

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[8] Jordan Paul and Margaret Paul, Do I Have to Give Up Me to Be Loved by You? (1983). Compcare Publications, 1994, p. 7. [9] IMHO, both the Iliad and the Odyssey show evidence of being cobbled together from episodic folk tales. Homer (whoever and however many he was) operated much like Shakespeare and the Brothers Grimm—he was a prospector of premises, digging up the best yarns he could find and polishing them for his listeners’ delight. [10] “Then the Lord said, ‘The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me.’” (Note that as of this early date, God was not viewed as omnipresent, but localized— “up there.”) For the complete transcript of Abraham’s last-minute negotiations with the Almighty, see Genesis 18:16-32. For Honest Abe’s narrow escape from Sodom, see Genesis 19:1-13. What happens next? Lot and his daughters hole up in a mountain cave. With the daughters’ fiancés gone up in smoke, they get their father drunk and seduce him—not once, but twice!—to “preserve our family line.” Both give birth to sons, who in turn will found the Moabite and Ammonite lineage. (See Genesis 19: 30-36.) [11] Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Signet, 1980, p. 13. [12] Kathleen Winsor, Forever Amber (1944). Ballantine, 1993, p. 28. [13] Peter D. Kramer, Listening to Prozac: A Psychiatrist Explores Anti-Depressant Drugs and the Remaking of the Self (1993). Penguin, 1994, p. ix. [14] In the movie Spartacus (1960), one Roman soldier forgot to take off his wristwatch. But he was only an extra, with

89 TAM MOSSMAN no lines to speak. Kirk Douglas, playing the title role, was careful to leave his Rolex in the dressing room. [15] This is my own pastiche. You’ll find all the facts, plus a few of the clunkier phrases, in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, 7th Edition, Volume 12. McGraw-Hill, 1992, p. 632. [16] Forever Amber. See [13] above, p. 36. [17] Ibid., pages as indicated. [18] Frank Herbert, Dune (1965). Putnam’s, 1984, p. 92. [19] John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story (1994). Random House, 1994, pages 36-37. [20] Stephen King, It (1986). Signet, 1987, p. 356. [21] Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961). Signet, 1992, p. 48. [22] Mario Puzo, The Godfather (1969). Putnam’s, 1969, p. 24. [23] Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close- Up (1990). HarperCollins, 1990, pages 209, 215, 216, and 286. [24] Quoted by Joyce Carol Oates in “The King of Weird,” The New York Review of Books, October 31, 1996, p. 49. [25] William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983). Warner Books, 1984, p. 185.

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90 STRATEGY # 3 Gifted Underdogs

Surrendering to tears would be so easy, satisfying . . . victimhood was seductive, a release from responsibility and caring . . . failure would no longer generate guilt but, instead, would spawn a comforting self-pity. —DEAN KOONTZ, Intensity [1]

CAN YOU GUESS WHAT ALL THESE CHARACTERS have in common?

Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis and Paradise Lost; Ophelia in Hamlet; Huckleberry Finn; Candy in Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s novel; Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia in Star Wars; Charlie Tomlinson in Stephen King’s Firestarter; Christopher Boone in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night- Time; and animated heroines like the Little Mermaid, Princess Jasmine, and Pocahontas.

They have no mothers to guide them! Their only parental relationship is with their father. Mom is either removed from the scene long before the story opens, or else she remains offstage and is hardly mentioned at all. Brünnhilde is the pivotal character in Wagner’s Ring cycle (1853-1870), featured in the last three of the four operas. Wotan, her father, appears in the first three. Yet Erda, Brünnhilde’s mother, appears only twice—briefly in the last scene of The Rheingold (1853), and again in Act 3, Scene 1 of Siegfried (1869), for a heated exchange with Wotan. Otherwise,

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Erda rests beneath the earth in “endless sleep,” [2] leaving Brünnhilde to defy Wotan on her own. In Disney’s The Lion King (1994), Simba’s mother, Sarabi, appears in only a few opening scenes. For the rest of the movie, she’s off hunting, leaving Simba to interact with his father Mufasa and the malevolent Scar. How come these fictional moms are specifically, glaringly absent? Because every mother’s duty is to protect her children from making poor choices and risky decisions. To dramatize this point, imagine the reverse: Martha Wayne, having survived the bullets that killed her husband Thomas, having a heart-to-heart with her son Bruce:

“Doesn’t that hood with the pointy ears restrict your vision? And keeping all those toxic chemicals in your utility belt—is that wise? Insurance premiums on your Batmobile are eating up your trust fund! If criminal elements trouble you so much, why not donate to the Gotham City Patrolman’s Benevolent Association?”

In James Michener’s Space (1982), teenager John Pope makes love to his girlfriend, Penny, in his own back yard,

where they could not be seen from the house. . . It was past one when they put on their clothes . . . From an upstairs window, Mrs. Pope called, “John . . . You’ll catch your death of cold.” [3]

After John drops Penny off, he visits the university observatory and peers through the telescope before returning home—to this reception:

“Just who in hell do you think you are?”

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John was startled. He had never before heard his conservative father swear. . . “John,” his mother called . . . She was in her nightgown, and it was evident that she had been crying. . . . “You are not to roam the streets like rabble, John Pope . . . And if you do go somewhere like the observatory, have the decency to telephone us. We care deeply what happens to you, Son.” [4]

Having immediate ancestors like these two prompts young John to achieve escape velocity. Protagonists with dead dads and living moms are rare— and conspicuously unfortunate. In Greek drama, there’s Electra, Orestes and Oedipus; in Shakespeare, Coriolanus and Hamlet; and in Nabokov, Dolores (AKA Lolita) Haze. Most of these offspring come to a premature, unhappy end. Paradise Regained (1671) is an action-free epic whose hero, Jesus, lives with his mother, apparently a widow. In the very last line, He “home to his mother’s house private[ly] return’d.” Being the Virgin Mary, she likely enforces a strict curfew. Only where the title characters are adorably young—as in Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) or Disney’s Dumbo (1941) [5] and Bambi (1942)—do single mothers play a pivotal role. Even so, suspense in these stories revolves around their youngsters’ physical safety. When there are too many kids for Mom to handle, Disney provides a real father in 101 Dalmatians (1961) or a surrogate dad in The Aristocats (1970). Now you can easily guess what unites the individuals in this next group:

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Ishmael of Moby-Dick, Peer Gynt, Oliver Twist, Rhett Butler, Blanche DuBois, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, Homer’s Ulysses and Leopold Bloom (of Joyce’s Ulysses), Peter Pan, Bruce Wayne’s ward Dick Grayson, Superman, Mary Poppins, Winnie the Pooh, O (as in Story of . . .), 007, Hunter S. Thompson, and the nameless narrator of The Celestine Prophecy.

As far as anybody can tell, they’re orphans every one. In the cases of Superman, Batman, and 007, both their parents died when their sons were still young.

Best-Selling Characters’ Absent Ancestry

Johnny Edge, protagonist of Harold Robbins’s The Dream Merchants (1949)

didn’t remember much about his own parents. They had been killed in an accident . . . when he was about ten years old. [6]

In Lolita (1955), “hero” Humbert Humbert’s mother dies when he’s aged three. [7] Some years later, Humbert’s father passes away, practically unnoticed: “A little money had come my way after my father’s death.” [8] In Jackie Collins’s Rock Star (1988), three of the main characters

were all orphans in one way or another. Shaleen had no family. Rocket had long ago disowned his. And Bobby had left [his cousin] Fanni and [her husband] Ernest’s with no regret. [9]

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The parents of Kinsey Millhone, the first-person heroine of “E” Is for Evidence (1988) “were killed when I was five.” [10] These characters never need to borrow the car keys. They can careen off on whatever foolhardy joyride they please, with no parental supervisor to tsk-tsk or tut-tut. And notice, not one ever mourns or bothers to lay flowers on a grave. Then why, dramatically, should those in the first group keep their fathers around at all? Mainly to spark conflict. These parental authorities are either: (1) So conservative, strict, and/or amoral that their children get fed up and feel justified in defying them. Kate Croy’s father makes his one appearance in the opening scene of The Wings of the Dove (1902), making it clear that his daughter despises him. King Triton, father of The Little Mermaid (1989), constantly voices his prejudice against air-breathers and destroys her beloved collection of human artifacts. Or else these fuddy-duddy daddies are. . . (2) So weak and ineffectual that their children must protect them. Think of Jim Backus, as James Dean’s apron- wearing dad in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), or Belle’s bumbling father Maurice, in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991), or the hypnotized Sultan, Jasmine’s father, in Aladdin (1992).

When both parents are defunct or effectively absent, letting the kids drift into trouble, one or more parental surrogates often get recruited to pinch-hit. After Alice falls down the Rabbit Hole, she must depend on the advice of eccentric Wonderland locals. In The Turn of the Screw (1898), Flora and Miles’s uncle abandons them to a governess who must protect them from malevolent ghosts. The

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Little Prince (1943) visits a series of small planets, pondering the lifestyles of each planet’s lone resident. In John Grisham’s The Client (1993), young Mark’s alcoholic “ex-father” is divorced and long gone. In a flashback, we learn that Mark’s mother, Dianne, was of no help during her husband’s rages. But her son, then seven, subdued his father with a baseball bat. “When he was nine, Mark convinced her to file for divorce,” [11] and for the past “five years Mark had been in charge of [his younger brother] Ricky.” No wonder he feels “like an 11-year-old father.” [12] As the novel begins, Dianne Sway is still “scared and uncertain.” [13] Just as her husband swayed when drunk, Dianne vacillates whenever she’s called on to make decisions. After Mark witnesses a Mob-related suicide, she’s unable to cope. Thereafter, Grisham brings her onstage as briefly as possible, letting attorney Reggie Love (Susan Sarandon in the 1994 movie) replace her as an assertive and accomplished surrogate mother.

Eight Essentials for Best-Selling Characters

As an author, it’s hard to delight readers all by yourself. Like the manager of a five-star resort, you must assemble a knowledgeable, efficient staff. They can appear as secondary characters or protagonists, narrators or case histories—but must be equipped to perform their crucial roles. Sherlock Holmes was a devoted reader of the “Agony Column”—the advice-to-the-lovelorn feature in Victorian newspapers. It gave him glimpses into human nature, whose endless vagarities he could never have imagined on his own. For a similar reason, I like to peruse the one-star reviews on Amazon.com, to see which defects readers hate the most, and the most often. One common complaint leveled against

96 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER both novels and non-fiction is that no character is “likeable.” None is selfless, intriguing or admirable enough to justify hours of reading time. H.P. Lovecraft admitted that he “could not write about ‘ordinary people’ because I am not in the least interested in them.” [14] In any best-seller, all the major characters are extraordinary in some way. They may be princes of the Church, as in Morris L. West’s The Devil’s Advocate (1959) and The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963), or Nobel Laureates as in Irving Wallace’s The Prize (1962), or automobile engineers as in Arthur Hailey’s Wheels and Harold Robbins’ The Betsy (both 1971). Note that they have not inherited their high offices. They have fought to achieve them, been elected to them, or both. What specific traits do they share in common? First and above all, they are

1. Strongly—and comprehensibly—motivated Their drives are basic and neurological, comprehensible to any reader. Think greed (as in most of John Grisham), true love (The Bridge Across Forever, 1984 and The Bridges of Madison County, 1992), revenge (The Other Side of Midnight, 1974), ambition (Valley of the Dolls, 1966), or self-preservation (Alive! and Deliverance, both 1970). They don’t need to share the average reader’s interests, ethics, or personal goals. But whatever these alpha protagonists aim for, it must offer them both a chance to triumph and the threat of disaster—as the Paranoia Formula requires. In Trevanian’s The Eiger Sanction (1972) and Shibumi (1979), “heroes” Jonathan Hemlock and Nicholai Hel are both professional assassins with extremely refined tastes. Bilbo and Frodo, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and E.T. the Extra- Terrestrial prove that characters needn’t be human, as long as their motives are. Pinocchio, the Tin Man, and the Velveteen

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Rabbit are not even of flesh and blood—but still driven by familiar fears and longings that stir young readers. Now you know why novels set in the high-power world of art dealing sell so poorly: It’s nigh impossible to describe a fictional artist’s output in dramatic terms. Until someone tries to steal a painting or vandalize a sculpture, it just sits there as an eye-candy prop. (For more on how best-sellers handle art objects successfully—as MacGuffins—see Strategy #6.) Steve Martin’s novel An Object of Beauty (2010) took the risk of including four-color reproductions of actual (but third-rate) artworks mentioned in his narrative. Unfortunately, they serve as too-vivid distractions that easily upstage Martin’s imaginary characters. Meanwhile, Robert Hughes’s chronicle of modern art, The Shock of the New (1980) remains in print. If you love art, you’ll prefer a non-fiction book illustrated with images you don’t need to imagine. The few successful novels about the art world are fictionalized biographies of artists, as in W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence (1919), or Irving Stone’s Lust for Life (1937) and The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961). Inanimate objects should offer their covetous would-be owners both a reward and a curse. Whether it’s a sword that makes you King of England, Nazi-looted gold bars stashed in a Swiss bank, or an alien spaceship fossilized in Arizona sandstone, it implies consequences to quicken the pulse of any reader who has one.

2. Energetic Every time I wade into Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (1913), I’m defeated by the hypochondriac, bedridden Leonie Octave. “There is very seldom a time,” she whispers, “when I don’t feel faint.” [15] In her passive “life of complete inertia,” Leonie speaks “in low tones, because she believed there was

98 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER something broken in her head and floating loose there, which she might displace by talking too loud.” [16] Her best friend, Eulalie, is “a limping, energetic, deaf spinster,” to whom Leonie might say

twenty times a minute, “The end is come, my poor Eulalie!” Twenty times, Eulalie would retort with “Knowing your illness as I do, Mme Octave, you will live to be a hundred.” [17]

Eulalie has more patience than I do. In his best-selling Ghost Story (1979), Peter Straub writes that “energy is always beguiling.” That’s as true of puppies and kittens as it is of Anne Shirley, the orphan doing business as Anne of Green Gables (1908). Dynamic characters don’t laze around in bed— or not for long, anyway! Something unexpected (buxom starlet, severed horse’s head, phone call from Strategic Air Command) jolts them awake. Whereupon they prove themselves to be

3. Efficient and decisive Catherine Alexander, waiting for to be interviewed for a job in The Other Side of Midnight (1974), overhears her prospective boss asking for a back issue of Life magazine. She dashes down to a nearby barbershop, brings up a tattered copy—and gets herself hired. Like her, most best-selling characters make apt, sound choices, creating their own luck and as the Spaniards say, seizing time by the forelock. While still a Unitarian minister, Horatio Alger, Jr. published his first boy’s book in 1864. Two years later, he was accused of molesting teenage boys, left the church (“Fired? I quit!”) and went on to write rags-to-riches novels in what’s now

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known as the Young Adult category. Several bore titles like Ragged Dick (1867) and Ben’s Nugget (1882) that would lift Freudian eyebrows today. Alger also penned From Canal Boy to President (1881), a fictionalized biography of James A. Garfield. All told, he published roughly 130 novels with total sales of 40 million copies. But after Alger he died in 1899, his reputation withered. Today, you’ll find many of his titles free on the Internet, where they are presented as naïve curiosities. Critics complain that he used his formulaic story arcs featuring essentially the same hero. They accuse him of spreading the falsehood that hard work alone will guarantee success. Similarly, a critic lambasted Tom Clancy because his recent novels “celebrate can-do military types.” [18] But Alger and Clancy both exploit a truism verified by centuries of good storytelling: Characters who accomplish a goal are more fun to read about. They’re self-starters who can generate more action in fewer pages. Often they’re overachievers like Robinson Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson, or a workaholic like Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged (1957). Irving Stone has his fictional Michelangelo observe that “the artist was a man who had to work all the time.” Though Michelangelo lived to be 89, Stone has him muse that

The years were so short, the frustrations so numerous, that unless he labored at the top of his capacity, he could never achieve a body of work. [19]

4. Curious about the outside world Intensely, relentlessly so! This trait is prompted by—and compensates for—the entry-level ignorance that (as you learned

100 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER back in Strategy #2) is a requisite shortcoming in any protagonist. Many slush-pile characters are the equivalent of Zen monks, spending page after page in solitary contemplation. But in good writing as in real life, self-examination is like sword-swallowing—fascinating to watch if you know exactly what you're doing, but gruesome if you don’t. Some speculate that Sigmund Freud sat at the head of his consulting-room couch so that patients wouldn’t notice if he dozed off. After psychoanalysis became popular, scholars devoted more attention to reflective characters like Hamlet and Richard II than to extroverts like Hotspur and Falstaff. Following “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) and the coming-home traumas of the Great War, introspection took on an exaggerated significance. Poetry was quickly overrun with self-absorbed verse. Later, inevitably, navel-gazing spread to first-person novels, still later to Portnoy’s Complaint (1967) and Something Happened (1990). Even John Fowles, who should have known better, followed this fad in Daniel Martin (1977).

Up to age six or seven, children talk about themselves non-stop. By the time they reach their teens, they’re restricting their internal weather reports to avoid boring their friends. As adults, they learn that not every blog’s worth reading, that not every confession will sound meaningful and courageous to everybody else. Self-expression is only as interesting as the self you’re trying to express. That’s why best-selling characters get out of the house (and into those tight spots where they shouldn’t be), where they must constantly interact with others.

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Shakespeare doesn’t leave Juliet alone on her balcony, talking to herself. He follows each of Hamlet’s soliloquies with a dramatic confrontation. In The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Holden Caulfield cares deeply for others—especially his old girlfriend, Jane Gallagher, and his 10-year-old sister, Phoebe. His passionate curiosity about what makes people tick makes him a keen observer, especially of those he doesn’t particularly like. The unexamined life may not be worth living. But as Sebastian Dangerfield proves in The Ginger Man (1960), it can be fun to read about!

5. Vulnerable To balance the Paranoia Formula, you should narrow the odds to zero. Whatever horse you’re betting on should be ahead by a nose, then behind by a length, with Win, Place and Show in doubt until the photo finish. Heroes—and main characters, generally—should never be safe from disaster. Achilles couldn’t be wounded, except in his heel. Superman must beware of Kryptonite. In Peter Benchley’s Jaws (1974), police chief Martin Brody and ichthyologist Matt Hooper should arm themselves with depth charges (a dependable recipe for shark-fin soup). Instead, they bring only deep-sea fishing tackle. Rather than requisition a steel-hulled Coast Guard cutter, they set off aboard the leaky wooden Orca. Best-selling characters regularly display flaws that could be professionally or literally fatal—as with Reggie’s drinking problem in Grisham’s The Client; Sherman McCoy’s hubris and poor judgment in Bonfire of the Vanities (1989); or plain ignorance in most of Mark Twain, in Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), and every children’s classic you can think of.

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Willfully ignorant characters (political dupes, religious fanatics) lose reader sympathy—usually on purpose, because their author wants to get walled off, isolated emotionally, in the foreknowledge that they’ll meet with a bad end. The average slasher movie plunks a granfalloon of teenagers in a vacant house, armed with nothing but flashlights. These characters are appealing only because (A) they’re better- looking than 99% of the population and (B) can claim youthful naïveté as their excuse for not recognizing oncoming danger, like Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie (1945) or Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar (1963),. Those over 30 but still emotionally “sensitive” are presented as grotesques, like Edgar Allan Poe’s Roderick Usher or Sonia Kaspbrak in Stephen King’s It (1986).

6. Woefully unequipped for the challenge at hand At first blush, this trait might seem counter-intuitive. But gaps in experts’ knowledge let the reader sympathize with them. When push comes to shove—as it always should!— protagonists are seldom armed with anything beyond their wits. To expose a terrorist sleeper cell and avoid becoming their next target, can they learn what they need to know? In time? Along with suspense and dramatic tension, being unprepared demands personal expansion and evolution, which help heighten reader rooting interest (see Strategy #7). Like Robinson Crusoe and Sherman McCoy, best-selling characters typically thrown into unfamiliar surroundings where brand-new rules apply. “Wily” Odysseus gets marooned on a series of unlikely islands in the wine-dark Mediterranean, where his Trojan War know-how must face bizarre new challenges. Bureaucrat Jack Ryan, aboard a nuclear sub in The Hunt for Red October (1984),

103 TAM MOSSMAN must improvise on the spot. That governess in “The Turn of the Screw” may be a fine nanny, but she’s a lousy exorcist. No matter if the book is a spy thriller, a steamy romance, or even non-fiction self-help like The Road Less Traveled (1977), challenges always hurtle out of left field. But protagonists survive because they are

7. Imaginative, confident and determined This trait is closely related to Essential #3, “Efficient and decisive.” No matter how overwhelming the odds may get, best-selling characters always mount one last effort—which is born of their healthy self-esteem. Don’t confuse confidence with feel-good optimism! Many popular characters nurse a cynical grudge against the world, trusting in nobody but themselves. Think hard-boiled Philip Marlowe, Travis McGee, or Hunter S. Thompson’s persona in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971). Yet these cynics still aim for the best—not out of idealism, but because thy know that going for the gold improves their chance of winning the silver. Outwardly, they may present themselves as rebellious and unconventional. But ADHD protagonists like Sebastian Dangerfield or “Sal Paradise” (as Jack Kerouac calls himself) in On the Road (1957) are anything but aimless. They’re simply obeying their own personal navigation systems. In The Agony and the Ecstasy, Michelangelo thinks

The Pope had not done right by him, but that did not free him from doing right by himself. . . . He was a victim of his own integrity, which forced him to do his best. [20]

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These characters may dance to wildly different drummers, but you’ll catch your own foot tapping. So that your reader can do the same, always distinguish “good” determination from “bad” stubbornness like “Stay the course” or dumb stick-to-it-ivity. Real-life gamblers keep playing the same one-armed bandit till it devours their last quarter. Best-selling characters prefer to even the odds with a game of skill, preferably an exotic one like baccarat or chemin de fer. Better yet, they open their own casino, as does Lucky Santangelo in Chances (1980) and again in Lucky (1985). If main characters lack some admirable essential, they should envy it or aspire to it. Noble motives can serve as good compensation for actual achievement. Should you need case histories for a non-fiction book, now you know what kind of people you should interview for the best raw material.

Versatile, enjoyable realistic villains also exhibit these first seven essentials! This is no paradox. Examine best-selling heroes more closely, and you’ll see that all of them

8. Display a whiff of the sociopath Of course that’s true of 20th-century fiction’s so-called anti-heroes. But you can trace this trait all the way back to Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis. When captured by the Cyclops, Odysseus gives his name as Nemo (“Nobody”), then drives a red-hot log into the creature’s single eye. In order to smuggle his crewmen out of the giant’s cave, he has each one cling to the belly of a departing sheep. The blinded Cyclops, frisking the fleecy backs of his herd, feels only wool. The Libation Bearers is the second “act” of Aeschylus’s Oresteia (458 BCE). Orestes, the young privileged heir to the

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royal family, kills his mother—who cheated on his father, Agamemnon during his long absence in Troy and on his return, murdered him—along with Aegisthus, formerly her lover and now king of Argos. Notice that Shakespeare replays these same dynamics with Hamlet, Queen Gertrude, King Claudius, and the late King Hamlet. Hamlet Junior is verbally abusive to his mother and girlfriend, then stabs her father, Polonius, in a fit of manic glee. In Henry IV, Part 1, Prince Hal loiters in taverns with small-time thieves even while Hotspur, an attractive nuisance, plots to take over the kingdom. Macbeth, Othello, and Richard III are all title characters who shed innocent blood. Though intellectually gifted, Raskolnikov goes to prison for a double murder in Crime and Punishment (1866). Huck Finn runs away from home and dresses in drag. Scarlett O’Hara preserves her girlish crush on Ashley Wilkes while marrying suitors whom she scorns. Amber St. Clare betrays every man who loves her. None of her three children is sired by any of the men she’s married to. 007 has a license to kill. Trevanian’s Jonathan Hemlock, another hired assassin, delights in insulting people. “Who is this Mr. Dragon?” asks Hemlock. “My superior,” another character says. To which Hemlock replies, “That doesn’t narrow the field much, does it?” [21] This antisocial streak even crops up in children’s books, especially in ones authored by men. Adam Gopnik points out that Peter Pan’s “motives are suspect and his desires vainglorious. Mary Poppins is essentially benevolent, but also cruel, conceited, and unpredictable.” [22] Dr. Seuss gives young readers the house-wrecking Cat in the Hat (1957) and the sticky-fingered Grinch (who also debuted that same year) whose “heart was two sizes too small.”

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Misbehavers can identify with wolf-suited Max in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963). Before best-selling characters confess to any guilt, they weigh their words. At the tender age of 11, Mark Sway of The Client (1993) is already a chronic liar. In Forever Amber, long-term lover Bruce Carlton tells a landlady that he’s Amber’s husband, because

he thought the truth was none of the woman’s business, and he offered [her only] a hundred pounds because he believed it might impress her more than a larger sum, which she would probably not expect to get. [23]

According to psychological studies, women tend to seek approval from peers and neighbors, even if that means agreeing not to compete with them. Not Amber St. Clare, who “never believed that . . . other women were important to her . . . happiness.” [24] Isadora Wing, flexing her extramarital muscles in Fear of Flying (1973), is alone at her personal controls—a sexual Amelia Earhart, with no close pals to egg her on, as in TV’s “Sex and the City.” If fictional heroines do have one close friend, they use her mainly as a sounding board, simply because dialogue makes it easier to reveal a character’s mindset. Nan Britton, Amber’s maid, is her only confidante. In Princess Daisy (1989) the title heroine has no friends except her (conveniently nearby) roommate, Kiki Kavanaugh. Before sleeping with The Horse Whisperer (1995), publishing hotshot Annie Graves admits she’s “ruthless.” Her only friend is Lucy Friedman, co-worker and “deputy” at the magazine where Annie rules as editor. When Lucy gets fired, Annie faxes her boss an ultimatum: “if he didn’t reinstate Lucy .

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. . she would resign.” The publisher accepts Annie’s resignation, and she never contacts Lucy again [25]. This dynamic holds true in real life. According to Hollywood producer Lynda Obst,

The most driven of women are likely to be solo players—“lone rangers,” as some of the most talented women producers are called. [26]

Like Mark Sway, many best-selling protagonists are actually villains-in-training. Their better impulses just happened to kick in first.

Slush Pile Lesson # 11: Don’t Get Even in Print

Aspiring novelists often base their villains on real people—on ill-tempered employers and lying boyfriends who left them holding a grudge. Won’t these lowlifes feel mortified when they see their misdeeds thinly fictionalized in cold print? No, because such manuscripts never get published! Editors can always detect such “authentic” bad guys because of one typical trait: They’re boring! They’re caricatures, the literary equivalent of shooting-gallery targets—hardly complex enough to keep an editor from skimming ahead. Effective villains are seductive, distinctive, memorable. Like those bizarre heavies who used to confront Dick Tracy and still bedevil Batman, they’re often physically outlandish. The Man with the Golden Gun (1967) has three nipples. Cruella de Vil sports black-and-white hair. Dr. Hannibal Lecter has

six fingers on his left hand . . . The hand [is] shapely . . . and the middle finger perfectly replicated. It is the rarest form of polydactyly. [27]

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Unlike zombies—literally brain-dead, expendable and interchangeable—durable villains like Dr. Moriarty (“the Napoleon of crime”) and the Phantom of the Opera are talented and accomplished, brilliant men who could rise high in any chosen profession. Their lack of scruples lets get away with stuff we often wish we could. In a New Yorker cartoon by William Hamilton, a businessman admits, “I was a ruthless, driven, unfeeling son of a bitch—and it worked out extremely well.” [28] Best-selling novels often pick historical time periods that showcased spectacular bogeymen like Genghis Khan, Jack the Ripper, or Billy the Kid. Despite their outsize reputations, these long-shadowed figures left few specifics behind them. That sets any author free to re-construct them virtually from scratch, adding plausible speculation to our few known facts.

Great Characters are Dreamed Up, Not Born

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis has been profiled in several best-selling biographies, starting with Jackie Oh! (1978). Then Jacqueline Susann tried fictionalizing her in Dolores (1976), but the novel fizzled. How come? Because a notorious enigma loses much of its allure when someone tries to explain it from close up, in plausible terms. Inscrutability is a large part of its appeal. Now you understand why some “public” figures have captured and held the popular imagination—like Howard Hughes, they’re glamorous but also, intensely private. For whatever reason, most are women: Greta Garbo, Mata Hari, Marilyn Monroe, the Black Dahlia. They’re like old- fashioned roses, with petals so tightly packed that their interiors remain invisible. Fictional characters are like morning glories— slow to unfurl, but finally letting us see straight to their hearts.

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Agatha Christie’s novels are translated into 44 foreign languages and have sold more than one billion copies in English alone. In her 80th year, Dame Agatha complained that fans kept asking her, “Do you take most of your characters from real life?” To this “monstrous suggestion,” she made this “indignant denial”:

No, I don’t. I invent them. They are mine. They’ve got to be my characters—doing what I want them to do, being what I want them to be—coming alive for me, having their own ideas sometimes, but only because I’ve made them become real. [29]

As movie director Rob Reiner points out, “If you’re going to be accurate, it limits your ability to be as dramatic as you might like to be.” [30] Rather than exhume any real-life villain, you’ll find it easier (and lots more fun) to invent your own, assembling them like Frankenstein’s monster. Just as memorable heroes have a few disreputable traits, so intriguing villains reveal dashes of nascent virtue and true innocence. Conflicts spawned by this inner dichotomy energize Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886); bad- moon-rising films like Lon Chaney, Jr.’s The Wolf Man (1941); An American Werewolf in London (1991); and comic books heroes like the Incredible Hulk. Like the man who—in Steven Leacock’s analogy— jumped on his horse and rode off in all directions, many best- selling characters are bundles of contradictions. Mark Sway is a “tough little boy, who threw rocks through windows and outsmarted killers and cops and raced fearlessly through the dark woods.” Reggie Love calls him “remarkable”:

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At times he thinks like a terrorist, then he cries like a little child . . . But don’t tell him. It may upset him and, hell, who knows what he might do? [31]

Given their versatility, such characters discover new ways to raise hell and steal heaven, wreaking creative havoc along the way. Dean Koontz, on a publicity tour for his best-selling Intensity (1996), said, “Strangely enough, it’s easier to make an evil character believable than a good one.” [32] That’s true enough for non-fiction. In true-crime narratives about a Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gayce, you can simply report the facts, letting any murderous motives remain inscrutable. In Helter Skelter (1974), Vincent Bugliosi never bothered to venture inside Charles Manson’s head. But in best-selling fiction, the villain’s motivations must be not only explained, but familiar and compelling enough to make the reader feel a guilty kinship: There, but for God’s grace, go I . . . Koontz went on to observe that it’s “difficult to write about [virtue] and make it convincing, to write about a character who is basically noble.” [33] True, because authentic saints avoid the spotlight. Modesty leaves them reluctant to perform in front of a live audience. After curing a man of leprosy,

Jesus sent him away at once with a stern warning: “See that you don’t tell this to anyone.” [34]

Characters who do present themselves as noble are nearly always hypocrites. Exposing them has fueled lots of enduring tales, from Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale” (circa

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1400) and Tartuffe (1664), up through Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry (1927)—as well as successful non-fiction. And the Band Played On (1987) unmasks a major AIDS researcher as an opportunist. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994) reveals that some Savannah do-gooders weren’t as selfless as their press releases would have you think. Happily, there are simple, time-tested ways to make characters noble and believable: (1) Show them doing good in secret. St. Nicholas, 4th-century bishop of Myra in Asia Minor, strolled beneath the windows of an impoverished Lycian household and flung in three bags of gold coins, to provide the three daughters with dowries so they wouldn’t resort to prostitution. (2) Portray the writhings of some reluctant saint. To paraphrase Shakespeare, some people are born virtuous, but those who have virtue thrust upon them offer the best dramatic potential. Best-sellers overflow with protagonists who just as soon stay home, but who get shanghaied into responsibilities too big for them (thus fulfilling Essentials #5 and #6). Examples abound: Odysseus, Hamlet, Frodo in Lord of the Rings (1954- 1955), Han Solo in Star Wars (1977). Eddie Murphy in 48 HRS (1982) and Sean Connery in The Rock (1996) are furloughed from prison so that lawmen can exploit their streetwise savvy. The spy, sleuth, or gunfighter coaxed out of retirement for one last assignment is an overused cliché—yet it resonates because sooner or later, each if us feels forced to do the right thing. Have a jaywalker cross at the green, not in between— but to recue a runaway baby carriage, not simply to reach the other side. This way, every stumble becomes doubly dramatic, satisfying the Paranoia Formula.

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No Moaners Need Apply

In The Silence of the Lambs (1988), Dr. Hannibal Lecter admits to killing one of his patients. “Frankly, I got sick and tired of his whining,” Lecter admits. “I expect most psychiatrists have a patient or two they’d like to refer to me.” [35] Best-selling novels don’t brake for losers. Instead, they step on the gas. And successful non-fiction is equally impatient with human frailty In Parliament of Whores (1994), P.J. O’Rourke endures the boring Bush-Dukakis race for president by “waiting for Kitty Dukakis to explode.” [36] From Vamps & Tramps (1994), here’s Camille Paglia’s take on feminist Andrea Dworkin who, as The New Yorker reminds us, was “routinely lambasted in the media for depicting sex as a fearsome, brutal thing:” [37]

. . . wallowing in misery, she is a “type” that I recognize after twenty-two years of teaching. I call her The Girl with the Eternal Cold. This was the pudgy, clumsy, whiny child at summer camp who was always spilling her milk, dropping her lollipop in the dirt, getting a cramp on the hike, a stone in her shoe, a bee in her hair. In college, this type—pasty, bilious, and frumpy—is constantly sick from fall to spring. She coughs and sneezes on everyone, is never prepared with tissue, and sits sniffling in class with a roll of toilet paper in her lap. [38]

The higher you rise in society, the fewer complaints you’ll hear from those around you. Capote, Gerald Clarke’s 1988 biography, reports a cruel but instructive example. After befriending the recently divorced wife of a TV personality,

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Capote used his social clout to “nudge her into Hollywood’s inner circle.” Eventually, she accepted a coveted invitation to an A-list luncheon. No sooner had she walked in the door than she “startled the guests by announcing that she was sick and needed fresh orange juice.” Instead of sympathy, she received withering contempt. “You’re a pain in the ass,” fumed a legendary director’s wife. “If you’re really sick, you shouldn’t have come!” [39] As she learned the hard way, jet-setters live in a sanitized world of fresh flowers and azure skies. They’ve no patience for illness, poverty, or hard luck. (That very lack of compassion makes them A-list villains!) When fictional characters suffer a physical affliction, it’s never as trivial as sniffles or PMS. More like Harrison Ford’s broken finger in Blade Runner (1982). Or leprosy, as in Ben-Hur (1880) and Lord Foul’s Bane (1977). In Deliverance (1970), Ed—played by Jon Voigt in the 1972 movie version— takes a broadhead arrow through his side. From Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), which won a Pulitzer Prize:

Her hip hurt every single day—but she never spoke if it. Only Halle, who had watched her movements closely . . . knew that to get in and out of bed, she had to lift her thigh with both hands. [40]

Though not immediately life-threatening, these afflictions are agonizing. Yet the characters don’t even whimper. Mark Sway takes three “vicious” slaps from a Mob lawyer, then peers in the mirror to assess the damage: “His left eye was puffy and looked awful . . . He’d looked worse after fights at school. He was tough.” [41]

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These characters seldom let any injury stand in their way. Like the old sick joke about the barbed-wire banister, it might slow them down, but doesn’t stop them. Consider Nick Angelo, title character of Jackie Collins’s American Star (1993):

His [broken] nose continued to throb, and he was in serious pain. So why did he feel like singing? . . . Lauren was only another girl . . . yet he had a hard-on that could crack ice. [42]

Interviewed in Playbill back in the 1970s, Tammy Grimes said that when an actress weeps on stage, she gains the audience’s sympathy. But by trying not to cry, she wins their respect. Keeping that in mind, let’s call Capote’s protégée Pamela and make her into a best-selling heroine. Her luncheon with the Beverly Hills élite might start out something like this:

The chance she’d been planning for weeks—and today, she could hardly swallow! Strep throat, the doctor said. Pain seared Pamela’s throat as she hurried down the walk to Carla di Toscana’s front door. The glazed terra cotta tiles under her feet, she knew, had been imported from a 17th-century Spanish monastery—a birthday surprise from Carla’s fourth husband. Pamela glanced at the gardens flourishing on either side of the path. Not one leaf of the weeping Ficus, not one blade of Bermuda grass was out of place. On the other side of the high adobe wall, she heard assured voices and confident laughter from Carla’s other guests.

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Thank God, I’m not the first to arrive! She stepped up to the massive oak door, rose to her full height, and gave the doorbell a firm jab. Chimes resounded deep within. Inside lay a gilded, French-polished, perfumed world where ugliness and clumsiness were sternly banished. “Your voice seems hoarse!” Carla said. “Too much Chivas Regal,” Pamela replied. “Back when I was in boarding school in Connecticut.”

Hardly great writing, but it doesn’t need to be. In this fictional makeover, Pamela has grown suave and observant. Her unspoken thoughts are brave and entertaining. Her motivation is clear, along with her grit and determination. She’s now good company. Thus, despite her streptococcus infection (always be specific!), she has a shot at acceptance by a roomful of snobs.

Insulate Your Live Wires

Zeus, king of the gods, wooed many a mortal woman, presenting himself as a swan to Leda, a bull to Europa, a shower of gold to Danaë. After Semele bore him a son, she said it was high time that he reveal himself in his true form. Reluctantly, Zeus agreed. His unshielded glory burned Semele to a cinder. Let’s call it the Semele Syndrome: Whenever your main character is too handsome, too talented, too anything, your reader may pull away, feeling outclassed and vaguely envious. But minimize or ignore a character’s sterling qualities, and the reader may question your values or accuse of you of bad faith. Solution: install a circuit-breaker between the reader and your paragon, in the person of some thoroughly ordinary observer/reporter.

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Sherlock Holmes’s powers of deduction can make him seem remote and inhuman, like one of the Mentats trained to think like computers in Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965). So Arthur Conan Doyle never forces us aboard the great detective’s high- speed train of thought. Instead, he lets John H. Watson, M.D. recount each case as it unfolds to his own slow understanding. Watson’s queries lure Holmes out of his shell down from his ivory tower. When Sherlock proclaims that the answer is plain as day, it’s Watson—not the reader—who feels rebuked. Doyle didn’t invent this tactic. In Plato’s Dialogues (circa 330 BCE), Socrates asks simple questions that coax the listener along, sidestepping details that might raise an argument. Similarly, Walter Scott uses meek, ineffectual Frank Osbaldistone to mute the dazzle of his title character in Rob Roy (1817). In Wuthering Heights (1847), the magnetism between Heathcliff and Catherine might overload the wiring of a proper Victorian reader. So the unrequited lovers are viewed through two filters: Nelly Dean, the housekeeper who witnessed their anguished yearning, and Mr. Lockwood, the mild-mannered narrator who pieces their story together. Many best-sellers employ this kind of surrogate— witnesses more intelligent than Loch Ness Howard, but who remain baffled, can’t explain or justify and so, leave awkward questions hanging. If answers don’t come hard and fast, it’s seemingly their fault, not the author’s. Mind you, this sleight of hand takes practice. In his first novel, Red Dragon (1981), Thomas Harris takes too many pages to recount serial killer Francis Dolarhyde’s abusive childhood, his weird personal mythology, and very first murder. But in Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, published seven years later, serial killer Hannibal Lecter remains an enigma. Almost

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everything we learn about him comes through the understanding of FBI agent Clarice Starling—a Gifted Underdog. In Silence, Lecter gets far less exposure than Dolarhyde in Dragon, but looms much larger in the reader’s imagination.

Defusing Reader Rebellion

According to Carl G. Jung, the Shadow is a powerful archetype that embodies—and seeks to express—whatever aspects of our personalities we seek to repress or deny. I suspect that in formulating this concept, Dr. Jung was inspired by Newton’s Third Law of Motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Back in college, I saw this principle acted out— literally!—when we undergraduates staged Richard III. (Given my dramatic talents, I helped ticket-holders find their seats.) Following the last performance, we struck the sets, scrubbed backstage grime off our hands, and the closing-night party began. But first, the curtain rose again, on a bare stage. Minor actors and stagehands came on to perform a fast-forward parody of the play. Every detail of the production—especially the lisps of the two little boys who’d played the doomed princes in the Tower—was fair game. Within fifteen minutes, we gleefully released all the resentments and annoyances repressed during the long nights of rehearsal. Such manic mood-reversals are as old as stagecraft itself. In ancient Greece, plays were staged in groups of four: three tragedies, followed by a so-called satyr play—a brisk, ruthlessly obscene farce that satirized the foregoing trilogy. (Centuries later, TV’s “60 Minutes” borrowed the same sob- sob-sob-DUMB! rhythm: three segments of investigative journalism, then Andy Rooney.)

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Purists often blame Shakespeare for profaning his tragedies with laughter. Witness the dirty puns in Hamlet (circa 1600), the drunken porter in Macbeth (1606), the Fool in King Lear (also 1606). But the Bard knew best: Bright highlights make gathering gloom seem darker still. Alfred Hitchcock admitted using humor to manipulate his audiences and as a form of closure, to start nudging them up a new slope of suspense. I’ve seen Psycho (1960) several times in theaters, with a live audience. After the harrowing shower scene, Anthony Perkins bundles Janet Leigh into the trunk of her car and rolls her car into a swamp . . . where instead of sinking, it floats. Cut to a reaction-shot of Perkins’s face, registering shocked dismay. At this moment—just before Leigh’s car burbles down into the muck—the audience always giggles. Why? Because the preceding sequences have been extremely intense. Viewers seize this moment to blow off nervous tension. The Third Law assures that whatever emotion you seek to evoke, the reader wants to react in a contrary direction— defiantly, if unconsciously. The Third Law justifies Oscar Wilde’s quip that “Only the hardest of hearts can read the death of Little Nell without laughing.” In Pollyanna (1913), the title character’s optimism is so relentless that popular counter- reactions have made her name a derisive term, familiar even to people who’ve never heard of Eleanor Porter’s novel. The Third Law packed ’em in at midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), where members of the audience—most of whom had seen it many times before— yelled wisecracks at the screen. Voicing scorn for the film’s silliness set them free to actually enjoy it, weekend after weekend.

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The Third Law inspires bumper stickers like DRUNKS AGAINST MAD MOTHERS and STOP GLOBAL WHINING. To watch the Third Law at full blast, check the editorial cartoons a few weeks after Inaugural day. Every newly sworn President enjoys a benign honeymoon with the media—for three or four months, tops. Then practically overnight, ridicule and sarcasm erupt from every side. Clever authors use the Third Law’s spring tension to effect “surprise” reversals—which are planned well in advance. For example, in John Willoughby’s first appearance in Sense and Sensibility (1811), Jane Austen really piles it on:

[Their gazes] were fixed on him with an evident wonder and a secret admiration . . . he apologized for his intrusion . . . in a manner so frank and so graceful that his person, which was uncommonly handsome, received additional charms from his voice and expression. Had he been old, ugly, and vulgar, Mrs. Dashwood’s gratitude and kindness would have been secured by any act of attention to her child; but the influence of youth, beauty, and elegance gave an interest to . . . her feelings. [43]

After enduring this smashing first impression, the reader feels gratified to learn, later on, that Willoughby’s a bounder and a cad.

Grounding Reader Hostility

If protagonists are clever, accomplished, enviable in any way, that leaves them vulnerable to all kinds of Third-Law reactions. To forestall this trap, careful authors ground every

120 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER main character, so that resentments flow harmlessly around them. Now you know why many popular characters suffer unenviable physical and emotional pangs—to defuse whatever negativity the reader might be building up. Classical heroes and heroines are usually in hot water from the get-go. Oedipus Rex must discover why a plague is ravaging his city. In the Gospels, Jesus is grounded repeatedly, even prenatally: Bethlehem is overbooked, and there’s no room at the inn. Mary must deliver him in a stable, where a newborn can easily get infected or trampled. [44] Later, his parents flee into Egypt to escape Herod’s murderous jealousy. [45] 1,977 years later, Star Wars opens with Princess Leia’s spaceship under attack from Darth Vader’s huge arrowhead-shaped vessel. Die Another Day (2002) had the biggest opening so far for a James Bond film, taking in some $47 million in its first three days. This time around, one reviewer noted, 007 is

somewhat less invincible. He bleeds. He gets beaten up. He grows a beard. He even needs help. . . Bond’s boss, M, tells him “You’re no use to anyone” and later points out, “While you were away, the world changed.” [One of Bond’s women] calls him “a blunt instrument” who’s “confrontational and provocative,” likely to “put a light to an already explosive situation.” The effect is unexpectedly liberating.

But why? As this reviewer went on to say, the movie’s director and screenwriters

anticipated the anti-Bond rumblings about his age, his sexism, his antiquated world of martinis, gambling,

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and one-night stands. Who plays baccarat anymore? Cleverly, they’ve absorbed these objections into the movie. [46]

Title characters typically get grounded within the first few pages. Do they enjoy good health, luck, enviable charisma? Then gossip can’t hurt! No sooner has Shakespeare’s Cleopatra exited the stage, than Agrippa jests about the son this “royal wench” bore to Julius Caesar out of wedlock: “He plowed her, and she cropped.”[47] Having tarnished his mother’s reputation, little Caesarion doesn’t need to appear on stage. Before the reader is introduced to 15-year-old Amber St. Clare, other girls of her village are whispering about boys who claim to have bedded her. Actually, Amber’s still virginal, which comes as a surprise to Bruce Carlton, who seduces her in the very next chapter.

A Paragraph of Prevention

To forestall any boos and catcalls, let another character react the way any reader might, before your reader can. At the beginning of “The Greek Interpreter,” Dr. Watson cites his “long and intimate acquaintance” with Sherlock Homes, then admits to mixed feelings:

I had never heard him refer to his relations, and hardly ever to his own early life. This reticence on his part increased the somewhat inhuman effect he had upon me, until sometimes I found myself regarding him as a brain without a heart, deficient in human sympathy. His aversion to women, and his disinclination to form

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new friendships, were both typical of his unemotional character . . . [48]

When Amber starts playing fast and loose, her soon-to- be-hanged lover Rex Morgan tells her she’s an “ungrateful jilting little slut . . . selfish, mercenary, whoring little bitch.” [49] Via the Third Law, his tirade generates reader sympathy: Hey, she can’t be all that bad! Does your narrative feature movie stars, CEOs, or heads of state? If key grips and janitors dare not gripe about them, then their own self-reproach—however fleeting—can ground them effectively. Listen to Swollen-Foot, King of Thebes:

I am godless and child of impurity . . . If there is any ill worse than ill, that is the lot of Oedipus. [50]

Or to Hamlet, Prince of Denmark:

Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I . . . A dull and muddy-mettled rascal. . . Like John-of-dreams, unpregnant of my cause . . . [51]

In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), Hank Morgan is hurled back 1,300 years—retaining full knowledge of gunpowder, electricity, and other 19th-century advances. Among the citizenry of the 6th century, he sees no one “who wasn’t a baby to me in acquirements and capacities.” But just before his ego threatens to swell, he imagines how things might be the other way around—if he found himself promoted only 100 years into his own future:

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What would I amount to in the twentieth century? I should be foreman of a factory, that is about all; and could drag a [net] downstreet any day and catch a hundred men better than myself. [52]

Grounding in Children’s Books

In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56), and Kay Thompson’s Eloise (1955), the main characters are all pre-grounded, thanks to their tender ages. If not young, they’re given short stature, like Frodo in The Hobbit (1937). In other children’s classics, protagonists are often physically smaller than the target reader. After sampling the bottle labeled DRINK ME, Alice finds herself “shutting up like a telescope” until she is “only ten inches high.” [53] In E. B. White’s Stuart Little (1945), the title character is

not much bigger than a mouse. The truth . . . was, the baby looked very much like a mouse in every way. He was only about two inches high; and he had a mouse’s sharp nose, a mouse’s tail, a mouse’s whiskers, and the pleasant, shy manner of a mouse. [54]

Earlier, we had Lemuel Gulliver and more recently, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) [55] and its sequels. To expand dramatically as well as literally, younger characters need regular doses of reader esteem, along with freedom and autonomy. This requires grounding any authority figure who might obstruct or restrict them. So narratives aimed at younger readers make fun of adults (especially parents) as dithering and dim, [56] as in “There was an old woman/ Who

124 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER lived in a shoe./ She had so many children/ She didn’t know what to do.” In books for older children (especially teens), adults are often poor role models. In Oliver Twist (1837), Fagin is an outsider and a thief. In Great Expectations (1860), Miss Havisham’s wedding cake is definitely missing a few tiers. And get a load of the father in Huckleberry Finn (1885):

His hair was long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining there like behind vines. . . . There warn’t no color in his face, where his face showed; it was white . . . . a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body’s flesh crawl—a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white. [57]

The brother and sister who become foster parents to Anne of Green Gables (1908) are middle-aged and “both a little odd.” Marilla presented as

a woman of narrow experience and rigid conscience . . . always distrustful of sunshine, which seemed too dancing and irresponsible a thing . . . to be taken seriously. [58]

Her brother Matthew “dreaded all women” and has long harbored

an uncomfortable feeling that [those] mysterious creatures were secretly laughing at him. He may have been quite right . . . for he was an odd-looking personage, with an ungainly figure. [59]

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Each book in “The Magic School Bus” series opens with spitballs at the teacher who pilots the bus on its magical mystery tours: “Our class really has bad luck. This year, we got Ms. Frizzle, the strangest teacher in school.” [60] For more weird teachers and clueless parents, open any of R.L. Stine’s “Goosebumps” novels.

Suffer the Villains

Successful bad guys are usually smarter than the average boor. (How else did they get so successful?) So they too must be safely grounded. Dr. No—title villain of Ian Fleming’s novel (1956) and the first film (1962) in the 007 franchise—has lost both hands and wields mechanical replacements. Yurasis Dragon (say that name out loud!), who recruits Jonathan Hemlock in The Eiger Sanction (1972), is an albino who requires a total blood transfusion every six months and can’t endure light. At one point in their negotiations, Hemlock reaches into his pocket for a book of matches. “Do you have some idea,” he asks Dragon, “of the pain it’s going to cause you when I strike them one by one?” [61] Francis Dolarhyde, serial killer in Red Dragon (1981), is born with a disfiguring harelip, is teased and tormented in an orphanage, then shipped to a tyrannical grandmother who warps what’s left of his psyche. If any characters are so repellant that readers might turn away, counter-ground them by stressing their good points. Lolita (1955) opens with an evaluator’s preface, citing the incarcerated Humbert Humbert as a “demented diarist” who has committed murder and other “sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman.” In the very next sentence, Nabokov offers the first of many Carrots:

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But how magically [Humbert] can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author! [62]

One page later, Humbert himself sketches his idyllic boyhood on the Riviera:

I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, lean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces . . . everybody liked me, everybody petted me. Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes listed toward me like towers of Pisa. [63]

Obviously, the “real” Humbert belongs somewhere between these two extremes. Curiosity over exactly where, plus the Carrot of becoming “entranced with the book,” coaxes us to read on. Lest decent, upstanding heroes spawn irritation and impatience, authors often punish them unjustly, as in The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), Les Misérables (1862), or The Color Purple (1982). Let them struggle with the prejudices and cruelties of a bygone era, as in Ben-Hur (1880) or Gone with the Wind (1936). But unless your main character is a time traveler like Hank Morgan, beware of psychological anachronisms. A tavern wench of the 1700s can be sharp-tongued and saucy, but not a vocal advocate of women’s rights. In 1749, John Cleland published Fanny Hill or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. In 1980, Erica Jong reworked his story as Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones. In her non-fiction preface, Jong takes her

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first false step by flaunting the exhaustive historical research that went into her re-imagining. Okay, but is she writing about a character or an era? As it turns out, Hackabout-Jones is an awkward hybrid of the two. Despite her frothy petticoats and authentic period speech, she thinks like Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl (1962). She’s curiously immune to the many prejudices, old wives’ tales and superstitions that oppressed 18th-century women. Compared to the success of Jong’s first novel, Fear of Flying (1973), her Fanny flopped. While protecting your main characters against reader backlash, never forget to shield yourself as well! This is a must if you hope to fulfill Strategy #4.

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Notes and References

[1] Dean Koontz, Intensity (first published 1996). Knopf, 1996, p. 58. [2] Richard Wagner, The Ring of the Nibelung (1853- 1870), translated with a forward by Stewart Robb. Dutton, 1960, pages 231-236. [3] James Michener, Space (1982). Fawcett Crest, 1983, p. 59. [4] Ibid., p. 65. [5] Viewed today, Dumbo (1941) displays sequences of alcohol abuse and cruelty to animals. This may explain why Disney hasn’t re-released it in theaters, giving reviewers a chance to point this out. [6] Harold Robbins, The Dream Merchants (1949). Pocket Books, p. 23. [7] Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955). Knopf, 1992, p. 10. [8] Ibid., p. 26. [9] Jackie Collins, Rock Star (1988). Pocket Books, 1989, p. 97. [10] Sue Grafton, “E” Is for Evidence (1988). Pocket Books, 1989, p. 8. [11] John Grisham, The Client (1993). Doubleday, 1993, p. 38. [12] Ibid., p. 4. [13] Ibid., p. 2. [14] Quoted by Joyce Carol Oates in “The King of Weird,” The New York Review of Books, Oct. 31, 1996, p. 49. [15] Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (1913- 1924), Volume One, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. Random House, 1934. p. 42. [16] Ibid., pages 39 and 38.

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[17] Ibid., p. 53. [18] Louis Menand, “Between Planes,” The New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, p. 17. Another reason why Horatio Alger’s squeaky-clean heroes have plummeted from popular favor can be found in Maria Tatar’s The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales (2002). According to one reviewer, she argues that enduring fairy tales “rarely dramatize, much less endorse . . . honesty and plain dealing and ascension from humble beginnings through hard work. Instead, they more often celebrate the triumphs of feckless sons who, through luck, cunning and conniving help from wiser counselors . . . win their way to unearned wealthy and power.” Quoted by Adam Gopnik, “Magic Kingdoms,” The New Yorker, December 9, 2002, pages 137-138. [19] Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo (1961). Signet, 1992, p. 529. [20] Ibid., pages 529 and 484. [21] Trevanian, The Eiger Sanction (1972). Crown, 1972, p. 64. [22] Adam Gopnik, “Magic Kingdoms,” The New Yorker, December 9, 2002, p. 140. [22] Kathleen Winsor, Forever Amber (1944). Ballantine, 1993, p. 455. [24] Ibid., p. 259. [25] Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer (1995). Dell Books, 1996, pages 96, 324 and 342. [26] Lynda Obst, Hello, He Lied—And Other Truths from the Hollywood Trenches (1996). Boston: Little, Brown, 1996, p. 184. [27] Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs (1988). St. Martin’s Paperbacks, 1989, pages 15 and 22. [28] The New Yorker, September 30, 1996, p. 65.

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[29] Agatha Christie, Passenger to Frankfurt (1970). London: HarperCollins, 1993, p. 8. [30] Quoted by Sean Mitchell, “Another Country,” Southwest Airlines Spirit, January 1977, p. 82. [31] John Grisham, The Client (1993). Island Books (Dell), 1994, pages 532 and 556. [32] Quoted by Betty Webb, “The Battle,” Scottsdale Progress, January 16, 1996, p. 21. [33] Ibid. [34] Mark 1: 43-44. Similarly in Matthew 8: 4. [35] Silence of the Lambs. See [26], above, pages 59-60. [36] P.J. O’Rourke, Parliament of Whores (1991). Vintage, 1992, p.32. [37] Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Body Politic,” The New Yorker, August 25 & September 1, 1997, p. 120. [38] Camille Paglia, Vamps And Tramps (1994). Vintage, 1994, p. 109. [39] Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography (1988). Simon & Schuster, 1988, pages 436-437. [40] Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987). New American Library, 1988, p. 140. [41] The Client. See [11], above, p. 27. [42] Jackie Collins, American Star (1993). Pocket, 1993, pages 142 and 155. [43] Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811). Signet, 1980, p. 37. [44] Luke 2: 1-7. [45] Matthew 2: 13-23. [46] Review by Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, “Bond’s Survivor Instincts Dashingly Evident in ‘Day,’” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 22, 2002, p. P6. [47] William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1607), Act 2, Scene 2, lines 276-278.

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[48] Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Greek Interpreter” (1893) in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1950). Norwalk: The Easton Press, 1981, p. 693. [49] Forever Amber. See [22] above, p. 280. [50] Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (480 BCE). Translated by David Grene, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, Volume II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, lines 1360-1364. [51] William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1603, 1604). Act 2, Scene 2, lines 556-575. [52] Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). See Chapter VIII, “The Boss.” [53] Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). See Chapter 1, “Down the Rabbit Hole.” [54] E. B. White, Stuart Little (1945). Scholastic, 1987, pp. 1-2. [55] Every so often, the “hero” of a children’s book is stunted not just physically, but psychologically. When Marc Brown’s Arthur the Aardvark made his first appearance, he was bespectacled, overweight, fearful—a textbook neurotic. Later, he still wore glasses, but slimmed down and displayed a much more cheerful, healthier self-image. [56] Sometimes to an offensive degree! Random House’s popular “Berenstain Bears” series presents Papa Bear as a blue-collar blowhard. Mama Bear and other female characters relentlessly correct his bad temper and poor judgment. For any custodial father who reads to his kids at bedtime, this daddy-bashing isn’t funny. [57] Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). See Chapter V. [58] Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (1908). Toronto: Bantam, no date given, pp. 3-5. [59] Ibid., p. 9.

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[60] Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen, illustrator, The Magic School Bus at the Waterworks (1986). Scholastic, 1986, p. 7. [61] The Eiger Sanction. See [21] above, p. 250. The screenwriter of Blade (1998) evidently borrowed this idea, replacing matches with flashlights. [62] Lolita. See [7] above, p. 18. [63] Ibid., p. 19.

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133

STRATEGY # 4 A Kind and Trusty Guide

We don’t DISCRIMINATE on the basis of race, nationality, gender, or sexual preference. But ACT like a jerk, and we will TREAT you like one. —Posted over the bar in a Colorado saloon

CASH A $100 CHECK AT YOUR BANK. If the teller is new and has never helped you before, he’ll ask you to show some photo ID. Once satisfied that you’re who you claim to be, he’ll offer you a smile and five twenties. Your reader, similarly, is a total stranger who wants to trust you, but isn’t sure she can. (I say she because women buy more books than men do.) To enjoy your book clear to the end, she must shell out at least a few bucks for its Kindle edition, then invest several hours of reading time. Or will she? In the past, she’s bought well-reviewed books that left her cold—and she posted her disappointment on Amazon.com. This time, she hopes that her impulsive purchase will reward her. She expects you to be experienced, have been there, done that—and are qualified to write this book. She wants your talent, knowledge, and narrative skill to be obvious from page one. Your implicit promise is a vibrant, compelling read. She hopes you’ll keep it. That shouldn’t be too high a hurdle. After all, your reader wants to like your book, unless you give her some boneheaded reason not to. As John Cheever did, right up front,

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in his preface to The Wapshot Scandal (1964), where he admitted, “All the characters in this work are fictional, as is much of the science.” In other words, he’d done no research into our nascent space program and was simply winging it! [1] Hundreds of non-fiction tomes have been written about our 16th president’s tow terms. Why did Lincoln (1995) loft itself onto the best-seller lists? Probably because the author established his credentials by judicious name-dropping:

The only time I ever met President John F. Kennedy, in February 1962, he was unhappy with historians . . . When I gave a talk in the White House about Abraham Lincoln . . . he voiced his deep dissatisfaction with the glib way the historians had rated some of his predecessors as “Below Average” and marked a few as “Failures.” [2]

If you want your reader to recommend your book to her friends, she must not only respect you but like you—perceive you as good company, a genial host wholly dedicated to her needs and interests, straight though to your final chapter.

Slush Pile Lesson #12: Narrators Get Cut No Slack

Alan and Marcia were launching a new small publishing company, to be called Fallowfield Press. For their very first list, they needed to contract books that would turn a profit, but— more important over the long term—earn good media buzz to attract decent submissions from literary agents. Otherwise, with nothing but backlist sales to pay the bills, they’d have to rely on the slush pile, where a great deal glistens with hype, but precious little is ever gold.

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Understandably, literary agents offer their very best projects to editors at big-name houses who can pay generous advances. Smaller publishers are offered lesser fare. One top literary agency sent me a one-page proposal in which the author promised, “If some publisher buys me a computer, I’ll learn how it works and write about it.” Agents use smaller publishers as last stops for shopworn proposals that bigger houses have all turned down. Because Fallowfield was a start-up, Marcia and Alan couldn’t expect any good submissions until they had cared out a niche and established some clout and credibility. Their first list of new titles would be critical. Alan had high hopes for Labyrinth of Blood, a novel about Vanessa, a young woman coping with HIV. Over lunch, he filled me in on the book’s sales points. “But Marcia feels it lacks something. Could you give it a read and be our tie-breaker?” The manuscript arrived the next morning, via FedEx. Given Alan’s enthusiasm, I assumed that this novel had potential, but might require the editorial plastic surgery I like to perform. But Labyrinth was told in the first person. The character of Vanessa had to double duty as both narrator and protagonist. For any first-time writer, that can prove tricky. In both novels and non-fiction—Ishmael in Moby-Dick (1854), Nick in The Great Gatsby (1925), or John Berendt in the Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1993)— successful narrators are like sports announcers, describing plays but not running them. The novel’s first chapters left me impatient and exasperated. From my report:

. . . Chapter 1 grabbed my interest, as you predicted. We’re immediately curious about Vanessa. We want to

137 TAM MOSSMAN learn more—and the author can’t afford to miss this window of opportunity. Having sparked our curiosity, she MUST start to satisfy it, at least in small doses— and prove that Vanessa is intriguing enough to carry the entire narrative. Being HIV-positive, she’s an Underdog. But to win our respect and affection, she must be Gifted too. That’s the first hurdle the novel fails to clear. Lest compassion sway my judgment, let me must evaluate Vanessa objectively. If she were HIV- negative and healthy, would we still care about her being a social worker? In the opening chapter, it’s a shock when the drug addict rapes her. But given that she works with assault victims in a crisis center, her reaction doesn’t seem plausible. She knows the addict’s name and where he lives. He’s missing a front tooth, making him easy to spot in any lineup. Yet she never reports his assault to the police—if only to keep him from victimizing other women! Her self-absorption prevents her from really observing other characters. After she crashes her car, injuring her fiancé, her main worry is if the cut on her hand will need cosmetic surgery. Later, she breaks off their engagement because he lives in California and she works here in the East. Her condescension toward minorities is a real turn-off. On p. 102, when she’s hospitalized with a bad infection, Nurse Juanita is trying hard to keep her comfortable. In return, Vanessa ridicules her accent: “She must have learned English from Speedy Gonzalez.”

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Later, since one of the major characters is a Mexican national, this lapse seems doubly dumb. The man could be seems fascinating, she never lets him expand into any dynamic role. She even admits that she wasn’t paying attention to whatever he told her! I doubt that readers will think this is worth 421 pages of their time.

Alan had to agree. Fallowfield turned down the manuscript, But a year later, to my surprise, an East Coast publisher announced Labyrinth of Blood in its fall catalog— billing it as a non-fiction memoir! Despite a standard ad campaign, it sank without a trace. But because since its publisher was established in the industry, Labyrinth was simply a tax write-off, not the lethal blow it could have dealt a start-up like Marcia and Alan’s. Last I checked, Fallowfield was doing fine, buoyed by its sub-rights share of a six-figure movie deal.

As an executive at another house once admitted, “Often the titles we turn down leave us with us better off than the books we signed up.”

Breathing Life with Killer Details

Most best-sellers offer privileged information that none but seasoned insiders ever learn. Because of the Third Law of Reader Reaction, the authors dare not blow their own horns too loudly. Instead, they use Killer Details as emphatic toots. Here’s the deceptively simple opening of A Bridge Too Far (1974), Cornelius Ryan’s account of the Allied assault against the river town of Arnheim, behind Nazi lines:

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Shortly after 10 a.m. on Sunday, September 17th, 1944, from airfields all over southern England, the greatest armada of troop-carrying aircraft ever assembled for a single operation took to the air. [3]

Ryan’s superlatives (“greatest armada”), exact times and qualifications (“assembled for a single operation”) show that he’s done his homework and then some. We’re promised plenty of detailed mayhem, all under the guise of an edifying history lesson. In Reviving Ophelia (1994), Mary Pipher describes a patient who

had the furry arms that often come with anorexia. It’s called lanugo—the soft, wooly body hair that grows to compensate for the loss of fat so the body can hold in heat. [4]

Early in Spontaneous Healing (1995), Andrew Weil mentions that

The entire lining of the intestinal tract sloughs off and is renewed every day, a spectacular regenerative feat. [5]

Has your topic been written about before? Then mark your turf by leading off with brand-new information. Walter Lord opens A Night to Remember (1955), about the sinking of the Titanic, with eerie coincidences worthy of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not”:

In 1898, a struggling author named Morgan Robertson concocted a novel about a fabulous Atlantic liner, far

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larger than any that had ever been built. Robertson loaded his ship with rich and complacent people and then wrecked it one cold April night on an iceberg . . . Fourteen years later . . . the White Star Line built a steamer [of] 66,000 tons displacement; Robertson’s was 70,000. The real ship was 882.5 feet long; the fictional one was 800 feet. Both vessels were triple- screw and could make 24 to 25 knots. Both could carry about 3,000 people, [with] enough lifeboats for only a fraction of this number . . . because both were labeled “unsinkable” . . . Robertson called his ship the Titan. [6]

Killer Details are most abundant in non-fiction, where they can be added without the risk of overkill. But in novels (even in the techno-thrillers of Tom Clancy, which he intends to be ultra-informative), they can fly too thick and fast. Consider this excerpt from Hannibal (1999), where Dr. Lecter goes shopping for

place mats in creamy white linen, and some beautiful damask napkins . . . two good 35,000 BTU portable gas burners, of the kind restaurants use to cook at tableside, and an exquisite copper sauté pan, and a copper fait-tout to make sauces . . . and two whisks. He was . . . able to find . . . a nearly brand-new Stryker autopsy saw. [7]

Clearly, these are all props he’s plans to use in an upcoming scene. But will a reader remember them all? Too many Killers raise doubts: Is the author trying to paper over holes in his narrative?

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Cookbooks, gardening guides, and other successful how-to titles often bear the bylines of TV personalities: Julia Child (Mastering the Art of French Cooking, 1961), James Underwood Crockett (Crockett’s Victory Garden, 1977) and Jeff Smith (The Frugal Gourmet, 1984). Knowing what these authors look like, the reader can “see” who’s writing the text, making their recipes easier to digest. You don’t need to host a syndicated show before writing a successful how-to. But you do need to present yourself as helpful, experienced, and trustworthy, because

In Your Reader’s Mind, You are a Character Too

This vital point is clear in any first-person narrative, most obviously in novels. Readers often confused mystery writer Mickey Spillane with his fictional detective, Mike Hammer. But even in non-fiction books and magazine articles, even in newspaper columns, the author’s personality always seeps through—for good or ill. A while back, I was in a dentist’s waiting room, thumbing though USA Weekend magazine. One reader asked the “Pets” columnist if wild raccoons would feel confident enough to eat food set out for them. “Considering the harm we do wild animals,” she replied, “it’s a wonder that trust is possible under any circumstances.” To a question about the best way to house rabbits, she scolded, “If you can’t give them safe, comfortable quarters, you absolutely should not keep them at all!” In the next week’s issue of USA Weekend, I saw the “Pets” column had been discontinued. The late Ann Landers (Eppie Lederer in real life) and Abigail “Dear Abby” Van Buren (Pauline Phillips) were twin sisters—though not identical, as you could see from their

142 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER publicity photos. Each wrote a nationally syndicated advice column, but Ann’s appeared in far more newspapers. She clearly valued her readers and often asked their opinions (“Tell me what you think”), thanking them for their advice (“I love the way my readers look out for each other”). When her advice proved wrong-headed, she was quick to admit it, often devoting some entire column to letters that gave her “lashes with a wet noodle.” By contrast, Dear Abby’s replies seemed clipped and distant, often betraying a hostile undertone. When a reader asked how to deflect intrusive personal questions, Abby suggested this all-purpose retort: If you will forgive me for not answering, I will forgive you for asking. “When I use that response,” a later reader protested, “I feel as rude as the person who asked the question.” In 2001, Dear Abby began co-authoring the column with her daughter, Jeanne Phillips, who later assumed the sole byline. Jeanne’s tone was emotionally flat at first, with none of her Aunt Ann’s zest, humility, and warmth. But she soon loosened up. Asked if it was rude to snoop in someone’s medicine cabinet, she answered, “It’s also nosy— and it’s wrong. But fascinating!” (See “Never Forget to Ground Yourself,” later in this chapter.)

Slush Pile Lesson #13: Beware of Being Yourself

One day I opened a submission postmarked Sacramento and thought I’d struck gold. In Bright Eyes, Bushy Tails, a young man I’ll call Dwayne was writing about his live-in girlfriend Jill, a veterinarian in upscale Marin County. His cover letter was funny and informative. And his timing couldn’t have been

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better. A new book by Yorkshire vet James Herriot was riding the paperback best-seller list. Instead of cows and ponies, Dr. Jill treated iguanas and capuchin monkeys, Persian cats and Japanese koi. That made Dwayne’s effort, written in the third person, just different enough that reviewers wouldn’t accuse him of being an opportunistic copycat. Maybe he could hook a few thousand Herriot addicts? Hopeful, I began reading—only to see him blow his chances in eight pages flat. His first chapter opened with a promising, professional dose of the Paranoia Formula. Dr. Jill was out in a barn, helping a mama llama give birth to twins—which, as she’d implied, threatened to be a dicey delivery. Surely Dwayne was there at her side to help out? No, he was waiting in her pickup truck, drumming his fingers in time to an old Prince tape, impatient for her to get finished so she could drive him home to their apartment. Then, after taking a quick shower together, they’d enjoy a romantic candlelit dinner. Except Dwayne was a little short of cash, so Dr. Jill would have to buy the steaks . . . Some writers need to clear their throats for a page or two before getting down to business, as F. Scott Fitzgerald does in The Great Gatsby (1922). So I trusted that Dwayne was setting me up for a surprise reversal. Surely any moment now, he’d join Jill in that barn, get drawn into her work and her world, and maybe ooze a tear at the wonder of new life. Never happened! Dwayne never budged from Jill’s passenger seat, proudly recalling the afternoon he first met her, at a coffee house near UCLA. She’d been semi-engaged to a law student. Didn’t that deter Dwayne? No sirree! He shaved his beard, went to the gym every afternoon to hone his pecs and abs, then put the moves on her, big time. Talked her into a just-

144 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER friends camping trip in Los Padres National Forest, where her fiancé couldn’t reach her by cell phone. Out there in the wilderness, Jill found a young hawk, its wing shattered by a hunter’s bullet. She splinted the wing herself and drove the bird to a vet, who told her she’d saved the hawk’s life and applauded her way in handling a wild raptor. That night, they drove back to his place where he finally got to home base— Dwayne’s X-rated flashback was interrupted by a fly buzzing around. He grabbed it out of the air and was crushing it slowly when he saw Jill leaving the barn. That bright, dazed look on her face meant two healthy new animals had been born. He couldn’t wait to brush that llama crap off her denim, maybe let his hands wander a bit. If she’d just shut the hell up about getting married and having a baby . . . Dr. Jill’s story might have wonderful potential in different hands, but not in Dwayne’s. His manuscript had breathed its last. Sorry, not right for our list.

Even if you don’t aim for a niche market, always determine the reader’s most likely interests before indulging your own. Ian Fleming enjoyed sadomasochistic foreplay with his wife, Anne. “I long for you even if you whip me,” she wrote him in 1947, “because I love being hurt by you and kissed afterwards.” [8] But Fleming never let this personal preference seep into how 007 handled women.

Your Printed Persona

A certain college professor was fired from his teaching position. Later, he published the narrative of his lean, desperate

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months trying to support his family. That made him a Gifted Underdog, and his book should have attracted plenty of readers. “This is a significant book,” opined the Atlanta Journal- Constitution, adding that the author’s “bristly, difficult persona stands in the way of complete sympathy.” [9] Yes, solid credentials or a unique story to tell can convince a publisher to offer you a contract. But thereafter, your slow-motion résumé—the self-portrait you contrive in your reader’s mind—becomes vastly more significant. Most of the adjectives you’ll want to avoid begin with S: sarcastic, self-righteous, smart-alecky, smug, smutty, sneering, snobbish, snotty, stilted, stuffy, superior, surly . . . On the plus side, your Printed Persona should display all Eight Essentials for best-selling characters, as enumerated in Strategy #3. Does this mean you should become a hypocrite? To write a successful book, must you groom yourself into a cheery compassionate optimist of good will toward all? What if you’re misanthropic or (even worse, because women buy more books), a misogynist? Just don’t let it show! Many successful writers are what Carl Jung called “emotionally incontinent,” unable to contain their peevish ill- temper. How do they keep winning new readers? Because they know how to make nice on the printed page. Our publicity department once joked about a certain best-selling author: “The question isn’t, ‘Did success spoil her?’ but ‘By how much?’” Yet as of this writing, that author is now 100 years old, still widely revered as a sweet old lady. If she can’t charm you, she’ll outlive you. When I spoke with a certain West Coast literary agent on the phone, he blurted non-sequiturs and interrupted himself to bellow orders to his secretary. When I finally met him in person, he mellowed remarkably. He’s published a book for aspiring authors. In it, he presents himself as a real pussycat,

146 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER suave and affable. The larger his audience, the more civilized he contrives to be. Writing in their books and newsletters, Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura Schlesinger [10] adopted personalities far less abrasive than the ones they presented live, on their radio talk shows. Once you realize that anyone can do the same—that your Printed Persona is a fictional creation—you’ll perceive unlimited ways to tweak and polish your own image. Remember how we transformed poor sore-throated Pamela, back in Strategy #3? You need not, should not, presume to be someone you know you’re not. The trick is to identify (or if you’re modest, acknowledge) what others perceive to be your most winning attributes. Think back to the times when you earned the most grins and laughter. Then move those moments to center stage. Cultivate them. Exploit them! Fan your personal sparks until they emit a steady glow, brightening your outlook as you write. Take extra good care of your virtues, because your faults will do fine on their own. Meanwhile, should you repress any anger, indignation, impatience—all those demons that may have impelled you to write in the first place? No! Energy is too valuable to waste. Rather than repress or deny your guiltiest impulses, merely quote (or in fiction, create) some other figure who happens to share those feelings.

Slush Pile Lesson #14: Bury Garbage Far from Your Tent

The mail brought us a treatise on why women should give up on romance, on the grounds that all men are shallow,

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dishonest, opportunistic, uncaring—would-be rapists, if given the opportunity. All men? Yes, with the possible exceptions of St. Francis of Assisi and the Lindbergh baby. The author footnoted all her assertions, drawing references drawn from every culture on Earth. But our Marketing Director agreed that her “solution”—total heterosexual abstinence—would appeal to a very narrow spectrum of readers. “It’s an editorial pretending to be a book.” Or as I told her, “We regret this doesn’t seem right for us.” Later, I compared her submission with a best-seller, The Women’s Room (1977). Mira, the novel’s narrator, winds up forswearing men—but for herself alone. She’s met enough testosterone-crazed psychos that she’s not eager to meet any more. But her decision is based on an admittedly small sampling. And she never urges anyone else to join her in celibate solidarity. Mark Twain remains one of America’s most beloved authors, yet he nursed a dim view of humanity. Bankruptcy and his daughter Susy’s death only deepened his bitterness. In 1895, during his stint as Harper’s Vienna correspondent, he deflected a reader’s charge of anti-Semitism by replying that the only race he despised was the human one. [11] In novels like The Prince and the Pauper (1881) that chronicled injustice in other times and places, Twain disguised the fact that he was criticizing his 19th-century here-and-now. This deliberate distancing let him mix in what’s now known as sick humor. After a jousting tournament in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), narrator Hank Morgan complains of the racket made by

quacks detaching legs and arms from the day’s cripples. They ruined an uncommon good old crosscut saw for me . . . but I let it pass. And as for my ax—

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well, I made up my mind that the next time I lent an ax to a surgeon, I would pick my century. [12]

His cruel, merciless Morgan le Fay becomes a running joke. During one banquet, she dislikes one of the tunes her musicians played and orders the composer hanged. Hank Morgan upstages her by observing that the offending ditty

seemed to be the crude first draft or original agony of the wail known to later centuries as “In the Sweet Bye and Bye” . . . I therefore ordered the musicians into our presence to play that “Sweet Bye and Bye” again. Then I saw she was right and gave her permission to hang the whole band. [13]

Read between the lines of other best-sellers, and you’ll glimpse many irritable authors too discreet to fulminate in their own voices. Instead, they assign their rants to some disposable curmudgeon and let him (rarely her) take the heat. [14] In syndicated comic strips, such irascible scapegoats are usually made the butts of ridicule, like Sergeant Orville Snorkel in “Beetle Bailey,” Julius Dithers in “Blondie,” or the Terrible- Tempered Mr. Bang in the long-departed “Toonerville Trolley.” In real life, Spiro Agnew served as a noisy and prominent whipping boy, voicing Nixon’s mean-spirited opinions and absorbing the media brickbats in the President’s stead. When a best-seller worries that such spokespeople will be greeted with disagreement and derision, often it shunts them safely to the sidelines where it won’t matter if the reader disagrees with their outlook. (As a prominent character in The Women’s Room, man-loathing Mira is an exception to this rule. But she doesn’t reveal herself as the narrator until the very end

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of the novel.) Even so, these author-surrogates are easy to spot! Their creators can’t help boasting about their wealth of knowledge and praising their rare common sense. Consider Sherlock Holmes’s brother Mycroft, “one of the queerest men” and among “the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town,” [15] or the crotchety Q (“I never joke about my work, Double-Oh-Seven!”) in the James Bond movies. In Silence of the Lambs (1988), the psychology of serial killer “Buffalo Bill” is left to Hannibal Lecter (another serial killer, but also a psychiatrist) to explain—because Bill’s motivations are too dark and labyrinthine. If FBI agent Clarence Starling could dream up such conjectures on her own, we’d find her a bit too creepy to root for. Where’d a nice Gifted Underdog like you get fantasies like that? In The Lost World (1995), Michael Crichton’s dino- sequel, there’s Jack Thorne (consider his last name!)—who

used to say, “How can you design for people if you don’t know history and psychology? You can’t. Because your mathematical formulas may be perfect, but the people will screw it up . . . And then what? I get a worker’s compensation suit. For their stupidity.”

But Crichton clearly admires Thorne, who “peppered his lectures with quotations from Plato, Chaka Zulu, Emerson, and Chang-tzu.” [16] Another of his Lost World’s loose cannons is bad guy Lewis Dodgson, clearly named after the immortal Charles Dodgson (pen name: Lewis Carroll). Because Dodgson’s peeves are suspiciously persuasive, he stands out as one of Crichton’s crotchety spokesmen:

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“First, it was just Hollywood celebrities and simple- minded zealots. Now it’s a bandwagon. Even university philosophers are beginning to argue that it’s unethical for monkeys, dogs, even rats to be subjected to the indignities of laboratory research. We’ve even had protests about our ‘exploitation’ of squid, even though they’re on dinner tables all over the world . . . Eventually, somebody’s going to say we can’t even exploit bacteria to make genetic products.” [17]

Predictably, Dodgson comes to a really bad end. Killing off characters is one way an author can seem to disavow whatever they’ve had to say. As long as your Printed Persona displays you as a good sport, with no private axes to grind, readers can relax, assured that you won’t badger or harangue them—and will isolate any character who tries to.

Beware of Public Service Announcements

Is this a warning off a subway poster? “Anyone who even threatens suicide needs counseling.” [18] No, it’s dialogue spoken by private investigator Lew Archer in The Underground Man (1971). The following excerpts are drawn from a crime novel narrated in the first person. It earned decent reviews, but never hit the best-seller list:

Oversights as trivial as leaving your car window down, or setting the door ajar as you carry in packages, or walking to a window after mistaking the noises outside for firecrackers—all can prove fatal . . . . Don’t carry a purse in a way that asks to be dragged by a thief in a

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passing car. Don’t leave that handbag in your shopping cart while you browse. Don’t block the windows of small stores with posters that may obscure what is happening inside . . . [19]

Any seasoned detective has learned how criminals think, so it’s very tempting to let fictional gumshoes offer pointers on how your readers can protect themselves, friends, and family. Don’t do it! Such advice is certainly welcome, even expected, in non-fiction books. But in a novel, it backfires. No matter how gritty and noir a police procedural may become, the reader knows that it’s all pretend. That’s a large chunk of the appeal of the thrill rides at any amusement park. When I open a murder mystery, I expect vicarious thrills in a let’s-pretend world, where make-believe bullets make fictitious holes that bleed imaginary blood. But if an author crosses that cozy boundary and intrudes on my space with real-world concerns, I resent it—and rightly so! Fun, as O.A. Scott said in a movie review, “tends to seem more precious the further it lies from the pressing issues of the actual world.” [20]

After a fictional detective like Travis McGee or Jack Reacher has been featured in two or three successful mysteries, each new novel in the series will boost the paperback sales of the earlier titles. In other words, if your first whodunit passes Go and earns back its advance, expect your editor to ask if you are plotting a sequel. So you’ll want to make your first effort enthralling and impressive enough to make your reader eager for future installments.

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Never Forget to Ground Yourself

In Charlie Chaplin’s silent films, he displays surprising physical grace, to the point that W.C. Fields— himself a former vaudeville juggler—called Chaplin a “goddamn ballet dancer.” But the Little Tramp never retaliates against the wealthy drunk, policeman, or hunger-crazed prospector who bedevils him, thus retaining his role as Gifted Underdog. During the 1930s, humorists often adopted the bemused persona of someone unequipped for the realities of life familiar to everyone in the audience. When Robert Benchley arrived in Venice, he sent friends a telegram that read STREETS HERE FULL OF WATER. PLEASE ADVISE. In the 1950s, Ogden Nash, Garry Moore, and “Lonesome George” Gobel sported crew cuts and bow ties that gave them a boyish, harmless appearance. More recently, stand-up comics routinely demean themselves, as with “I don’t get no respect,” and “Take my wife, please!” Onscreen, Woody Allen always portrays himself as a bumbling nebbish. [21] Journalists meeting him in person were sometimes startled to find him athletic, confident, and fully organized (as any film director needs to be). Reprobates pretending to be respectable authorities fuel comedies like Molière’s Tartuffe (1664) and W.C. Fields’s The Bank Dick and My Little Chickadee (both 1940). Onscreen, Fields often poked fun at his real-life drinking problem. In one scene, he leaps out of a plane to retrieve his flask of booze; in another, he turns to the camera and confides, “This scene was supposed be in a bar, but the censor cut it out.” Much of the joy in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1974) delightful is watching Hunter S. Thompson and his “Samoan” attorney assume moral high ground, even while their behavior undercuts it. Both film adaptations of HST’s saga—

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Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1997)—overlooked this hilarious pretense. [22] More recent humorists like P.J. O’Rourke and Dave Barry prided themselves in being quick-witted and sarcastic. If David Letterman ever visited Venice, likely he’d cable back something erudite and smart-ass like CURB YOUR DOGE. But in person, on the air, Letterman was always careful to ground himself—by confessing to yet another speeding ticket, joking about his heart surgery (“They went in through my wallet”), or and not being invited back to host the Academy Awards. On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh presented himself as a scathing foe of liberals and public hypocrisy, denouncing “environmentalist wackos” and referring to NOW as “the National Association of Gals [NAG].” But he also ridiculed his own superior attitude (“with half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it fair”). In his best-selling The Way Things Ought to Be (1992), he flatly denied any aggressive posturing:

Believe me when I say that my purpose is not to offend. In fact, it bothers me when someone is honestly offended, because I don’t consider myself an offensive guy. I am just a harmless, lovable little fuzzball. [23]

Non-fiction authors who must admit having wealth, privilege, or just dumb luck—as did Carlos Castaneda when befriended by a certain Yaqui sorcerer—should avoid their reader’s evil eye. At the outset of The Teachings of Don Juan (1970), Carlos immediately grounds himself:

Although in truth I was almost totally ignorant of peyote, I found myself pretending that I knew a great deal, and even suggesting that it might be to his [don Juan’s] advantage to talk with me. As I rattled on, he

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nodded slowly, looked at me, but said nothing . . . I was annoyed at having talked nonsense to him, and at being seen through by those remarkable eyes. [24]

In his highly popular Notes to Myself (1970), Hugh Prather, presents himself as a determined philosopher but still dutifully humble:

. . . I am broke, supported by [my wife] Gayle, a dropout from psychology, overweight, disowned by both our families because writing is not a “real job,” living in the middle of a Berkeley war zone. [25]

In his Ruff Times newsletter, Howard Ruff warned subscribers to hoard dry foodstuffs and buy bags of 90% silver coin against the day when paper currency becomes worthless. Later in 1979 came his best-selling How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years, written from the point of view of an “Economic Ecologist.” In it, he predicts fiscal Armageddon, brought about by spendthrift politicians and welfare wastrels whose misbehavior imposed a “sin-tax” on the gainfully employed. Declaring himself as both a financial expert and a moral authority makes Ruff a very tempting target. So he uses his book’s first paragraph to ground himself with painful specifics:

One day in November, 1968, I went to my office to [meet] the people who managed the national company with which I had a speed-reading franchise . . . When I walked out of that meeting . . . my franchise had been canceled, and the struggle to save my company was over. My business was down the tubes. My banker had been notified, and my accounts were frozen. I had

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$11.36 in my pocket. I had no money, no job, and no unemployment insurance . . . .

From reading his hardcover’s jacket copy, you’ll learn that Ruff (a Mormon) had a wife and numerous children to support. But this isn’t self-pity, it’s the Paranoia Formula:

My family and I decided that such pain, public humiliation, and grief had to be put to some positive purpose, for others, as well as ourselves. So we went to work, armed with our determination to learn everything we could from that business failure so that it would never, ever happen to us again . . . I resolved to apply to my life in the future the principles I had learned from a variety of sources. [26]

Throughout his Introduction, Ruff portrays himself as a valiant, resourceful fighter “for others, as well as for ourselves” —while constantly grounding himself:

I have never professed to be infallible, but my track record says I’m right far more often than I’m wrong. But I must protect you against my fallibility by giving you advice that won’t hurt you if I am wrong . . . [27]

Peter Lynch, mutual-fund wizard, begins his best-selling One Up on Wall Street (1989) by offering his reader

at least three good reasons to ignore what Peter Lynch is buying: (1) he might be wrong! (A long list of losers from my own portfolio constantly reminds me that the so-called smart money is exceedingly dumb about 40 percent of the time); (2) even if he’s

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right, you’ll never know when he’s changed his mind about a stock and sold; and (3) you’ve got better sources, and they’re all around you . . . If you stay half-alert, you can pick spectacular performers right from your place of business or out of the neighborhood shopping mall . . . . [28]

When authors have earned an M.D. or Ph.D., any publisher will want to add that degree after their bylines to prove their expertise. But high-powered lawyers like Louis Nizer, F. Lee Bailey and Vincent Bugliosi never affix L.L.D. after their names. Doing so might make them appear pompous and invoke the Third Law. (After all, entire books have been compiled of nothing but anti-lawyer jokes!) Instead, these legal whirlwinds hunker down and pretend they’re jes’ plain folks. O.J. prosecutor Marcia Clark always came to court dressed in a business suit for the TV cameras. Yet on the cover photo of her memoir Without a Doubt (1997), she’s wearing a pair of jeans, sitting on the floor! Nowhere in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994) does John Berendt mention that he was once the Editor of New York magazine. Wanting to be “completely mobile” in Savannah, he decides to buy “an old car . . . nothing fancy,” finally settling on

a 1973 Pontiac Grand Prix. Its metallic-gold body was dented and flecked with rust. The windshield was cracked, the vinyl roof was peeling, the hubcaps were missing, and the engine was well into its second hundred thousand miles. [29]

It’s the automotive equivalent of dressing down.

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In an early edition of his Baby And Child Care (1945), Benjamin Spock, M.D., writes, “I’ll be referring to the baby as him, because I need her to refer to the mother.” In the next few pages, he recalls one of his first appointments—when he had no money to hire a receptionist and he was too ashamed to admit that his waiting room was empty. In his 40th Anniversary Edition of that best-seller, Dr. Spock is still careful to bow to his readers: “You know more than you think you do,” and “Remember that you know a lot about your child, and I don’t know anything.” [30] What a relief from the distant, chilly pediatricians that most new parents must endure! Given the growing surge in malpractice suits—a sure sign of patient hostility—every doctor who hits the best-seller list usually does some serious grounding. From the first chapter of Andrew Weil, M.D.’s Spontaneous Healing:

Let me take you with me [tactfully asking the reader’s permission] to a faraway place I visited more than twenty years ago. . . . [Killer Detail:] The river was a tributary of the Rio Caqueta in the northwest Amazon, near the common border of Colombia and Ecuador, and I was lost. [31]

In Reviving Ophelia, Mary Pipher, Ph.D., writes that she is

gray-haired, I have been married for over twenty years and I am unlikely to ever go on another date. [32]

Dr. Weil again:

If I were to forget to take my hat on a sunny day, my bald head would receive a dose of UV radiation. [33]

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One or two sentences like this are plenty. Any more, and the author will risk earning an S for self-centeredness. Slush-pile sufferers often fixate on their own woes, to the point of never wondering anybody else’s angst might even come close. As a result, their manuscripts are monotonous, incurious, and lonely. And remember Labyrinth of Blood? Self-absorption narrows the sensory environment that a good narrator must perceive and communicate. Introspection is the literary equivalent of plaque in the arteries: A little won’t slow your readers down, but too much will make their hearts grow cold. Consider the two excerpts below. Which makes you eager to read on? Which leaves you feeling shortchanged and neglected?

I found myself dry and ordinary. Yet now, when I slept, I began to dream things I could remember. At first my dreams were blackish and skimpy. I awoke with a sense of returning from a pool of ink, semi- melted newsprint, something censored, excised. Soon the dreams involved vacations and visits and sweetness and ease that turned to unease. I would be prying and exploring a wall, for instance . . . . [34] . . .

New York was the capital of American sexuality, the one place in America where you could get laid with some degree of sophistication, and so Peggy Guggenheim and André Breton had come here during the war. Whereas Thomas Mann, who was shy, and Igor Stravinsky, who was pious, had gone to Los Angeles, the best place for voyeurs. [35]

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The first excerpt is a mumbling monologue. The narrator might as well be talking to his shrink or “journaling” in a diary not meant to for any stranger to read. But the second extract is garnished with names we’ve heard of, seasoned with gossipy peeks into their personal lives. Both quotes are from This Wild Darkness (1996), adapted from Harold Brodkey’s journals after his death.

Aye, I, I! O Me, O My!

The next two writers were once married to each other. To stress the differences in their styles, I’ve bold-faced certain words. From Deborah Love’s Annaghkeen (1970):

When I was a child I rode my horse to the top of the mountain where the sun shone down on me, and the valley green in meadow grass lay far below. I looked to the sky and waited, filled with longing. Nothing sounded. In sorrow I lay down on the earth, my arms outstretched to hug it. O Earth, warm and just right, everything just right, the shape of bark, and smell of grass, and sound of leaves brushing the wind, I wanted to be just right too. But no voice tells me I am and I rise from the mute ground and get on the horse and ride back down the mountain. [36]

As you can guess, Annaghkeen was never a best-seller. Next, here’s a passage from The Snow Leopard (1978), which won the National Book Award, written by her ex-husband, Peter Matthiessen:

In the old quarter of Geneva, we discovered a most beautiful bowl fired at Istafahan in the thirteenth

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century . . . Next morning, her plane left an hour before mine . . . carried away by the drama of our parting, I telephoned the antique shop and arranged to buy the bowl. I meant to surprise D with it on her birthday, but when that day came, we quarreled. [37]

Suppose that you’re on a long flight from LAX to JFK. Who would you rather have sharing your armrest—Matthiessen or Love? One sure way to win reader sympathy is to pass along taunts and jeers from a hostile public. In Reviving Ophelia, Dr. Pipher quotes disparagements from the parents of her adolescent patients:

“This wasn’t as stupid as I thought it would be.” “I might come back, but don’t get your hopes up.” “I thought this was a racket at first . . .” “No offense, but I personally don’t believe in this shit.” [38]

What does she offer in reply? Nothing! Similarly, in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus’s silence before Pontius Pilate lets us admire his forbearance while sharpening the injustice of his accusers: “Jesus made no reply, not even to a single charge—to the great amazement of the governor.” [39] I’m OK—You’re OK (1969) spent more than a year on the NYT best-seller list, selling more than a million copies in hardcover alone. In it, Dr. Thomas Harris reports a colleague asking him, “If I’m OK and you’re OK, how come you’re locking your car?” [40] He plays down his medical degree by portraying himself as a disgruntled critic of his own profession. In the first paragraph of his Preface, he shares the public’s

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growing impatience with psychiatry, with its seeming foreverness, its high costs, its debatable results, and its vague, esoteric terms. To many people, it is like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there . . . Although hundreds of thousands of words about psychiatry are consumed by the public yearly, there has been little convincing data to help a person in need of treatment overcome the cartoon image of psychiatrists and their mystical couches.

Can you detect the Paranoia Formula at work? In his very next paragraph, Dr. Harris steps down from his soapbox to join the audience:

Impatience has been expressed . . . not only by patients and the general public, but by psychiatrists as well. I am one of those psychiatrists. [41]

Over and again, he reminds us that psychology as traditionally practiced is Not OK:

As I write this, I am confronted with rows of bookshelves loaded with tomes devoted to the general topic of therapy . . . repetitious, morbid accounts of so- called “mental illness” or human misery. . . . Too often, these writings dwell on how to protect the therapist, rather than how to cure the patient. In psychoanalysis, the analyst is the hero . . . the omnipotent therapist sitting in the dark corner with his poor little patient recumbent before him. [42]

So much for the Sticks. Now Dr. Harris offers a Carrot:

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One of my psychiatrist friends said, “One of the best Transactional Analysts I know is a truck driver. The goal is to make every person in treatment an expert in analyzing his own transactions.” [43]

This, of course, is the very same Carrot offered by Peter Lynch and Dr. Spock: The reader should feel empowered!

How Much Grounding is Too Much?

In Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983), William Goldman admits having earned $80,000 for his first produced screenplay. Lest his reader grow envious, he immediately cuts to his getting off the plane in California:

A uniformed man was standing by the exit gate, holding a cardboard sign with the name GOLDMAN. . . Finally, I went up to him and said, “Pardon me, sir, but are you, by any chance, waiting for William Goldman?” . . . “Yes, sir, Mr. Goldman.” . . . “Can I sit up front with you?” I said. . . . We’re tooling along in the limo . . . On both sides of the street now are houses, cheek to jowl . . . all about the same height and all huddled together. I turned to the driver and said, “Is this a housing development?” . . . we were right smack in the middle of one of the fancier sections of Beverly Hills.

“I find Los Angeles a very difficult and potentially dangerous place to work,” he adds. “I went nowhere without a bottle of Kaopectate hidden in a brown paper bag.” [44] But at this point,

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he wisely changes the subject, not wanting to come across as like a neurotic, a whiner, or a wuss. Never ground yourself with fears and insecurities, unless they’re the same understandable, everyday worries that any sane reader is likely to share. If you must spend narrative time on drugs, in prison, or in a mental hospital, counter-ground yourself by documenting how various bystanders were able to recognize your good points. Esther Greenwood, Sylvia Plath’s alter ego in The Bell Jar (1963), will soon experience psychosis and attempt suicide. Yet in the novel’s opening chapter, Esther describes herself as “the envy of thousands of other college girls just like me”:

Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl . . . gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car. . . . There were twelve of us at the hotel. We had all won a fashion magazine contest [in real life, to edit Mademoiselle’s annual College Issue], by writing essays and stories and poems and fashion blurbs, and as prizes they gave us jobs in New York for a month, expenses paid, and piles and piles of free bonuses, like ballet tickets and passes to fashion shows and hair stylings at a famous expensive salon and chances to meet successful people in the field of our desire . . . . [45]

Before Barbara Gordon suffers a breakdown in I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can (1979), she establishes her credentials as an award-winning TV producer:

My new Emmy . . . was my reward for last year’s documentary, and the engraver’s block letters loomed

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into my line of sight: BARBARA GORDON, BEST WRITER, CBS, SUPERLANDLORD. . . . This was my third, but it was still nice to be a winner. [46]

Recounting her struggles with clinical depression in Prozac Nation (1994), Elizabeth Wurtzel lets slip that she attended Harvard. And oh, incidentally . . . .

Somewhere down the road I managed to pick up the 1986 Rolling Stone College Journalism Award . . . and now I have a summer job at the Dallas Morning News as an arts reporter.

Her cover photo depicts her wearing revealing cutoff jeans and looking stunningly attractive, “like someone I’d actually want to be.” [47] Their impressive résumés imply that these bedeviled young women, so “Full of Promise” (one of the chapter titles in Prozac Nation), have plenty to lose. Only after Hamlet proves that his head is on straight—letting the audience understand that he’s a worthy heir to the throne—does Ophelia exclaim, “O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!” [48] Suppose you’re writing fiction in the third person, simply reporting on your characters’ behavior. Do you still need to ground yourself? Yes, because even omniscient authors must be perceived as likeable and trustworthy. On the other hand, you don’t want your reader to think you’re striving to please.

Slush Pile Lesson #15: What Sick Mind Wrote this Stuff?

Parents admonish their children not to embarrass them with bad behavior that would “reflect badly on us.” But too

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often, fledgling novelists view their characters as their own offspring. If a protagonist misbehaves, won’t readers accuse the authors of doing likewise? As they rightly do with the Marquis de Sade and any novelist who writes about drug addiction with a bit too much streetwise knowledge. These nervous newbies “sin” in the opposite direction, modeling their characters after admirable, squeaky-clean Norman Rockwell types. They forget that enduring literature runs on dysfunctional rails—and always has, from the Greek tragedies, up through the plays of Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, to daytime TV soaps and prime-time hits like “Dallas” and “Dynasty.” Flannery O’Connor, Shirley Jackson, and Anne Rice all feature horrendously gruesome scenes. But when these authors entered a lecture hall, readers rose in respect, not in self- defense. Gore Vidal first established himself as a screenwriter, essayist, and playwright. Later, after he published Julian (1964) and Myra Breckenridge (1968), no one accused him of being a sun-worshipping transsexual. Never fear that your fictional creations will hurt your reputation, as long as you identify yourself as their reporter, not as their accomplice. Given Stephen King’s dark subject matter, he takes pains to do exactly that, grounding himself as a run-of-the- sawmill working stiff. In an introduction to Skeleton Crew (1985), his collection of short stories, he tells of his early days as a writer when he was paid $2,000 by Playboy, only to have his agent’s commissions and taxes whittle it down to $769.50. Then he flashes back to before his career took off, when he confronted stacks of bills with slender paychecks:

We had one child, and another was on the way. I was working fifty or sixty hours a week in a laundry and making $1.75 an hour . . . The checks for these stories

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(on publication, never on acceptance) always seemed to come just in time to buy antibiotics for the baby’s ear infection or keep the telephone in the apartment for another record-breaking month. [49]

In his Foreword to Night Shift (1978), an earlier collection of stories, King bewails that he’s a prisoner of his own imagination!

. . . before the question-and-answer period is over, someone always asks this question: Why do you choose to write about such gruesome subjects? I usually answer this with another question: Why do you think I have a choice? [50]

He’s well aware that many of his devoted fans are blue-collar types so, like a canny C&W songwriter, he focuses on their everyday concerns. Almost all his yarns are set in his home state of Maine. His characters are working hard to put money in the bank before the next long winter closes in. Meanwhile, well-off summer residents “from away” look down their noses at these year-round folk. When the zombies show up for dinner, guess who gets eaten first? In 1999, while strolling along a roadside, King was struck by an inattentive driver and gravely injured. In the spring of 2000, he published an article in The New Yorker, recounting the accident in grisly detail, implying he was too demoralized to write. Yet that same July, he offered his new serial novel, The Plant, on the Internet at $1.00 per installment. In November 2000, he had another new novel in bookstores.

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Slush Pile Lesson #16: Act Your Age!

Some beginners sound like graduates of the Class of 1912: “I take my pen in hand” . . . “in point of fact” . . . “I am of the opinion that. . .” They want to sound impressive, but come across as formal, faintly pompous. Unless you work at a law firm or a bank where Vice Presidents outnumber tellers, it’s wise to adopt a breezier rhythm, closer to the colloquial style of Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Wolfe. Why is your tone of voice so important? Because the reader is deaf, dumb, and blind to everything but your words. The Miracle Worker, William Gibson’s 1957 play, dramatized the early years of Helen Keller—a little girl who couldn’t see, hear, or speak. As a writer, you accept the role of Annie Sullivan (the Anne Bancroft role). Your readers are all Helen Keller (as played by Patty Duke). You’ll find it easy to perform miracles, because readers can’t perceive much beyond what you place directly in their grasp. They’ll never learn anything you don’t choose to reveal—though you can tease them and coax them to assume or guess, based on their previous experience. You enjoy a monopoly, a bottleneck, for all the new information they can receive, until your final page. Nor can your readers give you feedback—not until you’ve published the book. And so, as Joyce Carol Oates says, they must

assume a tacit contract between themselves and the writer: they understand that they will be manipulated, but the question is how? And when? With what skill? And to what purpose? [51]

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Any survey of best-selling novels reveals that readers gladly pay for the privilege of being tantalized, startled, bamboozled. To keep them from getting restless, feed them a steady diet of sights, sounds, and sensations—but always in small doses, one tidbit at a time. In The Lost World (1995), characters’ first impressions are often incomplete, intentionally misleading. Here’s Sarah Harding, reviving from a dead faint, with her perceptions unfolding gradually:

She felt heat, and wet. Something rough scraped along her face, like sandpaper. It happened again, this roughness on her cheek. . . . Something dripped on her neck. She smelled an odd, sweetish odor, like fermenting African beer. . . .Slowly, she opened her eyes and stared up into the face of a horse. The big, dull eye of the horse peered down at her, with soft eyelashes. The horse was licking at her with its tongue . . . . It wasn’t a horse. The head was too narrow, she suddenly saw, the snout too tapered, the proportions all wrong . . . . [52]

Similarly, from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994):

“I woke up this morning at seven . . . and there was this big lump next to me under the covers, which I thought was strange because I had gone to bed alone . . .So I lay there just looking at the lump, trying to figure out who or what it was. It was very big, bigger than anybody I knew. I was sure it was a human being because it was breathing. Then I noticed something strange about the breathing pattern: It was coming

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from two different parts of the lump. Finally, it dawned on me that the lump was two people. . . so I yanked the covers back. . . .” [53]

In Crichton, the enigma is a stegosaurus. (Reptiles lack eyelashes, but that gaffe passes unnoticed.) In Berendt, it’s “a boy and a girl . . . both completely naked.” [54]

I Could Say Something, But I Won’t!

One sure-fire recipe for literary suicide: Arouse your reader’s curiosity with some spicy, intriguing detail—and then simply drop the subject, without ever following up. After Carlos Castaneda was revealed as a fraud, I bought a small-press book by a therapist who’d traveled three continents to learn from native shamans. His back-cover author’s photo showed him looking alert, energetic, virile. This guy clearly enjoyed life. No doubt it enjoyed him. Without saying so, he was clearly aiming at Castaneda’s vast, disillusioned readership, because the book’s back-cover copy implied that he had solved a few of the real mysteries that still puzzled anthropologists. For me, the bigger mystery was why no major publisher had wanted to sign him up. Ten pages later, I found out why. First he recounted some delightfully eerie experiences in a sweat lodge, then began downloading personal information:

I lived many years in a relationship where life at home consisted mainly of the search for my partner’s hidden bottles of alcohol and protecting myself from unpredictable outbursts. There I was, an internationally recognized expert on helping other families in crisis, helpless and defeated in my own home . . . .

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Whoa! Before we can trust generalized complaints like this, first we need specific examples—at least one episode from those “many years” of boozing and bellowing. But instead:

I was unable to stop the actions of a team of lawyers who dragged me through the divorce courts with all the cruelty and economic persecution that our legal system permits . . . .

Again, whoa! If this “partner” was his wife, he should have said so in the first place. Partner means an unmarried somebuddy (usually of the same gender) who shares the same bed. And specifically, what “economic persecution” did the courts allow? Hadn’t this author troubled to learn the protocols of divorce, or too naïve to shop for a competent lawyer? Every reader expects authors to display common sense, to learn—and explain—the rules of whatever games they’ve been forced to play. This guy still had time to stop whining and rescue his narrative. But no:

The chairman of my university department . . . warned he would destroy me because I asked too many questions. . . . The evil perpetuated through back- stabbing gossip, lying, deception, outright crime, and even death threats has not left me unscathed.

I gritted my teeth, waiting for him to unfold at least some of this dirty laundry so I could draw my own conclusions. And then:

In the story that follows, I have chosen not to detail my own suffering and hardships. This has been done ably before in the spiritual stories of other lives . . . [55]

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Whereupon I closed the book and Frisbeed it across the rug. If you’d like to see crucial information withheld the right way, watch a horror movie on DVD or Netflix. Whenever an actor starts exploring the darkened forest, Bates Motel, or abandoned spaceship, the camera pans in for an extreme close- up. All you’ll see is the actor’s anxious face. Evil can strike from any corner of the screen. In standard old-fashioned murder mysteries, clues pointing to the killer are doled out slowly, seldom pieced together till the final chapter. Today, this measured pace will strain credibility and the reader’s patience to boot: You can’t serve up a banquet with red herrings alone or, worse, play keep- away with curiosity mounting. For a cautionary example of what not to do, see The Second Deadly Sin (1977)—a best-seller, despite the flaws in Lawrence Sanders’s opening scene.

The studio was an aquarium of light. Warm April sunshine came splaying down . . . [The model] was wearing soiled, grayish cotton underwear.

Vivid details, all filtered through the eyes of artist Victor Maitland. Sanders doesn’t bother to describe any paintings in the studio (a smart move, as you’ll see in Strategy #6). But it’s clear that this artist prefers underage girls as his nude models, which takes him down a notch in our esteem. But then, this is a traditional distancing device: Unsympathetic characters make better victims! After this nameless girl departs—conveniently, to leave no witnesses—Maitland is “beginning to plan the first painting,” when

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There was a knock at the studio door. Angry at the interruption, he yelled, “Who?” A familiar voice answered.

Up to now, Sanders has fully described every sound that Maitland hears, down to the nuances of his youthful model’s soft Hispanic accent. But now, abruptly, he shortchanges us.

Maitland scowled. He set the whiskey bottle on the crate. He went to the door, unlocked it, took off the chain. He pulled the door open, turned his back, walked away. “You again!” he said. The first knife thrust went into his back . . . . [56]

No fair! Given Maitland’s keen powers of observation, why does he ignore details of his visitor’s appearance? When any sequence becomes crucial and dramatic like this, time should slow down. Details should grow more vivid, not less. If the killer is a man, did he forget to shave this morning? If a woman, is she wearing a new shade of lipstick? Because “he” or “she” pronoun would reveal the killer’s gender, Sanders resorts to the awkward passive voice: “The blade was withdrawn . . . the blade was plunged . . . .” These lapses are easy to fix. Simply distract Maitland at the last instant, thus preventing him from recognizing his assailant right away. Something like this:

There came a knock at the studio door—a distinctive knock that Maitland recognized. Annoyed by the interruption, he was on his way to unlock the door when his phone began ringing. He undid the security chain, barked “Come in!”

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and turned, hurrying back to answer it. He lifted the receiver. “Yes? Hello?”

In any given scene, sticking to one character’s point of view makes it easier for the reader to follow the action. Here, with the action revving up (as in the shower scene in Psycho), you can get by with shifting over to the killer’s POV, like this:

His visitor followed, lifting the knife, aiming it carefully before plunging it between Maitland’s shoulders.

Now, back to Maitland. He can’t notice much because he’s going into shock, about to lose consciousness:

He stumbled, fell to the floor. The knife descended again and again. Maitland twisted his body, lifting his head to see the dark form looming over him. The studio lights were blindingly bright. Maitland couldn’t figure out who it was.

No, he still doesn’t know his killer’s identity. But at least we are told why he doesn’t. And notice that in our revised version, Maitland never hangs up the phone. Whoever called him can overhear the sounds of the assault—another thread you might choose to pursue. Perhaps the caller was actually the killer, using a cell phone to call Maitland’s land line from right outside his studio door! When it comes to withholding important details, Arthur Conan Doyle cheats—brazenly! Again and again, Sherlock Holmes’s deductions hinge on seemingly trivial details that escape Dr. Watson.

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In “The Greek Interpreter,” Sherlock confides that his elder brother Mycroft “has better powers of observation than I.” Soon the Brothers Holmes are scrutinizing a man whom Watson dismisses as “a very small, dark fellow, with his hat pushed back and several packages under his arm.”

“An old soldier, I perceive,” said Sherlock. “And very recently discharged,” remarked the brother. “Served in India, I see.” “And a non-commissioned officer.” “Royal Artillery, I fancy,” said Sherlock. “And a widower.” “But with a child.” “Children, my dear boy, children.”

The reader’s disbelief is about to be strained too far, but Watson’s snaps first. “Come,” he says, “This is a little too much!” Whereupon Conan Doyle makes sense of it all. Details that Watson failed to notice appear in bold:

“Surely,” answered Sherlock, “a man with that bearing, expression of authority, and sun-baked skin is a soldier, more than a private, and not long from India.” “He has not left the service long; he is still wearing his ammunition boots, as they are called,” observed Mycroft. “He has not the cavalry stride. Yet he wore his hat on one side, as shown by the lighter skin on that side. His light weight argues against his being in the Engineer Corps. He is in the artillery.” Mycroft nodded. “His complete mourning shows he has lost someone very dear. That he is doing

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his own shopping looks as though it were his wife. He has been buying things for children. There is a rattle, showing that one of them is very young. He has a picture-book under his arm. There is another child to be thought of.” [57]

Lacking all these details, no reader could possibly draw the same conclusions. But we don’t resent Conan Doyle for teasing us because once having piqued our curiosity, he satisfies it quickly. If you must usher a Gifted Underdog through an emergency room or nuclear weapons lab, too much scientific explanation can slow your pace of emotionally relevant information (a vital element of Strategy #6) and clog the narrative. Faced with such a problem, you simply spoon-feed any technical complexities by doing what Conan Doyle did: Funnel any necessary data through the perceptions of a lay observer, who can pick out whichever details will prove most relevant to your narrative. This is a time-honored ploy in science fiction, but also in mainstream best-sellers like Nicholas Evans’s The Horse Whisperer (1995). In this passage, a father is recalling the medical condition of his hospitalized daughter. Phrases in bold are deft shortcuts, purposefully vague summations of what might take whole pages to explain in full:

Without a riding hat, the doctors said, the girl might well be dead . . . A second scan had found some diffused bleeding in the brain, so they had drilled a tiny hole in her skull and inserted something that was now monitoring the pressure inside . . . . [58]

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Riding the Waves of Clichés and Stereotypes

Your reader’s mind is never a clean slate. Everyone has personal experience to refer back to and compare with, including books similar to yours—what editors call “the competition.” To your book, they’ll bring their own biases, their personal (but fortunately, predictable!) ways of sorting out whatever facts you offer. To take advantage of readers’ tendency to make snap judgments, best-sellers portray settings and characters in quick strokes, rather than spelling everything out in 19th-century fashion. If you can anticipate a reader’s assumptions and aversions, that lets you manipulate your target audience. Clichés and stereotypes let you push a reader’s buttons, quickly and economically. Witness the deft shorthand that opens Jackie Collins’s Hollywood Husbands (1986):

Jack Python walked through the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel [which Collins doesn’t bother to describe] with every eye upon him. He had money, charisma, a certain kind of power, razor-sharp wit, and fame. It all showed. [59]

Describe a lovely aspiring actress in a sequined gown. Readers will assume she’s glamorous and seductive. Write, “Her hair was platinum blond, and her torso was embraced in a sequined gown once owned by Jean Harlow.” They’ll assume she’s an old-movie buff, perhaps a collector of studio memorabilia. Introduce a young doctor in a white smock, and we’ll infer that he’s bright, experienced, dedicated. Describe an aged, bloated surgeon, and we’ll be alert for malpractice.

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But there’s a downside to this technique. Left to their limited imaginations, readers may dismiss your characters as stock figures from Central Casting—hard-boiled detectives, hookers with 24-carat ventricles, sensitive James Dean clones. To forestall any such rushes to judgment, 19th-century novelists like Dickens, Hardy, and Tolstoy used to describe major characters at exhaustive length until they bristled with too many distinctive traits to fit any familiar pigeonhole. Nowadays, readers won’t sit still that long. So to stymie (or at least, forestall) their presumptions, immediately cite any of your characters’ quirky, paradoxical traits.

How Distinctive and Original Must You Be?

Time critic Paul Gray once condemned the work of, “another self-regarding writer playing solipsistic games for his own amusement. Anything good on the tube?” [60] Experimental writing can be great fun to write, but is seldom riveting to read. And few people spend the time and money to do so. After all, would you trust your life and limb to a car with experimental brakes? Given a choice (and they have plenty!), most readers prefer sure-footed authors who are stylistically predictable, know what they’re doing, and exactly to what effect. Chris (as I’ll call him) is now a successful literary agent. Back when he started out, his clients mostly were tenured poets and short-story writers with MFA degrees. Their smugly oddball screeds were steadily rejected, even by cutting-edge quarterlies and “little” magazines. Finally, out of growing desperation, Chris sent one of these “experimental” efforts to a hard-nosed editor at Simon & Schuster. She immediately returned it, along with a brief note.

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“Gifted writer! Once he learns that readers should have as much fun as he’s having, you might get him published.” That rejection transformed Chris’s way of thinking— and soon after, his entire career. Recently, he held an auction for a zombie novel that attracted spirited bidding and finally sold for an advance of more than $1 million. A certain national magazine gave it a thoroughgoing rave—which suggests that when professional reviewers are assigned an 800-page doorstop novel, they don’t always read it all the way through. Because disappointed readers soon began posting on Amazon.com to complain that halfway through, the novel dies and never comes back to life. Given Chris’ agency commission of 15%, I doubt he’s losing much sleep over those author’s one- and two-star reviews. But the editor must be! To justify his seven-figure advance, he wound up offering Chris a three-book package deal and signed up the author for two sequels. So far, unwritten and not eagerly anticipated!

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Notes and References

[1] John Cheever, The Wapshot Scandal (1964). Harper & Row, 1964, p. 5. [2] David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (1995). Simon & Schuster, 1995, p. 13. [3] Cornelius Ryan, A Bridge Too Far (1974). Quoted by William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983). Warner Books, 1984, pages 74 and 76. [4] Mary Pipher, Ph.D., Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Lives of Adolescent Girls (1994). Ballantine, 1995, p. 176. [5] Andrew Weil, M.D., Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body’s Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself (1995). Fawcett Columbine, 1996, p. 80. [6] Walter Lord, A Night to Remember (1955). Bantam, 1956, pages xi-xii. [7] Thomas Harris, Hannibal (1999). Delacorte Press, 1999, p. 289. [8] Andrew Lycett, Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond (1995). Turner Publishing, 1995, p. 198. [9] Matt Schudel, “Books: Reviews and Opinion,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 15, 1997, p. L-11. [10] As one Internet joke went, “When you cross Dr. Laura with a roller skate, do you get a bitch on wheels? No, because you don’t cross Dr. Laura!” [11] Mark Twain, Concerning the Jews (1982). Philadelphia: Running Press, p. 14. [12] —— ——, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). See Chapter IX, “The Tournament.” [13] Ibid. See Chapter XVII, “A Royal Banquet.” [14] Stephen King and, to a lesser degree, John Updike let their male characters make sneering, disparaging remarks

180 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER about women. Most of Dick Francis’s mysteries include at least one who is strident, weepy, or plain insufferable. [15] Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Greek Interpreter” (1893) in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Norwalk: The Easton Press, 1981, pages 694 and 695. [16] Michael Crichton, The Lost World (1995). Ballantine, 1996, pages 66 and 63. [17] Ibid., p. 107. [18] Ross Macdonald, The Underground Man (1971). Vintage, 1996, p. 219. [19] Edna Buchanan, Suitable for Framing (1995). Hyperion, 1995, pages 51 and 130. [20] O.A. Scott, “Catch That Reference? There’ll be a Quiz,” The New York Times, June 26, 2011. [21) Woody Allen’s film persona isn’t universally embraced. Outside the big cities, his movies do poorly. One European distributor released his Annie Hall (1977) under the title of Urban Neurotic. [22] In one story line in “Doonesbury,” Raoul Duke (blatantly modeled on Hunter S. Thompson) poses as a Catholic priest to solicit funds to open an orphanage—where one of his charges turns out to be his own son, born out of wedlock. [23] Rush Limbaugh, The Way Things Ought to Be (1992). Pocket Books, 1992, p. 5. [24] Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan (1968). Simon & Schuster, 1973, pages 13-14. [25] Hugh Prather, Notes to Myself: My Struggle to Become a Person (1970). Bantam, 1990, p. 46. [26] Howard J. Ruff, How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years: A Crash Course in Personal and Financial Survival (1979). Reprint: Times Books (no date), p. 3. Ruff didn’t employ a literary agent to market his manuscript. In the version he sent to prospective publishers, he

181 TAM MOSSMAN fretted that black Vietnam vets might use their military training to mount armed insurrections here in the States—a prediction trimmed from Warner Books’ first edition.) Later, he offered Ruff Times readers the chance to buy a recording titled, “Howard Ruff Sings.” [27] Ibid., p. 8. [28] Peter Lynch with John Rothchild, One Up on Wall Street (1989). Simon & Schuster, 1989, p. 14. [29] John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story (1994). Random House, 1994, p. 96. [30] Benjamin Spock, M.D., and Michael B. Rothenberg, M.D., Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care: 40th Anniversary Edition (1985). Dutton, 1985, pages xv and 1. [31] Spontaneous Healing, see [5], above, p. 3. [32] Reviving Ophelia, see [4] above, p. 283. [33] Spontaneous Healing, p. 74. [34] Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness: The Story of my Death. Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt), 1996, pages 78- 79. Brodkey’s earlier novel, The Runaway Soul (1991), which he’d labored over for years, featured a brutally self-absorbed narrator. The book was a critical and commercial failure. [35] Ibid., p. 165. [36] Deborah Love, Annaghkeen (1970). Random House, 1970, quoted in Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard (1978). Penguin, 1987, p. 76. First-person streams of consciousness are typically risky. Arbitrary shifts to present tense (“But no voice tells me . . .”) tend to confuse and annoy the reader. [37] The Snow Leopard, pages 77-78. [38] Reviving Ophelia, see [4] above, pages 129, 130, and 153. [39] Matthew 27:14.

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[40] Thomas A. Harris, M.D., I’m OK—You’re OK (1969). Avon, 1973, p. 229. [41] Ibid., p. 13. [42] Ibid., p. 244. [43] Ibid., p. 229. [44] Adventures in the Screen Trade, see [3] above, pages 74 and 76. [45] Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963 in the U.K., but 1971 in the U.S.A.). Harper & Row, 1971, pages 2-3. [46] Barbara Gordon, I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can (1979). Perennial Library (Harper & Row), 1989, p. 6. [47] Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America. A Memoir (1994). Riverhead Books (Berkeley Publishing), 1995, pages 151 and 365. [48] William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1603), Act II, Scene 2, line 159. [49] Stephen King, Skeleton Crew (1985). Signet, 1986, pages 17-19. [50] —— ——, Night Shift (1978). Doubleday, 1978, p. xii. [51] Joyce Carol Oates, “The King of Weird,” in The New York Review of Books, October 31, 1996, p. 50. [52] The Lost World, see [15] above, p. 233. [53] Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, see [27] above, p. 79 [54] Ibid. [55] Bradford Keeney, Shaking Out the Spirits: A Psychotherapist’s Entry into the Healing Mysteries of Global Shamanism (1994). Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1994, pages 16-17. [56] Lawrence Sanders, The Second Deadly Sin (1977). Putnam’s, 1977, pages 7-10.

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[57] “The Greek Interpreter.” See [14] above, pages 696-697. [58] Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer (1995). Dell Books, 1996, p. 55. [59] Jackie Collins, Hollywood Husbands (1986). Simon & Schuster, 1986, p. 11. [60] Time magazine, September 23, 1996, p. 82.

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184 STRATEGY # 5 Every Fact Tells a Story

It was on the corner of the street that he noticed . . . something peculiar—a cat reading a map. —J. K. ROWLING, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone [1]

DOZENS OF BIOGRAPHIES ARE PUBLISHED EVERY YEAR. Few of them ever become best-sellers. Why not? Martha Duffy, writing in Time magazine, says that most authors don’t “use editorial judgment to assess the relative worth” of the facts they uncover and weigh in with a “mountain of repetition, trivia, and undigested research.” [2] Best-selling biographers are like prosecutors in a successful criminal trial. They never introduce details that a reader might object to as irrelevant, incompetent, and immaterial. They show—either right away, or very soon—that every descriptive scrap enfolds a larger significance.

The Amazing Secret of Miracle Mail Order

For several years, I worked at the Trade Books division of Prentice-Hall, located in New Jersey. Parker Publishing, one of our most profitable subsidiaries, sold most of their titles by direct mail—meaning that they had practically no returns from bookstores and also, received nearly 100% of each copy’s list price. [3] Yet Prentice pretended that Parker was a wholly independent outfit, even assigning it a mailing address up in Nyack, NY, across the state line/ How come? Because P-H didn’t want to risk offending the fussy academics and old-school physicians who authored

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their highly profitable textbook line. Parker specialized in flaky self-help titles like The Miracle of Psycho-Cybernetics and The Secret Power of Your Subconscious Mind. Most were sold to customers who seldom left the house, much less to visit any brick-and-mortar bookstores. Whatever its topic might be—diet for health, yoga for energy, or Amazing Telecult Power—a Parker book always began with the Paranoia Formula, dramatized with a brief case history. John A. or Mary B. had suffered from X (something fairly routine like lack of energy, too many bills, or loneliness). Soon after performing exercise Y, he or she was able to Z as never before. Z was always some goal like “restoring youthful vigor,” amassing untold wealth, or levitating small objects. I joked that the sooner or later, Parker would publish a book entitled How to Conquer the World in Your Spare Time. But Parker had the last laugh! Quietly and discreetly, Prentice- Hall’s Sub Rights Department licensed many of Parker’s backlist titles to mass-market paperback houses. A number stayed in print for years, racking up healthy bookstore sales and untold royalties. Our salesmen were fully aware of the active ingredient in every Parker title. Whenever I proposed a self-help book, their first question was, “Any case histories?” In short, useful advice isn’t enough by itself. Your reader needs a narrative to help imagine that advice in action.

From Demographics to Drama

To illustrate the compelling power of case histories (and the dismal results when they go missing), compare excerpts from two different books that cover the exact same topic—but in wholly different ways.

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The first is Choices, a reference work on the various manifestations and treatments of cancer. First published in 1980, it was revised twice, but none of those three editions became a best-seller:

Women over the age of 50 are most likely to get breast cancer. Women who have a mother, sister, daughter, grandmother or aunt who has had breast cancer and women who have already had breast cancer in one breast are also at increased risk. White women and women with higher incomes are more likely to get the disease, as are women who had their first period at an early age, have menopause at a late age, women who deliver their children later in life or who remain childless, and postmenopausal women who are overweight. [4]

Informative, well-intentioned—but plodding and repetitious! Now, consider this shorter, snappier passage from a best-selling success, Spontaneous Healing (1995):

In 1979, at the age of 50, Eva found a lump in her left breast. X-rays gave no cause for alarm, and the first doctor she saw told her the lump felt benign. When another doctor tried and failed to get a needle aspirate of the lump, a biopsy was scheduled . . . [5]

Paradoxically, none of these details affect the reader directly. Yet what a striking difference in readability and human interest! Instead of demographics and probabilities, we can root for a specific woman with a specific first name. Death takes out individuals, not statistics. Throughout his best-selling How We Die (1994), Sherwin B. Nuland always

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leads with a case history. Before explaining each cause of death, he names and profiles one specific patient who succumbed: James McCarty to congestive heart failure, Bob DeMatteis to cancer, Phil Whiting to Alzheimer’s, Ismail Garcia to AIDS. Almost every doomed patient is talented, warm-hearted, and sympathetic—thus fulfilling Strategy #3. And each was a patient of Nuland’s, helping to fulfill Strategy #4. After hooking our interest firmly with a single individual, he pulls back to show an overall profile of that deadly health threat, then zooms in for a close-up of how it works its damage on the microscopic cellular level.

Acorns Explain How Great Oaks Grow

Just as Dior and Chanel scissored new fashions out of the same old silks and cottons, Charles Fort’s The Book of the Damned (1919) and Lo! (1935) and Frank Edwards’s Flying Saucers Are Real (1956) cobbled ingenious theories out of existing news reports. But no matter how innovative, a theory must spin a net of narrative to capture the reader’s imagination. It must imply or impose a sequence of events—a story. Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision (1950) compares biblical passages with a wealth of ancient texts and legends to suggest that 3,500 years ago, a passing comet flung Earth off its axis before colliding with Mars, finally settling into solar orbit as the planet Venus. Space probes have proven Velikovsky wrong, but Worlds is richly informative—and still a compelling read! From only a few inscrutable artifacts, Erich von Daniken deduced evidence of extraterrestrial visitation. His conjectures made Chariots of the Gods? (1959) an international success in its various translations.

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Refining Narrative Gold

Every best-seller is less of a detective story, more of a closing argument presented to a jury of one. In novels and non-fiction alike, some details are always more significant than others. To ensure that any one fact is “active”— truly suggestive and intriguing; by itself or in context—pretend you’re a district attorney, about to introduce that scrap of evidence as Exhibit A to your reader. What do you hope it implies? Will it help your overall case? By themselves, Killer Details don’t generate narrative energy. You need the equivalents of smoking guns—details that with minimal prompting link up to other facts, leading to a conclusion far beyond their individual face value. If description can’t wield that effect, it’s not relevant— the prose equivalent of Styrofoam pellets packed around your narrative. Either: (1) Replace this disposable detail with a more active one. Or else (2) Make it a precursor or clue pointing to some active fact yet you’ve yet to reveal. Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, active facts present distinctive bulges and hollows that link up with other facts. Like fragments of an ancient statue, they should be intriguing by themselves while still suggesting the overall structure from which they’ve broken loose. (3) Keep that the detail in, if it sets the scene in some small punchy, pungent way. If your lovers stroll down Paris’s rue St. Honoré, let one glance at that Louis XV dos d’âne writing desk in the antique store window. Don’t let them cross the Lower East Side’s Avenue D without stepping on crack vials on the sidewalk. (If you find these two examples vivid, it’s

189 TAM MOSSMAN because they portray wealth and degradation, respectively— yin/yang halves of the Paranoia Formula.) Active facts are like billboards and fire sirens, meant to be noticed. Be sure to spotlight them in novels and non-fiction alike. What happens if you don’t? Consider this passage from an imaginary potboiler set in springtime France, during World War I. You’re being fed plenty of details—but why?

With the river at his back, Martin filled his lungs with cool morning air, rinsed clear after last night’s rain. The rising sun felt warm on his face. Overnight, the low, gnarled limbs of the pear orchard had erupted with clusters of fragile white blossoms. Some twenty yards distant from the old farmhouse, a flock of two dozen sheep kept the turf cropped close to the ground. Martin listened for the song of a lark, somewhere in the tranquil sky.

Pretty and evocative, but too leisurely! What if we supercharge this same passage? Make every detail an active one and highlight what each one means:

The river lay behind them, to the west, but Claire couldn’t swim. They’d never make it back across the river. Martin’s only chance was to lead her eastward, straight toward the German lines. Or were Kaiser Bill’s tanks already headed this way? He filled his lungs with cool morning air. Last night’s rain had erased any footprints they’d left the day before. Nobody will know we were here. The rising sun felt warm on his face. He couldn’t

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let it distract him as he glanced around the abandoned farm. Nothing here to stop a German tank. Those ancient pear trees in the orchard, whose twigs had erupted with clusters of fragile white blossoms—their gnarled trunks wouldn’t even slow down an A7V! There was a wall of smooth stones, stained with copper-green lichen and half-tumbled by centuries of frost, had no mortar to hold it together. A tank’s weight would crush its rocks down into the rain-soaked earth, barely slowing the machines’ advance. The small flock of two dozen sheep kept the grass cropped short. A tank’s revolving treads would quickly turn the tuft into a soggy mire. Martin took another quick, deep gasp. Again he held his breath, hoping to hear the song of a lark. Last night, this orchard had been alive with the chirrup of birds. Now, not even a twitter. The morning was quiet—too quiet. Then Martin heard a rhythmic diesel growl [6], still distant, coming from the east. He burst into the one-room farmhouse. “Claire! Nous . . . il nous faut sortir, maintenant . . . Move out. NOW!!”

Sorry to break off, but I’ve made the point. Whenever a character comes under pressure, make your sentences snappier, more urgent. As you recall from doomed artist Victor Maitland, fear hones the senses. Your reader will pay closer attention to small details. Make every fact relevant, and you’ll have more to say, not less—which is why our second version runs more than twice as long as the first one. As you see here, active facts should be interpreted as they first appear, or very soon thereafter. That makes them more

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memorable, further building involvement and curiosity. Better yet, it offers your reader the context and background information needed to enjoy what happens later. In our example, once those tanks lumber into view, no reader will want you to pause for second-thought backtracking like “The stones in that wall were too round, piled too loosely, to impede a heavy tank’s mechanized treads.” Active facts always exert some influence on a human being. In our foregoing example, you could add still more involvement if you mention that Claire’s aging grandfather planted those pear trees. That way, she can feel a real pang when his handiwork gets splintered flat. Just as a sugary soft drink stimulates thirst, active facts should satisfy curiosity and pique it at the same time. If you spin active facts into quick anecdotes that run for a paragraph or two, formerly “minor” details will assume a narrative function—making them easier to remember later, but fun to read right now.

Gifted Underdogs are reliable witnesses. Show a corpse’s forearm to an underpaid medical examiner or forensic pathologist in her first day on the job, and those dark splotches can suggest tensed muscles that bruised more easily— something that would escape a lay observer (namely, the reader). Seeing entire worlds in grains of sand comes naturally to archeologists, to whom a few broken potsherds can suggest an entire way of life. Pollen grains recovered from a Neanderthal’s grave (in a cave, under a pile of rocks) proved that the corpse was buried along with a bouquet of wildflowers! Active facts like that are enough for non-fiction. You can simply report what’s happened or been discovered, add your own speculations, and you’ve paid your dues. But in

192 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER fiction—again, as in our rewrite of Victor Maitland’s death— you are free to dig wider and deeper, imagining the emotions of the grieving Neanderthal who plucked those buttercups and hyacinths. The best active facts are versatile, allowing a number of interpretations, fingering a wide lineup of suspects. Ideally, every active fact spawns two intriguing narratives: how it was discovered, and what it suggests about the narrative in progress. Always assume at least some of your readers will be familiar with your technical information (like the etiology of those bruises on our corpse). If you think of them as intelligent college seniors majoring in your field of expertise, you’ll realize that spoon-feeding explanations can risk insulting them. “As you know,” or “Of course,” are flattering nods to what your reader might already know.

The old Broadway adage has it that there are no small roles, only small actors. Enduringly popular authors—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, James Michener, Stephen King, to cite a few—are generous enough to give each minor “supporting” characters at least one memorable turn on stage. In Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake (1943), the title character is a drowned corpse. The fascination derives from everything we learn about her, disclosed by well-rounded suspects or witnesses, each with vivid back stories of their own. Her killer’s motive turns out to be fairly mundane (as most motives turn out to be, which makes them more credible, not less—we can identify more easily with Othello’s jealousy than to Hannibal Lecter’s culinary tastes). Similarly, while chasing down leads in The First Deadly Sin (1971), Detective Francis X. Delaney pries open his informants’ private lives, their pains and aspirations. Every

193 TAM MOSSMAN stage of his investigation unlocks a narrative, expanding the case into a series of interlocked short stories.

Slush Pile Lesson #17: Stamp Out Walking, Sitting, and Standing

A young writer had finished his first three-act comedy. Convinced that it was hot stuff, he showed it to an actress who’d played leading roles in summer stock from Pasadena to Bucks County. She was gracious enough to be honest: “First, cut out your stage directions. How the ingénue walks, when her father shrugs his shoulders, using Christmas-tree lights to represent the seaside town in the distance. Those are things a director will decide on. Don’t force his hand.” From The Dream Merchants (1949) one of Harold Robbins’s early novels:

[Johnny] savagely resumed packing. Angrily he threw his remaining clothes into the valise and snapped it shut. Placing one knee on its corner, he put his weight on it and clinched the strap around it. Finished, he straightened up and picked the valise from the bed and carried it out of the room . . . and placed it on the floor near the door. [7]

Watching the climactic duel in Hamlet (1603) or a battle scene in Henry V (1600), you’d never guess that Shakespeare’s printed stage directions are brief, mostly monosyllabic: Enter. . . They fight. . . Dies. Historians may know exactly how Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin greeted each other at Yalta, but they consider it too trivial to report. But a fledgling historical novelist, wanting to

194 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER help the reader see what happened at the conference, will often tell you exactly whose who shook whose hand, and how hard. Tyros waste far too much space (and reader patience) describing their characters in motion. This can be justified in sci-fi: Faced with the peculiarities of any alien locale, the reader may need to get oriented. Remember how Apollo astronauts in their bulky space suits took huge skips along the lunar surface? In any similar alien setting, your human characters should get around differently—by crawling, hopping, even flying. I had to condense The Widow Custis, a Revolutionary War saga that bogged itself down in needless stage directions. Below you’ll see a passage from the original manuscript. See how it improves when tightened up, with the bold- face words deleted?

General Washington rose from his stiff wing chair and strode closer to the fire to warm his fingers. From there, he took four steps to the window and gazed out over the snow-shrouded hills of Valley Forge. He shivered. Feeling the cold through a cracked pane of glass, he briskly chafed his palms together, then slipped his left hand between the buttons of his vest to keep it warm. Then he turned, lingering in front of the fire once more before returning to his wing chair. He was about to sit down when Francis, his aide de camp, knocked at the door. In his right hand was a fresh dispatch, waiting to be read. . . .

Much has changed since 1777, but generals still put on their uniforms one leg at a time. When it’s chilly, people feel it the same way on Samoa as in Siberia, in ancient Rome just as aboard an intergalactic starship.

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Familiar facts can’t raise reader curiosity and advance your story. Conversely, any distinctive trait or unlikely action— a soldier’s limp, a happy child’s leaping up and down—can make a character memorable.

More Talk, Less Action

Since that climactic love scene is the moment your reader’s been panting for, shouldn’t you pay closer attention to the couple’s body English? No, not unless their boudoir behavior in some way reflects their characteristic approach to everyday life. (In fiction at least, mild-mannered seducers are few and far between.) Experienced romance novelists describe their hookups in vague oceanic terms, expecting their (equally experienced) readers will fill in the R-rated blanks with their own X-rated specifics. When passions become overwhelming, they keep foreplay to a minimum because complex Masters-and-Johnson type descriptions would only cool things down. Consider this long-awaited but comma-free tryst from Chapter 27 of The Horse Whisperer (1995):

He finished drinking and turned to her and as he was about to brush the water from his face, she reached out and did it for him. She felt the cold water on the back of her fingers and might have taken it as rejection [?] and removed her hand had she not then felt through it the confirming warmth of his flesh. And with this touch, the world went still . . . . Annie watched him and took a long quiver of breath. Then she reached out with her other hand and ran it along the side of his face, from the harsh unshaven cheek to the softness of his hair. She felt his

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hand brush the underside of her arm and stroke her face [??] as she had stroked his. At his touch she closed her eyes and blindly let his fingers trace a delicate path from her temples to the corners of her mouth . . . He put his hands to her elbows and smoothed them up inside the sleeves of her T-shirt to hold her upper arms. Annie felt her skin contract. She had both her hands in his hair now and she gently drew his head toward her and felt an equal pressure [???] on her arms. [8]

This have could have prompted a bit of dialogue from The Wapshot Scandal (1964):

“I’ve been married three times, but right here in this book they’re doing something and I don’t know what it is. I mean, I don’t know what they’re doing . . . .” [9]

Before Alex Comfort published The Joy of Sex (1972), readers impatient with “marriage manuals” sought real-life advice in the memoirs of Casanova and Frank Harris. Best- selling novels were of little help. All fictional lovers, from Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons (1782) to Rhett Butler, are uniformly mum when it comes to technique. One exception is the dying Harry in Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” who recalls a “hot Armenian” who “needed no pillow under her buttocks.” Generations of college students have taken the hint and been amply rewarded. In effective fiction, when the action heats up, physical sweat evaporates, leaving only emotions and reactions for the reader to enjoy. Consider some of the guidelines laid down by the editors of Silhouette Romances. (In the words of humorist Dave Barry, I am not making this up!)

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Descriptions of lovemaking should be sensuous, with some details. They cannot be limited to “he kissed her passionately.” However, there are limits to what and how it can be described. Nudity is permissible, depending on context, but it should not be too graphic. In general, nudity above the waist is fine. Below the waist, things become trickier. Veiled references to our Heroine’s “hidden” or “secret” places are OK. Our Hero’s “hard male strength” also gets by the stern Silhouette censor. Of course, references to pain and blood are out. The only pain permitted is the sweet pain of fulfilled (or unfulfilled) desire.

This kind of nebulous reticence is satirized in Shibumi (1979). While explaining “Stage IV lovemaking,” author Trevanian keeps the details deliberately skimpy:

. . . his endurance [was] aided by the task of controlling movement very strictly, as their position was complicated and arcane, and a slight error could do them physical hurt. [10]

Slush Pile Lesson #18: What’s Next on the Menu?

Successful novels sometimes repeat evocative details, such as the wind chimes mimicking the name of Hee Sing, the Chinese cook buried in the grave below, in The Thorn Birds (1977); or in Frank Herbert’s Dune series, the oft-mentioned (but never closely described) Face Dancers and ghola tanks, which allow cloning of characters killed off in previous novels. (Of course, “ghola” plays off “ghoul,” adding a threat that the process might go wrong).

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But inept writers often recycle salient details over and over, the way cruise-ship comedians repeat a punch line in hopes that that their audience will laugh this time around. Gourmets like second courses, not second helpings. Once readers grasp the import of any active fact, they want to move on. Trot it out twice, and they’ll assume that you have still more significance to squeeze out of it—as J.K. Rowling does with her Portkeys, vital to the endgame of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000).

The Short-Lived MacGuffin

In movies, the Holy Grail, the Fountain of Youth, and the Maltese Falcon don’t earn much time onscreen. The script treats these precious props like hot potatoes—briefly drooling over them, then ignoring them for the duration of the film. Each is a MacGuffin, a term Alfred Hitchcock borrowed from screenwriter Angus MacPhail, one of whose shaggy-dog stories ran something like this:

Two men are on a train speeding north from London. “What’s in that oddly wrapped parcel?” asks the first man. “That,” the other smiles, “is a MacGuffin—for trapping ostriches in Glasgow.” “Ahem . . . I don’t believe there are any ostriches in Glasgow. Nor anywhere in Scotland.” “Not a one? Then this can’t be a MacGuffin, now can it?”

In his biography of Hitchcock, Donald Spoto explains that the MacGuffin is any arbitrary device to “simply [get] the story going . . . Soon after the story begins, the issue” of what

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the MacGuffin may be “fades in importance for both the characters and the audience.”[11] Having delivered its prescribed dose of motivation, a MacGuffin drops out of sight—though in the interests of continuity and closure, it typically resurfaces at the very end of the film. Like an athletic trophy, it motivates the players, but is never on the field while they play out the game. This is why the most legendary, memorable MacGuffins (the Philosopher’s Stone, the sword Excalibur) are described in passing, if at all. They’re never described too precisely, much less subjected to thermo-luminescence. Thereafter, they remain in their shadowy netherworld.

Bottom line: Trust your reader’s imagination. Let it do some of the hard work for you. Humorist P. J. O’Rourke admires “the way the movies of the 1930s and 1940s would show the presidential character only from the back. It was more respectful.” [12] It was easier, too, to cast an actor who only sounded like Roosevelt or Truman. The audience instantly recognized the Chief Executive’s voice from radio broadcasts. Since they knew what he looked like, their memories did a more convincing job than any makeup artist. For that same reason, director William Wyler never showed the face of the actor playing Jesus in his 1959 re-make of Ben-Hur—and gave him no lines to speak. As The Blair Witch Project (1999) proved at some length, it’s often best to let your audience fill in the blanks. No matter how gifted you are, there’s a limit to what print can communicate. Clever authors share a healthy respect for what words can’t achieve and never try to force language past that point, in the ways that experimental writers do, repeatedly.

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Creative writing instructors often advise students to offer a sensory smorgasbord of smells, sounds and sights, mimicking the overstuffed descriptions you’ll find in Balzac and Poe. But in the literary arena, this works against you. In a widely publicized lab experiment, mice allowed to eat only half their normal calories (not starved, just afforded smaller portions of nourishing food) lived longer and stayed healthier than a control group of rodents allowed to chow down whenever they felt like it. The same principle applies if you overstuff your prose descriptions: Given only a scraps to chew on, your reader’s imagination remains strong and “hungry,” with more room to digest what you do feed it.

Read the Label Under the Painting and Move On

Best-sellers typically describe works of art as interchangeable, citing only the creators’ names. This is deft shorthand: By stimulating the reader’s memory of “a Chagall” or “a Van Eyck,” they give the same effect as having used 1,000 words. In The Eiger Sanction (1972), when Jonathan Hemlock feels “an urge to be with his paintings,” he descends to his finished, climate-controlled basement and clicks on the lights, to reveal . . . nothing but names!

Along the walls leaped out the color of Monet, Cézanne, Utrillo, Van Gogh, Manet, Seurat, Degas, Renoir, and Cassatt. He moved around the room slowly, greeting each of his beloved Impressionists, loving each for its particular charm and power . . . [13]

In a flashback to Hemlock’s college days, we learn that he

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took a summer job assisting a professor of Art . . . In the course of the cataloguing, Jonathan listed one small oil as “unknown,” although the packing slip assigned it to a minor Renaissance painter. The professor chided him for the mistake, but Jonathan said it was no error. “How can you be so sure?” the professor asked, amused. Jonathan . . . was young and still assumed that teachers knew their fields. “Well, it’s obvious. We saw a painting by the same man last week. And this was not painted by the same hand. Just look at it.” . . . Jonathan was correct. [ 14]

How can we be sure that Hemlock was correct? To save time—and duck any arguments—Trevanian doesn’t say. Consider the alternative. Describe a late Picasso too thoroughly, and readers might be disappointed that it’s not a precise, geometric work his Synthetic Cubist period. Lynn V. Andrews, invited to a dinner party in Medicine Woman (1978), notes a “Fritz Scholder painting [that] covered the entire wall behind the long leather sofa . . .” [15] By leaving the canvas effectively blank—never mentioning the colors or even the subject matter—she lets the reader imagine one of Fritz Scholder’s slapdash portraits of Native Americans. But what if that Scholder served as a MacGuffin, or if her plot hinged on its authenticity? Shouldn’t she offer a more complete description? Again, no! In fact, Medicine Woman begins in an art gallery, where Andrews glimpses a photograph depicting a marriage basket, a mysterious Native American artifact:

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The basket . . . was haunting. It had an intricate pattern resembling a dolphin with a snake, or with lightning. Even though I am a collector of American Indian art, I had never seen anything to compare with it. [16]

In MacGuffins as with movie stars, sheer beauty doesn’t matter as much as whatever motive (envy, lust), and emotions (awe, curiosity, desire) the beholder is feeling. That’s why, after her very cursory description of the basket, Andrews cuts to her personal response:

I was entranced by its perfection. No telling where it was from, but it was already on display in my subconscious. [17]

In the works of Herman Hesse and Carlos Castaneda, enticing daydreams and vivid hallucinations serve as perfectly good MacGuffins. And for the first half of Medicine Woman, the marriage basket seems to be just that. When Andrews finally sees it for real, her description is pared to a single word:

. . . exquisite . . . [18]

If masterworks tend to elude description, so do their creators. “Biographies of artists,” Arlene Croce observes,

are notably tricky to write: The greater the art, the less there is for the biographer to get hold of. The artist’s life is absorbed by that other reality which is the art, and what’s left over—the husk of a life—is comparatively uninteresting. [19]

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As you saw, Lust for Life (1937) and The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961) succeeded by filling out “dry husks” with meaty fictionalized detail.

As soon as an active fact has yielded up its significance, drop it. This leaves your “lab-rat” reader underfed, and hungry for more. Also, by ruthlessly omitting any description you can’t manage quickly and easily, that forces you to rely on those personal memories and insights that come easiest—and which no other writer can supply. And as the French say, appetite comes with eating. To keep your reader eager, keep changing the textures and flavors of what you serve up. This very simple trick is an essential part of Strategy #6.

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Notes and References

[1] J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (first published 1997). Scholastic, 1998, p. 2. [2] Martha Duffy, “Is Excess Necessary?” in Time, January 22, 1996, p. 66. [3] To keep the math simple, let’s assume a new book’s list price is $10 in hardcover (or “cloth,” as editors call it). That price is printed on its dust jacket and encrypted in the UPC (Universal Product Code, commonly called the bar code). So that retailers can afford to sell copies of that hardcover at its bar-coded price, the publisher must offer a wholesale discount—of at least 40% off list price—and pay for shipping to boot. When (if!) a customer buys that $10 hardcover, the bookstore remits no more than $6 to the publisher—who then pays the author a contractual royalty of $1. (I’m simplifying: again! For books published in cloth, royalties go up in stages, according to the total of copies sold: from 10% of list on the first 5,000, to 12.5% on the next 5,000, and 15% thereafter. But many titles often sell fewer than 5,000 copies!) In short, each $10 hardcover sold nets its publisher no more than $5.00, and usually less, because of chain-store discounts and remaindered copies. But direct-mail customers pay the full $10, plus a fee for shipping and handling! And on such mail-order sales, the publisher pays the author a reduced royalty based on list price— on our $10 hardcover, as little as 50 cents. Yes, mail-order still has its built-in costs (book manufacturing, advertising flyers, and Media Mail postage). But the difference in net cash received results in huge profit margins that help niche publishers survive.

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[4] Marion Morra and Eve Potts, Choices (1994). New York: Avon Books, 1994, p. 294. [5] Andrew Weil, M.D., Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body’s Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself (1995). Fawcett Columbine, 1996, p. 123. [6] I’ve no idea what a German A7V sounded like. Can you let me know? [7] Harold Robbins, The Dream Merchants (1949). Pocket, 1985, p. 22. [8] Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer (1995). Island (Dell), 1996, pages 335-336. [9] John Cheever, The Wapshot Scandal (1964). Harper and Row, 1964, p. 41. [10] Trevanian, Shibumi (1979). Ballantine, 1980, p. 438. [11] Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (1983). Boston: Little, Brown, 1983, p. 145. [12] P. J. O’Rourke, Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government (1991). Vintage Books, 1992, p. xix. [13] Trevanian, The Eiger Sanction (1972). Crown, 1972, p. 21. [14] Ibid., pages 23-24. [15] Lynn V. Andrews, Medicine Woman (1978). Harper & Row Perennial, 1983, p. 13. [16] Ibid., p. 1. [17] Ibid. [18] Ibid., p. 198. [19] Arlene Croce, “Loves of His Life,” The New Yorker, May 19, 1997, p. 78.

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206 STRATEGY # 6 The Slope of Curiosity

Once something heavy begins to roll, it can’t be stopped; it’s simply going to roll until it finds a flat place long enough to wear away all of its forward motion. —Stephen King, It [1]

TEXTBOOKS, TAX-PREPARATION GUIDES, and computer manuals are no fun to read—because they don’t have to be! Similarly, Slush-pile manuscripts—and most of those books on the remainder tables—require some effort to finish. Readers don’t want to waste time on “difficult” prose if they don’t have to, especially if it doesn’t offer commeasurable rewards. Who wants to trudge through knee-deep snow for the fun of it? In glad contrast, any best-seller is a downhill ski run, pulling you gracefully and effortlessly along. (Hence the title of this chapter!) Invariably, the first page (after the acknowledgments) provides you enough “pull” to get you started. As you read on, inevitably, the pace will flatten out. But only briefly, having built up strong momentum. You don’t slow down, trusting that a new plunge lies just ahead, where you can resume your speed with redoubled interest. The Slope of Curiosity is a logical extension of Strategy #5, but now, the flow of information becomes even faster and more energetic, compelling reader interest If this fails to happen, it’s for several predictable—and preventable—reasons.

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The Pains of Starting Over

Collections of short stories by different authors and annuals like The Year's Best Science Fiction don’t sell very well. Publishers depend on orders from libraries, academics, and die-hard aficionados. One problem is that when selections are made, sheer reader delight is rarely the top priority. The typical collection strives to be “representative,” basing its choices on sociology and demographics. But socially-aware writers under 40 living in the Bay Area offer no sales point to brag about in the catalog. But in any anthology, the more serious flaw is that no mater how worthy, every selection presents a different “voice,” an entirely new Printed Persona. It’s the literary equivalent of speed dating. Faced with shifts in tone and style, plus a fresh cast of total strangers, readers must set their Enjoyment Odometer back to zero—repeatedly! Worse, any author who manages to shine among the rest is soon whisked away, never to appear again. In collections by only one author, much the same problem applies: Short stories can’t maintain a Slope. Unless united by a common character (like Sherlock Holmes, or Hemingway’s Nick Adams) or by their author’s distinctive outlook or theme—as in compelling shorter works by Edgar Allan Poe, John Cheever, Stephen King, or the dazzling T. Coraghessan Boyle—the collections soon fall out of print, eking out a zombie half-life on Amazon.com. Now you know why collections of a single comic strip, like “Garfield” and “The Far Side” often hit the TBR’s best- seller list, while thematic New Yorker anthologies—featuring a mix of individual cartoonists and drawing styles—never do. Back in college, I took a course in doorstop-sized Victorian novels. To motivate myself into finishing each

208 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER assigned one, I’d leaf to the final page and read the very last paragraph. Out of context, it made no sense at all. But that was the point. That tantalizing whiff of mystery kept my curiosity alive, even while George Eliot and Anthony Trollope were doing their damnedest to smother it. Your reader shouldn’t need such ploys! It’s your responsibility to provide relevance on every page. Successful authors are eager and able to do just that. By page 3, their works are up and running—and keep on doing so.

Before the U.S. Postal Service’s rates for Media Mail became prohibitive, literary agents used to ship entire manuscripts to editors who never asked to see them. Each week, editors would get a few boxed manuscripts from agents—along with all those from amateurs who mailed their stuff in cold. Soon publishers adopted the policy of not returning submissions that lacked return postage. Nowadays, most houses flatly refuse all unsolicited manuscripts, even ones enclosing stamps or SASEs. Turn your radio dial to a classical FM station, you’ll sometimes hear total silence—what broadcasters call dead air. But you don’t switch channels. You feel confident that sooner or later, a new movement will resume. Similarly, you might trust that some limp manuscripts might wake up with a lurch around page 26 and become breathlessly compelling? They could, they should, but they never do! For this reason, if editors see any glaring flaw on your first few pages (stilted dialogue, so-what? descriptions, cardboard characters), they’ll assume that those same weaknesses persist throughout. No editor has time to read everything straight though. So to blow through the chaff, I used to pull surprise inspections. Rather than begin on page 1, I’d cut the manuscript like a giant

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deck of cards, open it to more or less the halfway point, and see what was going on. If anything! Some dependable novelists like F. Scott Fitzgerald, J.D. Salinger and William Styron need two or three pages to clear their throats. But by 150 pages or so, if a book wasn’t breathing on its own—if something intriguing wasn’t happening right then and there, on that very page—I’d declare it DOA and replace it in whatever coffin it arrived in. Hadn’t I missed all the crucial plot twists? Bypassed the author’s whole premise? Guilty as charged! But I wasn’t being ruthless, just doing the same thing most bookstore browsers do—peeking inside a title to see if it seizes their interest, enough to justify their two-figure “advance.” Later on, I learned that Hollywood producers use this same trick, first thumbing to the middle of a screenplay to probe for intelligent life. But to assure myself that this trick was reliable, I went to the library and located a test group of titles published up to 200 years ago and still in print. I opened each one to near the halfway point and began reading. From Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852): “I’ve had a sister sold in that New Orleans market. I know what they are sold for; and am I going to stand by and see them take my wife and sell her, when God has given me a pair of strong arms to defend her? No; God help me! I’ll fight to the last breath, before they shall take my wife and son. Can you blame me?” [2]

From Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900):

The passion for pepper seemed to burn like a flame of love in the breast of Dutch and English adventurers. For a bag of pepper, they would cut each other’s

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throats without hesitation and would forswear their souls, of which they were so careful otherwise. The bizarre obstinacy of that desire made them defy death in a thousand shapes: unknown seas, loathsome and strange diseases, captivity, hunger, and despair. It made them great! It made them heroic! And it made them pathetic, too, in their craving for trade with inflexible death levying its toll on young and old. [3]

From Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run With the Wolves (1992):

However, on the day of the great parade, and just minutes before Eisenhower was to drive down the long road in his jeep, it was discovered that while all the native women dutifully wore the skirt, they did not like the blouses, and had left them at home. So now all the women were lined up and down both sides of the road, skirted but bare-breasted, and with not another stitch on and no underwear at all. [4]

From Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun (1992):

“Probably digital to analog converter,” Sanders said. “Very neat. . . You know how the Japanese can make things this way and we can’t? They kaizen ’em. A process of deliberate, patient, continual refinements. Each year, the products get a little better, a little smaller, a little cheaper. Americans don’t think that way. Americans always look for the quantum leap, the big advance forward. Americans try to hit a home run—to knock it out of the park—and then sit back. The Japanese hit singles all day long, and they never

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sit back. So with something like this, you’re looking at an expression of philosophy as much as anything.” [5]

From R. L. Stine’s “Goosebumps” series, Return of the Mummy (1994): Startled cries filled the room. Uncle Ben spun around, his eyes wide with surprise. “What is happening?” he cried. The four Cairo police officers, their features set in hard frowns, moved quickly into the center of the room. “Be careful,” Uncle Ben warned, standing in front of the mummy case as if protecting it. “Do not move anything. It is all terribly fragile.”[6]

In each of these quick excerpts, something vital was going on. Exactly what wasn’t always clear, but every glimpse made me want me to turn back a few pages and find out. To make this a controlled experiment (though still not scientific), I ran the same test on a sad group of losers on the PUBLISHER’S OVERSTOCK table at that same bookstore. Picking a dozen at random, I opened each book to roughly the halfway point and dug in. To paraphrase Dante, I never thought that ineptness had undone so many!) Like city morgues, remainder tables feature an endless turnover of semi-permanent guests. Therefore, it wouldn’t be fair to toe-tag these particular failures by title and author. But I can summarize what I found.

In novels: • While exploring a deserted rectory in England, a woman ignores the evocative surroundings because she’s pondering all the possible reasons behind a police investigation

212 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER that transpired the week before. • A young man struggles to refrain from talking while shooting pool. • A traveler wakes up, showers, shaves, and listens to the clatter of dishes in the hotel dining room downstairs. In non-fiction: • Sensible precautions taken by researcher Albert Schatz while experimenting with tuberculosis bacilli. • Wins and losses of the Boston Red Sox during the summers of 1948 and ’49. • Different people’s recollections of André Gide, jotted down several years after his death. • Vague memories of being dehydrated as a child, being carried to the hospital and given what a nurse said was sugar water, then being carried home again.

Are you having fun yet? One excerpt did coax me to read on: Two NASA astronauts were trying to stabilize their Gemini spacecraft, yawing and pitching in its course above the atmosphere. But their craft was in Earth orbit, not bound for the moon. And the stakes weren’t high enough to invoke the Paranoia Formula because the problem wasn’t even life-threatening, just a glitch that forced them to scrub one of the flight’s scheduled maneuvers.

Taking Good Care of Your Reader

Playwright Tony Kushner, who won the Pulitzer for his Angels in America (1993), writes of conversing with Craig Lucas who has “written several wonderful plays, all of which have been enormous successes.” But when Lucas’ God’s Heart opened at Lincoln Center, audiences accustomed to his “funny,

213 TAM MOSSMAN beautiful tightly constructed stories . . . were baffled” by “the sprawl and anti-logic of this new, extremely rough and demanding” work. On the night his play closed, Lucas admitted that he could have “taken better care of his audience.” Kushner adds that any playwright knows just what he means. It is possible—in fact, it’s not all that hard—to make a play “work.” [7]

Kushner doesn’t spell out exactly how, but of course the same holds true for books. No best-seller “baffles” readers by being heedlessly rough, needlessly demanding. Reviewers often praise a book for being “a page-turner” or “well-paced. Thrillers’ flap copy describes them as fast-moving and action-packed. But these foxfire attributes are no guarantee, as the remainder table demonstrates, again and again. At he Cineplex, both Spielberg’s 1941 (1979) and Martin Campbell’s The Mask of Zorro (1998) were crammed with destruction and fast-cut mayhem. But since each fireball was predictably harmless to the featured actors, the Paranoia Formula went unfulfilled. When protagonists never suffer a scratch or even run out of breath, prolonged action soon grows tiresome, as in Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011). It’s far more effective, surely easier, to pose some mystery, quickly resolve it with no fanfare or preening, then move on to some fresh dilemma. Probably you haven’t noticed that kind of pacing in books you’ve enjoyed because most sequences of this type are stealthy, almost subliminal—which makes them so effective, of course!

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Slush Pile Lesson #19: Easy on the Foreplay, Heavy on the Scheming

Slush-pile amateurs like to out-sleaze even the steamiest best-sellers with fantasies that range from the sweetly naïve to the hair-raising and pathological. But remember what Lester admonished, back in Slush Pile Lesson #1? Sex is a prime attention-getter, but a poor attention-keeper. Editors soon realize that, as Stanley Kowalski put it, your characters have had this date from the beginning. Since their (ahem) climax is foreordained, is getting there still half the fun? And while spinning whatever scenario you like best, are you sure what turns on your target reader? Pandering to any niche preference (remember Roger and his Leather Chaps?) will automatically dissuade folks of different strokes. In best-sellers, psychology trumps anatomy every time. And without dynamic conflicts and thwarted ambitions in their fully-clothed hours, even the most physically ravishing characters grow boring. As Roxanne says of Christian in Cyrano de Bergerac, “He’s pretty short on wits, since he’s a handsome boy.” [8] Anatomy is fairly standard, but psychology can be enthrallingly unique. This is why best-selling fiction correctly perceives that at least to some extent, characters’ lust is a byproduct of their overall world view. In successful books, hormonal hi-jinks are often revealed as disguised, displaced manifestations of obsession, jealousy, pride, resentment, or revenge. Porn emphasizes single-minded—and fast, predictable— satisfaction. But romances are long on longing (motivation in its most basic form!) and scheming or revenge, wherein lovers plot to knock their rivals out of the ring.

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How do their closed-door preferences impact their lives in the real world? Scan a few personal ads. You may have trouble finding any girl who wants to be taken to party on a leash, wearing nothing but an owl mask. But in 1954, millions bought a novel about a heroine who did, making The Story of O an international best-seller. The Paranoia Formula helps explains why so much fictitious sex keeps one eye on the cash register. Moll Flanders (1722) and Fanny Hill (1749) both seek to re-unite with their true loves, while dabbling as prostitutes. Many heroines try sleeping their way to success like Sister Carrie (1912), or marrying a man of wealth and social position, as in Jane Austen and almost all of Jackie Collins. But as with sex, money by itself can’t hold a reader’s attention. Told that a friend of mine just won a $40 million lottery, I’ll snap to attention because that news has a familiar face. But reading that last week’s National Debt is up by another trillion or two, I simply yawn. “In reality,” concludes Wes Nickerson, “dollars are quite abstract and disconnected from everyday life.”[9] Wealth is valued only for what it can buy—power, freedom, glamour, satisfaction. But money has no intrinsic fascination unless it’s exotic in some way—and physical, observable, like a gold doubloon or an 1804 silver dollar. At that point, it becomes a MacGuffin and no longer legal tender. Tangible objects, being easy to imagine, are more dramatic. Now you know why best-sellers professing to be about finance are really about something else. Paul Erdman’s The Billion Dollar Sure Thing (1974) covers the operation of Swiss banks and the Gnomes of Zurich. Arthur Hailey’s The Money Changers (1975) is about office romance and financial scams. Peter Lynch’s One Up On

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Wall Street (1989) is about the art of stock-picking. And so forth.

Your Title Is a Promise

I was in a used bookstore, looking for Enola Gay (1995), about the plane that dropped the first A-bomb on Japan. Finally a bookstore clerk located a copy, tucked in the section for GAY AND LESBIAN. With a more descriptive title like Target: Hiroshima, this book would have been shelved correctly, under MILITARY HISTORY. Moral: Any title should state clearly what a book is about, not just coyly hint at it. This goes double for screenplays. Back in the ’50s, one studio dreamed up can’t-miss movie titles like Night of the Blood Beast, then wrote screenplays to fit them. One L.A. instructor warns film students never to hobble their screenplays with “artsy titles that sound nifty, but don’t reflect the story.” He faults Joan Didion (author but also part- time screenwriter) for helping fuel this trend: “Her collection of essays, The White Album [1979], has nothing to do with the Beatles or the recording industry. And her novel, A Book of Common Prayer [1977], has zilch to do with religion.” His gripe explains why a good many worthwhile books wind up on remainder. “Fire in the Lake” is one of the 64 hexagrams in the I Ching.) But to learn what Fire in the Lake (1972) was really about, you had to read the book’s subtitle: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. Some authors commit the same offense in reverse: After clearly defining their topic, they stray far beyond it. Back in 1993, when there was intense interest in shamanism and Southwest Indian culture, a psychiatrist published The Theft of

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the Spirit: A Journey to Spiritual Healing with Native Americans. [10] He might have had a best-seller, but he kept wandering off-topic. One entire chapter was devoted to his visiting the small town in Eastern Europe where his immigrant grandparents grew up. Not what his title promised! Not what we paid to read!

Slush Pile Lesson #20: If You Run a Steak House, Serve Steak

Every so often, a literary agent speaks to a reporter and convicts herself of gross stupidity. As one complained,

There’s a book I’ve submitted over the past couple of years . . . rejection letters commented on what a charming and whimsical book it was. It actually evolved into a deep and dark story with murders and an electric chair! The whimsy was only at the beginning, so it was obvious that those [rejecting editors] hadn’t read it through. I made a couple of phone calls to express my displeasure. [11]

What’s wrong with this picture? Plenty! (1) Obviously, any novel that hasn’t drawn interest for “the past couple of years” has something wrong with it. It needs rethinking, and any good agent should have the confidence to tell the writer as much. (2) As you know, any book must grab the reader in its first few pages. Without skimming ahead, editors naturally assumed that novel’s charm and whimsy (which are pretty weak sales points, BTW!) threatened to persist throughout.

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Never play coy with your reader! If you’re writing a “deep, dark story,” make that explicit from the very start. (3) We editors may actually like a submission. But if our Sales Manager doesn’t feel it will sell enough copies, we’re forced to reject the project. And we expect agents to know that, to take the rejection in stride and ask what we’d prefer to see next. If one is unprofessional enough to phone us to “express displeasure,” we’ll soon be unavailable to take her calls. We’ll quickly return her submissions as Not right for our list.

A certain Ph.D. admires Henry James’s “daring” in choosing to omit the crucial meeting between Merton Densher and the dying Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove (1902). But that might have been the most fascinating scene in the whole book! James left out what the French call la scène à faire: the episode you must dramatize because the story arc needs it—the confrontation you must include because your reader expects it. For an even worse example of a writer who chickened out, I recall when a publisher—now out of business; you’ll soon figure out why—asked me to evaluate their slush-pile submissions. I was grateful for the extra income, but astonished that these professionals couldn’t recognize drivel when it slithered over and bit them. Walkin’ With the Master was narrated by some bush- league apostle who never made the Top Twelve. The “Master” (no names, please!) did perform miracles, but always offstage. He told parables, but out of earshot. Our few glimpses of him came when he was relaxing, in between public appearances. The action—if you can call it that—consisted of loving hugs and warm smiles.

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Bored, I skimmed ahead. Finally on Palm Sunday, the Master departed for Jerusalem. (Needless to say, Apostle X lingered behind.) A week later, the Master came skipping back, cheerful as before. What about Jesus’s magnificent, terrifying final days— all those obligatory scènes à faire, like Gethsemane, the trial before Pilate, Calvary, and the Resurrection? Never mentioned! Just more warm hugs and loving smiles. This was the Gospel according to Hallmark. Never foreshadow a tidbit you don’t intend to serve, unless it’s a red herring or a brief ameuse-gueule to whet the reader’s appetite, while you’re cooking an even more tasty surprise.

The Case of the Disinterested Narrator

R.L. Stine’s Say Cheese and Die (1992), the fourth book in his “Goosebumps” series, employs the omniscient-author point of view:

“There’s nothing to do in Pitts Landing,” Michael Warner said, his hands shoved into the pockets of his faded denim cutoffs. “Yeah. Pitts Landing is the pits,” Greg Banks said. . . . Actually, Pitts Landing wasn’t much different from a lot of small towns with quiet streets of shady lawns and comfortable old houses. [12]

These youngsters might as well be zoo animals viewed from the other side of a moat. For its first few pages, Say Cheese lies dead in the water, without even a dorsal fin to liven things up.

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Since then, almost every “Goosebumps” entry has been narrated in the first person by some kid who—as both protagonist and victim—is dying (sometimes literally!) to tell us how things turned out. Here’s the opening of Return of the Mummy (novel #23):

“Gabe, we will be landing soon,” the stewardess told me, leaning over the seat. . . “Who will be meeting you in Cairo?” “My Uncle Ben,” I replied. “But he likes to pay practical jokes. Sometimes he dresses in weird costumes and tries to scare me.” “You told me that your uncle was a famous scientist,” the stewardess said. “He is,” I replied. “But he’s also weird.” [13]

Now that Stein has freed his narrative from the dead weight of detachment, you can feel his acceleration.

First Things First

She wrote of transcendent, life-changing experiences in ancient Egyptian temples. Her prose was lithe and succinct. But her book never became a best-seller, probably because it lacked any firm forward thrust: “The stories of my travels set down in this book do not appear chronologically.” [14] Why the heck not? If you toss chronology overboard, many readers will abandon ship. Relate events in order, as they occurred, and your characters’ understanding will unfold at the same pace as your reader’s. That’s why so many enduring tales start with, “In the beginning,” or “Once upon a time.” At least in your first draft, sequential order is the best way to get everything down and see which events need more explaining.

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The 21 editors who rejected W.C. Fields & Me (1971) did so because Carlotta Monti hadn’t strung her pearls on any narrative thread. creating the story arc of a doomed romance between herself and a Hollywood legend. Even if you know where you’re heading, readers want to feel a structural progression. They need firm evidence that you have your ducks in a row, logically and comprehensibly. Yes, flashbacks are exceptions to this rule, but use them only after your narrative has built up a good head of steam. Many enduring works like the Odyssey (before 700 BCE), Paradise Lost (1667), The Time Machine (1895), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and The Bridges of Madison County (1992) employ back-and-forth time frames. But each subplot moves our understanding forward, never retrograde. Think of flashbacks as artificial Slopes of Curiosity, letting the reader back up a few paces for a faster plunge ahead. Stephen King’s It (1986) relates two different face-offs with the same alien shape-shifter—the first time in 1958, later in 1985. To avoid the déjà vu and anticlimaxes that such a structure might threaten, King dodges back and forth in time, slicing his narrative into two parallel tracks. Both confrontations occur near the very end of the novel, but there’s no confusion. At the outset, King displays the overall frame into which his diptych will fit. Later, his characters’ ages immediately indicate which year they’re in. If your own narrative must shuttle between past and present, always make it clear when which floor the reader’s on when a chapter’s door opens. That’s not hard to achieve if you extend a few simple courtesies.

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Number Thy Chapters

A friend told me about driving his family through the splendors of Monument Valley. “Most of the trip, our kids were watching the odometer to see the last three digits to roll up from 999 to 000.” Counting comes natural to us humans. Opposable thumbs let us count up to ten, so when we are very young, counting becomes a dependable, comforting way of putting the world in order. Radio broadcaster Paul Harvey offered his listeners several minutes of human-interest news clips. To give the illusion of some progression, he would turn the pages of an imaginary newspaper: “And now, page two . . .” At the end of the first quarter, football scoreboards don’t roll back to zero. Similarly, chapter numbers give the reader a sense of mounting accomplishment. If you want to gather your chapters into larger bundles—as in “Book One, Part I,” and so on—consider maintaining your count from the very start. “Part II, Chapter 20” looks more reassuring than “Part II, Chapter 1.”

Roman or Arabic?

Most of us quickly decipher numerals I through XII because we see them on the faces of clocks and sundials, and after the names of European monarchs. But people have trouble counting much beyond XVIII (10 + 5 + 3 = 18) because Roman numerals use subtractive prefixes. IV (5 – 1 = 4) and IX (10 – 1= 9) are familiar, even if you don’t do the math.) But upwards of XIV (10 + 5 – 1 = 14), you must stop to see if any letter- numeral is less than the one that follows, then subtract it from the total sum. This makes longer Roman numerals impossible to decipher at a glance. [15] If you see MCMIV on the cornerstone

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of an old courthouse, that date works out to be 1,000 + 1,000 – 100 + 5 – 1, or 1904. Nevertheless, some authors—like Margaret Mitchell In Gone with the Wind (published MCMXXXVI)—use Roman numerals to number their chapters, either to lend the book an old-fashioned feel aura or just to come over as refined and elegant. To figure out Mitchell’s Chapter XLVII, you must first subtract X (10) from L (50), before adding V (5) and then II (2). The correct sum appears in a copy at my local library, where some impatient reader scribbled in “47!!” Never trust any numeral over XXX. If your chapter count runs higher than that, turn your back on Rome and cast your gaze toward Mecca.

Slush Pile Lesson #21: Getting There is 99% of the Fun

Creative-writing instructors understand this principle and so, stress the importance of foreshadowing. Subtle tremblors make any later earthquake more plausible, though still a surprise. But their conventional wisdom warns you not to give away too much, too soon. That’s not always good advice, because curiosity thrives on information, not on ignorance. Far too many amateurs draw their inspiration from “gimmick” movies like Psycho (1960) and The Crying Game (1992), or by old TV shows like “This is Your Life” and “Candid Camera” where the setups derive from one major surprise. But as long as you have an ace up your sleeve, isn’t it okay to mark time for 100 pages or so? Sorry, no! The effect may well be stunning when you finally pull the rabbit out of your top hat. But no editors will be around to applaud. They laid your manuscript aside hours ago

224 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER because your small-talk patter didn’t hold their interest. Take a tip from Hansel and Gretel: To lead readers where you want them to go, you want a trial of ever-larger breadcrumbs, not one single loaf hidden at the end of the trail. In The Defense Never Rests (1971), F. Lee Bailey recounts his most prominent cases. One chapter, “The Grandest Haul of All,” covers the great Plymouth Mail Robbery. In the style of a B-movie poster, it lists some leading characters:

THOMAS R. RICHARDS — He had a new concrete patio until the government tore it up. RICHARD CHICOFSKY — The Feds wanted him to mastermind a kidnapping. JUDGE CHARLES E. WYZANSKI — At one point, even His Honor nearly broke up laughing. [16]

This is the irreverent equivalent of opening arguments. Bailey’s giving us a firm promise of what to expect, what narrative goodies we can anticipate.

Dante Alighieri and Harry Houdini

In the 3rd century BCE, The Dhammapada offered this analogy:

If a man acts or speaks with an impure mind, suffering follows him as the wheel of the cart follows the beast that draws the cart. [17]

Some 1,200 years later, an exiled Florentine had the idea of putting the cart before the beast, the better to rouse his reader’s curiosity. From Dante’s Inferno (circa 1350):

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As a green branch with one end all aflame will hiss and sputter sap out of the other as the air escapes—

We’re in the Wood of the Suicides, with nary a campfire in sight. This comparison is vivid and precise, but what’s it compared to? Dante explains:

so from that [tree’s] trunk there came words and blood together, gout by gout. [18]

Dante uses this same rhetorical device again and again. By the time he’s mountain-climbing in the Purgatorio, his reader’s reassured that prefatory similes like this—

As pilgrims wrapped in holy meditation when they encounter strangers on the way, look, but do not pause for conversation . . .

—surely will make sense only a few lines later:

So from behind us, turning half about to stare as they went by, a band of souls came up and passed us, silent and devout. [19]

In modern times, best-sellers offer miniature puzzles and their solutions always at a steady pace. Writers like Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe delight in wild digressions, pretending to paint themselves into corners. They beg the same question that Houdini made his audiences ask: How can he possibly wriggle out of this one? But as W.C. Fields

226 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER demonstrated, only a consummately skilled juggler can mimic klutziness so well that onlookers assume it’s real. Back in Strategy #2, remember how Arthur Conan Doyle presents crucial details twice—first through Watson’s arms-length viewpoint, then crisply and minutely through Holmes’s magnifying glass? There are countless other ways to pique curiosity and quickly satisfy it. Surprise reversals are among the most reliable. Last time I was boarding a flight to Maine, the check-in man handed me my claim tags and smiled. “Yessir, your bags are on their way to Portland, Oregon.” Seeing my reaction, he broke into a grin. “Portland, Maine. My mistake!” No sooner was my seatbelts securely fastened than the captain’s voice came over the intercom: “Welcome aboard Flight 643, non-stop to Miami.” He paused, chuckled, then added, “To Portland, I mean. Relax and enjoy the flight!” Movies often raise curiosity and satisfy it again, all within a few quick cuts, to remind the audience that paying close attention can pay big rewards. Toward the close of the otherwise predictable Johnny Mnemonic (1995), director Robert Longo dishes serves up a deft shock. The villain is a futuristic Tin Man, composed largely of durable hi-tech replacements. Earlier, we see him get hit by a car and walk away unhurt. He seems unstoppable—until he steps in between two high-tension wires. Long-lost electrons meet and greet. Caught in the middle, he gets dry-roasted. Whew! But just when we think we can breathe easy, Longo gives us a riveting close-up: The “corpse” is beginning to stir, lifting its gruesomely burned head off the floor. Another Terminator-style resurrection? No, merely a false alarm. A wider camera angle shows what’s really happening: Conscientious recyclers are using an overhead pulley to haul away the cybercorpse.

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Do You See What I See?

Desperation, Stephen King’s 1996 best-seller, opens with this exchange:

“Oh! Oh, Jesus! Gross!” “What, Mary, what?” “Didn’t you see it?” “See what?” . . . “On that sign. That speed limit sign.” “What about it?” “There was a dead cat on it, Peter!” [20]

King’s been using this technique for more than twenty-five years. Consider these excerpts from “The Mist,” and “The Monkey,” two short stories he published in 1980:

“Jeee-pers,” Billy said. [King’s narrator, now confident that he has our attention, offers some leisurely description that we might otherwise skim:] He was standing by the fence that separates our property from Norton’s and looking down our driveway. The driveway runs a quarter of a mile to a camp road which, in its turn, runs about three-quarters of a mile to a stretch of two-lane blacktop, called Kansas Road. From Kansas Road you can go anywhere you want, as long as it’s Bridgton. [But oh, yeah, as he was saying . . .] I saw what Billy was looking at, and my heart went cold. “Don’t go any closer, champ. Right there is close enough.” Billy didn’t argue . . . [Narrator gives three well- crafted sentences about the weather—yesterday’s and

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today’s—before strolling back to the present:] Not far from where Billy was standing, there was a steady hissing noise, and in the grass there was what you might at first have taken for a writhing bundle of snakes. Power lines . . . had fallen in an untidy tangle, twisting lazily and spitting ......

Dan Miller was in the lead . . . . By the time I got out the door, Miller and Ollie had already faded into [the mist], and Hatlen, who was third, was nearly out of sight . . . “Oh my God!” Miller screamed. “Oh dear sweet God, look at this!” . . .

When Hal Shelburne saw it, when his son David pulled it out of a moldering Ralston-Purina carton . . . pushed far back under one attic eave, such a feeling of horror and dismay rose in him that for one moment he thought he would scream. [21]

When, in that third excerpt, we learn that “it” is a toy monkey, we suspect that moldy cardboard carton is in better shape than Hal Shelburne’s psyche. Many best-selling authors (Carlos Castaneda and Jackie Collins among the best examples) settle on one favorite technique that they employ over and over. Their soon-familiar presentations don’t grow repetitious, because the information served up is always different. Standardized openings (“Once upon a time,” or “Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away”) lull the audience into a sense of familiarity, so the storyteller can slip in bizarre details

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(bears cooking porridge, dead cats on traffic signs). The familiar, level-headed narration makes them more plausible. As in music, variations on a theme invite a deeper appreciation and afford reassurance, not boredom. They let us savor changes comfortably, in small safe doses.

Cold-Blooded Killer Talked Victim to Death

When the narrative is nearing its close, writers often must knit up loose ends. So in the next-to-last scene or chapter, when the protagonist is literally a captive audience, the villain often reveals—in blow-by-blow detail—whatever his plot has been all along. Avoid this cop-out because it’s (1) Used repeatedly—and predictably in every spy thriller you can think of, especially in animated TV shows like “Scooby Doo.” (2) Not psychologically plausible. While your concrete overshoes are hardening, the Godfather won’t explain why he’s called this meeting. (3) You can do better! Protagonists should be your reader’s surrogates, smart enough to decipher what’s been happening without some bad guy spelling it out. For example, when Lieutenant Columbo tells killers (as opposed to the police or the District Attorney!) that he’s figured out why they did it, this “reverse-confession” puts him in danger of becoming their next victim. That’s no less of a cliché, but at least it offers added dramatic tension. If your protagonist can’t connect the dots, that’s fine too—as long as your reader can do so! To hike suspense, keeping your main character ignorant of what the reader already knows. (Hitchcock uses this device to nail-biting effect in his 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much.)

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Cooling Down the Audience

The Abbé Prévost begins his Story of a Modern Greek Woman (1740) by saying, “This story needs no preface, but custom requires one.” [22] In Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage (1796), Denis Diderot warns a reader to “Skip over the preamble, which doesn’t amount to anything.” [23] A renowned psychology book, long out of print, had been republished in a 20th-anniversary edition. Eager to dig into it, I had to wade through the original Preface by some forgotten Ph.D., reeling off facts now clearly out of date. Then the author’s original Acknowledgments and Introduction. Then her new Introduction, written especially for this new edition. Soon I was up to page 38, and her first chapter was nowhere in sight. Couldn’t she have simply updated her original Introduction and deleted all the other verbiage? One best-seller, published in 1968, has never gone out of print. The author followed up with hugely successful sequels. Countless articles, speculations, and parodies were written about Carlos Castaneda, including a cover story in Time magazine. When you open The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, these are the first words you’ll read:

Anthropology has taught us that the world is differently defined in different places. It is not only that people have different customs; it is not only that people believe in different gods and expect different post-mortem fates. It is, rather, that the worlds of different peoples have different shapes. The very metaphysical presuppositions differ: space does not conform to Euclidean geometry . . . man is not

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differentiated from non-man or life from death, as in our world . . . [24]

This isn’t Castaneda, of course. It’s Walter Goldschmidt, whose books include Man’s Way: A Preface to Understanding of the Human Society (1959) and Comparative Functionalism: An Essay in Anthropological Theory (1966). Why is he here at all? Academic protocol! When the University of California Press accepted Teachings for publication, they assumed that no academic would take Castaneda seriously unless his book bore the rubber stamp imprimatur of some tenured academic, even if his name had no recognition at all outside the academic community. Ten years later, both authors had brand-new titles on sale. Castaneda’s was The Second Ring of Power (1977). Goldschmidt’s was As You Sow: Three Studies in the Social Consequences of Agribusiness (1978). Can you guess which one was not a best-seller?

Because good writers value their reader’s enjoyment above all else, they view acknowledgments, introductions, and prefaces as the nuisances they really are—the literary equivalent of speed bumps. Inviting any celebrity, third-party authority, or literary heavyweight to introduce your book can actually discourage potential readers! For a number of reasons: (1) Imprinting. In King Solomon’s Ring (1952), Konrad Lorenz tells how newly-hatched goslings assumed that he was their mother and so, followed him wherever he went. Similarly, readers tend to bond with the very first Printed Persona they see. If that person isn’t you, they must “de-imprint” themselves and start over, exactly as if you were Author # 2 in a short-story anthology.

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A publisher once asked me to write an introduction for a first-time author’s book. I agreed to contribute an afterword instead, so that readers could grow familiar with her style and prose rhythms, not mine. (It also made my task lots easier. Being able to postpone all my comments to the very end, I could discuss her book in specific detail without spoiling anything. Even better, the reader knew exactly what I was talking about.) (2) Too many endorsers offer generic praise without actually reading the book. After all, writing praise-for-pay eats into their own creative time. After Joseph Wood Krutch had solidified his reputation as a Grand Old Man of nature writing, an editor I’ll call Rob offered him a $250 honorarium to write an introduction. Krutch, a veteran of similar requests from other publishers, turned in one typewritten page. Rob saw it was a lazy and off-topic, but hadn’t the courage to tell Krutch so directly. Instead, he made up the fib that some secretary had had thrown it out, assuming that no introduction could possibly be so brief! Could Krutch be kind enough to send a replacement? Krutch promptly obliged, sending Rob a carbon copy of his original effort via Certified Mail. Some authors wind up endorsing so many lackluster efforts that their names no longer carry much weight. [25] But most are more discriminating. They either choose very few books to blurb or, careful of their reputations, turn down all endorsement requests on the grounds that readers are able to choose for themselves. (3) To promote their own books, endorsers will often upstage you. On the back cover of a J.P. Donleavy reprint, you’ll find this verbal dazzle from Jay McInerney:

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Nasty and lyrical, a curse that sounds suspiciously like a prayer, this outlandish hybrid of Irish-American letters is still armed and dangerous after thirty years. Sebastian Dangerfield, the lecherous, treacherous, larcenous and thoroughly charming Ginger Man, appears to be immortal as well as immoral. [26]

Endorsers wax lyrical in high-energy bursts, in their own distinctive styles—and their breezy, quotable blurbs can be tough acts to follow. A certain editor (let’s call him Justin) was obsessed with endorsements, insisting that any celebrity’s name on a book’s jacket (or “front plate,” as it’s called) would give it better visibility on bookstore shelves and knee-jerk recognition among readers. After signing up talented newcomers, he’d hold their manuscripts back from Production until some literary chaperone had contributed a preface or better yet, an introduction. For a small advance against royalties, Justin contracted a wildlife photographer’s diary of a year in the Serengeti. With its informative text and enthralling photos, it was ready for publication, exactly as the author submitted it. Instead, Justin “packaged” it as an overproduced coffee- table book, complete with slipcase. Now ballooned in size, it featured a Preface by a renowned conservationist, an Introduction by an expert in African wildlife, and an Afterword by a member of Britain’s Royal Family! All these heavyweights upstaged the author’s lean, earnest text. Weighted down with glossy paper and excess white space, aimed over the heads and wallets of its target audience, the book sank without a trace. Rock-concert promoters know better: They’ll open a concert with some barely-known act, so that latecomers can find

234 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER their seats and fans are revved up when the headliner struts on stage. And finally . . . (4) Readers expect you to live up to that praise. After strewing petals in your path, your introductor leaves you to your reader’s mercy. You must argue your own case from scratch. But if an editor does want some author or other celebrity to introduce your book, protests will make you seem ungrateful and naïve. Instead, revise and energize your first chapter to outshine your assigned expert, exactly as Castaneda did Goldschmidt.

Slush Pile Lesson, #22: Omit What Your Reader Already Knows

In her work as a therapist, Regina helps clients uncover psychological traumas from early childhood. She’d finished a manuscript explaining exactly how she does it. But before she sent it off to her publisher, she asked me to read it through and give it one last editorial polish. I found her case histories dramatic, instructive, readable. But every time someone began to access some crucial memory, Regina broke in to emphasize that she could Feel Their Pain:

Jenny’s morose revelation fell to the bottom of my solar plexus and reverberated there, like an out-of-tune gong. Mentally, I found myself rewinding and reliving those bitter, contentious months near the end of my own first marriage, when I too suffered the bewildering frustrations of a dying relationship, albeit during those sane weeks I had felt oddly buoyed up by a private exhilaration, the scary-breathless promise of impending freedom. Even though I was flunking

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Marital 101 at the time, I knew that my final exam would soon be over. Soon I’d be able to walk out of my dark, airless relationship and embark on a well-deserved vacation by myself for a change—a fresh start, yes, but on the condition that I acknowledge, on the very deepest level, that I truly deserved it. . . .

Because Regina’s showed attentive compassion for her clients, and because their anguish came through so loud and clear, these “Me too!” digressions seemed superfluous—to quote E. B. White’s simile, like putting a hat on a horse. Letting her own past woes upstage her clients’ current ones were (as you know by now) serious violations of Strategy #4. Whenever her clinical training taught her to react in some counter-intuitive way, then Regina could justifiably explain her own emotions. But so long as her reactions were in step with the reader’s, why bother?

At its best, developmental editing is an instinctive, gut- level enterprise that goes far beyond simple copyediting or rearranging clauses in a sentence. Even if I can tell you the reason why I made certain changes, there’s never time to justify them all. And it’s often safer not to try! A few writers—like Regina, unfortunately—are tone-deaf to the kind of concise progression that readers have every right to expect. So while going through her manuscript, I deleted all her needless personal digressions without saying why. Invoicing her for my hourly time, I added my standard diplomatic disclaimer: “All the changes you see here are suggestions. You can probably find better ways of solving these same problems. But I

236 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER do think that one way or another, they need to be fixed before you submit your final draft.” Regina mailed me back a blank sheet of notebook paper. Folded inside it was her check for the full amount. That frosty dismissal made me wonder—Should I have tried to condense those windy, boring passages, preserving her most meaningful recollections? That same week, I started reading It (1986)—1,090 pages in its mass-market edition.

As you’ve seen from earlier examples, King likes to give himself plenty of elbow room. But whenever a tense moment is imminent, his character’s reactions become terse and succinct. For example:

. . . what he saw destroyed his sanity in one clawing stroke . . . Panic was rising in her mind again . . . Her mouth pulled back into a dreadful grin of horror . . . I uttered a thin little cry . . . his skin [was] crawling, his hair lifting . . . His lungs didn’t have enough air in them to manage a scream . . . a fear so thin and sharp that it found its way deep into her inner heart . . . . [27]

King seldom gets more elaborate than “She screamed” or “His heart thudded in his chest.” In these excerpts, he does sound a bit like Regina, but never slows to compare these characters’ present-tense reactions to any earlier frights they’ve had before. That would dull the vivid immediacy of the horror at hand. After It, I felt more justified in the way I’d edited Regina. Even so, I should have explained my reasons behind those wholesale cuts. Months later, copies of her published book arrived at the local Barnes & Noble, displayed in a stack a foot fall. Opening

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one, I saw that Regina had stubbornly restored (or “stetted,” as editors say) every single one of those deleted digressions. Over the next week or so, I checked the height of the pile and saw it was down by no more than four or five copies. Finally the whole stack vanished—presumably, returned to Regina’s publisher for full credit. In their place stood a two-foot display of a new tile by Deepak Chopra, a pro who knows how to serve up relevant information. Whenever you’re shooting a portrait of anyone, keep your fingers away from the camera’s lens and viewfinder.

Never Apologize, Never Explain

At certain crucial points in any narrative, you should deprive your reader of relevant information. Not only in murder mysteries alone (as pointed out in Strategy #4), but whenever the action threatens to grow unwieldy or flat-out implausible. In the final moments of North by Northwest (1959), why does Alfred Hitchcock use so many fast cuts? “There was so much unexplained,” screenwriter Ernest Lehman later admitted.

If we had had more [scenes], it would have made us vulnerable to looking like an entire grocery shelf of open cans of peas. [28]

Now you know why the movie’s final moments present the arrest of the villain (played by James Mason) as a done deal, together with a blizzard of images to keep the audience watching, not thinking. Stage magicians direct the audience’s gaze away from where the deception’s taking place—a ploy satirized by the Wizard of Oz’s command to “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” Many best-sellers play the same trick. In

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The Silence of the Lambs (1988), Hannibal Lecter stashes a freshly-killed victim on the roof of an elevator. Whoa! Where was the cab parked all this time? How did Lecter open the door in the roof? Where did he find a stepladder? If author Harris let readers ask such questions, he’d have too much explaining to do. So Lambs simply leaps from Lecter’s escape to the first discovery of the corpse—from a suspenseful distance at the top of the shaft. We might expect that later on, Lecter will explain how he pulled it off. Of course, he never does. When skating on thin ice, your safety lies in speed. When the traffic becomes confusingly complex, never try to narrate how a crash came about. Simply describe the tangled, smoking end result and let the reader imagine the details. If your characters must travel a great distance in an impossibly short time, do as Shakespeare does—move them offstage pronto. (The transporter room in Start Trek provides the same shorthand.) Later, don’t even hint how they managed it. Unless you suggest that you have doubts, your reader won’t either.

Slush Pile Lesson #23: A Means, Not an End

A slush-pile submission, When Wildwood Really Was chronicled the mishaps of a wacky clan living year-round on the Jersey Shore, near a seaside amusement park. The first chapter had this great one-liner: “Is Columbus, Ohio the same Columbus those Knights of Columbus are the knights of?” The manuscript was short enough to read in an hour or two and I did, often laughing out loud. But I had to reject it. The banter was entertaining enough, but not arranged on any story arc. Episodes were interchangeable, showing up

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Wildwood for what it was—a grab bag of conversations that led nowhere. Dialogue has two main functions: (1) ostensibly, to reveal character and (2) more subtly, to advance the narrative. Entertainment and amusement run a distant third, so never worry about (3) until your narrative is running at a fast clip. Remember, all readers are deaf and blind! Throw anything unexpected in their path, and they’ll trip over it. Keep that in mind, and you can keep them in suspense by letting them sense the nearness of heavy, sharp-edged dangers not close enough to perceive. Conversely, when you need to bring readers anywhere fast, clear away misleading detours and speed bumps. This is why “authentic” dialogue—the kind of rambling syntax you can overhear in coffee shops and which David Mamet writes for the stage—has no place in an aspiring best-seller. During my time as an acquisitions editor, paid to find and sign new manuscripts, every so often I’d find myself opposite some VIP—an editor-in-chief who might hire me away, or a successful author or Hollywood celebrity with a new project up for grabs. We’d usually start out with small talk. One exception to this rule (as to so many others) was Timothy Leary. His first words to me were, “Cannibalism’s coming back!” Other Top Dogs launched in with some admission that was meant to sound personal, but really wasn’t: Tuesday’s root canal, or some other expensive in-office procedure that took up their whole fucking afternoon. Soon after that came the name- dropping of People I Know. The failed-actress wife of a best- selling novelist had suffered an asthma/anxiety attack and had to be carted off the plane on a stretcher. Carpenter ants were infesting an Oscar winner’s weekend home in Connecticut.

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After two or three minutes of this (I could practically time it), they’d switch gears and get down to business. On the few occasions when they didn’t—when the small talk got prolonged—they intended it as a diplomatic putdown: Sorry, Tam, but we have nothing to discuss. In a similar fashion, slush-pile amateurs tend to prolong aimless chitchat. They’re striving for authenticity, but slighting the reader. Best-selling dialogue must serve a larger purposeful. Small talk crops up only when tension is crackling like a live wire. Any nervous blather serves as protective insulation against what a character dares not say in so many words. With this insight in mind, you can imagine what John Cheever might have done with this one-note monologue from The Wapshot Scandal (1964):

“Termites and carpenter ants. It was a combination. The termites ate the underpinnings of the house and the carpenter ants ate the porch. But the worst was bedbugs. When my cousin Harry died he left me this big bed. I didn’t think anything about it. I felt funny in the night, you know, but I’d never seen a bedbug in my life and I couldn’t imagine what it was. Well, one night I turned on the light good and quick and there they were. There they were! Well, by this time, they’d spread all over the house. Bedbugs everywhere. We had to have everything sprayed and, oh, my, the smell was dreadful. Fleas too. We had fleas . . .” [29]

Yes, Cheever’s out to poke gentle fun. But he could have been more dramatic and even more amusing by breaking this up into a dialogue—perhaps between the dim-witted speaker seeking to sell his house and a real estate broker, well

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aware that a good asking depends on the property being vermin- free. Reluctantly, the owner admits he’s never hired an exterminator, while angling for sympathy at the same time. So their exchange runs something like this:

“Any infestations?” “Definitely none of them critters. But we had carpenter ants, and white ants.” “By white ants, you mean termites? Did they do any damage?” “It was a trade-off. The termites ate the underpinnings of the porch, and the ants chewed up the porch itself.” “But you don’t have a porch.” “Yeah, and that’s why!” “Any other problems a buyer should know about?” “Well, the worst was bedbugs . . .”

And so on. Soliloquies in tragedies like Hamlet (1603) and the streams of consciousness in novels like Ulysses (1922) succeed in revealing the character of solitary speaker/thinkers being buffeted in the crosswinds of their own minds, debating their own anxious conflicts. If a monologue lacks such inner give- and-take, it becomes like Cheever’s—the equivalent of one hand clapping.

If absorbing too many details too quickly threatens to overwhelm a character (and thereby your reader too), avoid this risk by letting two or more character explain things to each

242 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER other. If they can make everything clear, your reader is sure to understand. Good dialogue should become a game of poker, not solitaire or 52 Pick-Up. Any “informative” conversation can threaten to turn into an argument. Opposing motives can perceive different views of the same topic, exposing it from wider, often eccentric perspectives. It helps to keep an imaginary scorecard and consider even the briefest exchange as a contest between two players: (1) The Speaker, smarter and more experienced, spoon- feeds information in bite-size chunks for (2) The Listener and by proxy, the reader, to chew over and digest. Listeners are often narrators, like Dante in The Divine Comedy. They also include naïve bystanders like Sancho Panza in Don Quixote (1600), Miranda in The Tempest (1611), and in Kay Adams in The Godfather (1969). And simply by asking the right question, any Listener can transform into a Speaker. If Listener and Speaker can keep switching roles, their resulting dialogue will supply information at a steady, plausible, comprehensible pace. Like this:

“Where does it hurt?” “Right here, Doc. Could it be cancer?”

Does Listener really want to know? Will Speaker withhold information? Speaker possesses knowledge (not necessarily wisdom!) that Listener lacks, but may not want to hear. Trial lawyers use this ploy all the time: “Did you ever contemplate murdering your wife?” Defendant denies it. His lawyer objects. Nevertheless, that possibility is firmly planted in

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the jury’s mind, especially if His Honor instructs them to disregard it! Like scalpels, deft questions can be perfectly sanitized and still cut deep. When L.A. police stopped actor Eddie Murphy with a transsexual prostitute beside him in the car, Murphy’s alibi was that he’d simply offered her a lift. During an interview on “Entertainment Tonight,” host Bob Goen asked Murphy, “Does your wife know of your predilection for driving around in the middle of the night and helping out strangers?” Says writer and director David Mamet, “It took me forty years to find out that rhetorical questions are all . . . very, very sneaky accusations.” [30] Nor do all questions end with a question mark, as in “I just know you’ve thought of some way to remember our anniversary tomorrow!”

Best-selling novels are studded with what the Brits called “inverted commas.” You’ll find entire pages crammed with dialogue, simply because it offers many enticing benefits: (1) Fast, easy reading. Spoken words are always quicker, terser, more efficient. The traffic sign reads “Cross at the green, not in between.” A mother says, “Johnny, stop! RIGHT NOW!” With dialogue, characters can communicate in broken sentences, taking up far less space than your own prose exposition using proper grammar. Think of dialogue as Prose Lite. On the page, indents and white spaces are more inviting than monolithic slabs of print, offering the reader more places to take a breather. (2) Guilty pleasure of being a fly on the wall. Quite apart from its voyeuristic thrill, eavesdropping serves as a major plot accelerant in plays like Hamlet (1603) and Tartuffe (1664), novels like Gone with the Wind (1936) and the Harry Potter series, and movies like Jerry McGuire (1996). While two

244 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER characters speak openly and indiscreetly, a third can react— heightening tension along with the flow of information. (3) Undercurrents of motivation and duplicity. One media critic once complained that Kathy Lee Gifford “never has an unexpressed thought.” The converse is that complex personalities leave a great deal unsaid. Even great teachers like Socrates and Jesus used analogies and parables that require some decoding on the listener’s part. Strong muscles always show, even through thick skin. Dynamic dialogue always ripples with half-concealed motives and powerful undertows. Therefore, every dramatically useful conversation should raise four separate questions: What do these speakers want to reveal to each other. And why? What do they hope to hide from each other? And why? Think back to the last time you flirted with someone, endured a job interview, or applied for a second mortgage, and you’ll see what I mean. As your scene progresses, all four answers should become clear—even if reluctantly. (4) Guaranteed to make sense . . . eventually. In the opening scene of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990), a gravely wounded man utters a phrase that, to an ear tuned to Spanish, sounds like “Lo sa raptor.” [31] He’s groaning about Velociraptor, the dinosaur that bit him. Even if the speaker is a clinical schizophrenic, quoting him directly suggests that sooner or later, his Space Brothers rant will probably decipher itself. Even if it never does, your reader can’t be sure of that—so will pay close attention to that spoken gibberish.

No Affectations, Please, We’re Readers!

Instead of using quotation marks, French authors introduce dialogue with an opening dash, as in this exchange:

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—Êtes-vous the Man in the Iron Mask? —Mais non, just a little rusty.

James Joyce adopts this usage in Ulysses (1922), as does Charles Frazier in Cold Mountain (1996). In Angela’s Ashes (1999), Frank McCourt forgoes dashes completely. What for? Possibly to seem distinctive and sophisticated, as well as to stress that his narrative is rooted in the past. Whenever dashed dialogue is immediately followed by narrative, the reader can grow confused, as in this example:

—That’s not what he testified, the detective said, under cross examination.

Where does this quotation end? Is “under cross examination” what the witness said? Or how he said it? (If so, that second comma should come out.) Washington Irving, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway all spent time in France. Upon returning home, they kept on using double quotes. So should you Some recent authors have sworn off quotation marks entirely and still managed to enjoyed succeed. James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003) doesn’t indent paragraphs, either. In Cormac McCarthy’s novels, including Cities of The Plain (1998), he includes short conversations in Spanish and never bothers to translate, even by implication. Even minor departures can be annoying. Throughout The Horse Whisperer (1995), Nicholas Evans withholds commas from dialogue, as in “Sorry Don, could you say that again?” [32] But the character’s name isn’t Sorry Don. Elsewhere in the same book, a child’s request for a second helping—“I want more Mommy”—sounds needlessly Oedipal.

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Readers may put up with “daring” eccentricities like this, but editors see them as red flags, warning that you are conceited and arrogant, playing by your own rules just to show off. With so many cooperative authors out there, who needs you? But is your break from convention more for the reader’s benefit than your own private pleasure? Then go for it!

To illustrate how good dialogue can operate on several levels at once, imagine a standard-issue murder mystery. Kids playing in the woods run across a dead man in a rain-drenched sleeping bag. Beside his right hand lies a pistol with his fingerprints on it. Later, the police learn that it was registered in his name. The autopsy determines that a single .38 bullet passed straight through the sleeping bag, drilling his heart en route. Later, his blood-alcohol level is determined to be twice the legal limit. And found crumpled in his shirt pocket was a birthday card addressed to his wife Sally—signed, “Love, Derek.” But the dead man’s name is Walter! When a homicide detective arrives to question Sally, his grieving widow, she tells him that Walter liked to go hunting with his buddy Derek. “But they didn’t like to get dressed at the crack of dawn. They preferred to take their sleeping bags so when the sun came up, they could be right there in the woods.” Hmm, the detective thinks. What hunter uses a pistol? “I don’t now what they hunted, ’cause Walter never brought anything home. Maybe Walter he was annoyed that Derek paid me so many compliments. Which I guess he did. And Derek kept telling him, ‘What a pretty wife you have!’ “Oh yeah, Walter did keep a revolver . . . .” Al pretty straightforward, but that’s what Sally wants the detective to think! As we readers will soon discover, Walter had a girlfriend over in the next town. Needing an alibi for

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staying out all night, he always claimed to be hunting with his buddy Derek—which Sally knew was a lie. On the nights when Walter was gone, Derek slept with her! So Sally had no objection to Walter’s “hunting” trips as long as she had Derek all to herself. Then she overheard that Derek was interested in a younger woman—who was single. Then she learned it was true. Feeling humiliated and betrayed, Sally realized to get back at Derek by aiming at her closest target—Walter—thus killing two birds with one stone. One bird, anyway, while framing the other one. Imagine Walter’s surprise and disappointment when Sally told him she wanted to know what hunting was all about. Next time, could he take her along? Reluctantly, he agreed. They drove to the woods in separate cars, “in case I don’t like it and want to come home.” At camp that night, knowing Walter’s weakness for vodka martinis, she kept refilling his tin cup from a shaker she’d brought along. Once he passed out, she zipped him into his sleeping bag and shot him through the heart with the revolver she knew he kept in his car’s glove box. To implicate Derek, she crumpled his last birthday card to her and stuffed it into the pocket of Walter’s flannel shirt. Then she wiped the gun clean, pressed it in Walter’s still-warm fingers, and drove home in her own car. Now, with these facts in mind, go back and reread what Sally told the detective. Most of it is either the truth, or exactly what Walter told her. All of it is slanted to implicate Derek.

To be intriguing, your Speakers needn’t be dishonest withholders like Sally, but they should be streetwise. “Be as shrewd as snakes,” Jesus advised his followers, “and as innocent [or, in the KJV, harmless] as doves.” [33]

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Strive for Sense, Not for Sound

In the late 1960 and 70’s, overheard speech was prized for its unvarnished authenticity—the verbal equivalent of found objects. In The Village Voice, Stan Mack’s “True-Life Funnies” (“All dialogue guaranteed verbatim”) and in Philadelphia’s Welcomat, Stu Goldman’s “Eavesdrawings” featured true-life speech balloons. [34] But they were well chosen sound bites, never in dialect and easily understood. A smart move choice, because it’s nearly impossible to quote bad grammar at length and not have your Printed Persona seem to be condescending. To make sense of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1881), you must read the words aloud. In “Mr. Rabbit Nibbles up the Butter,” the tongue can decipher what baffles the eye:

Brer Rabbit en Brer Fox dey boaf ’gree [they both agree], dey did, en dey b’il’ [and they build] de bresh- heap, en dey b’il’ her high en dey b’il’ her wide, en den dey totch her off . . . Next time you see one un um, you look right close en see ef de een’er [end of] his tail ain’t w’ite. . . Dey b’ars de skyar er [They bear the scar of] dat bresh-heap down ter dis day. Dey er marked . . . . [35]

With your lips moving, “ter” becomes to, “er” are, and “des” just. But too much remains impenetrable, like this passage from “The Corn-Shucking Song”:

Fer de los’ ell en yard is a huntin’ fer de morning. [36]

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Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes (1939) is reprinted in many anthologies and revived constantly in amateur productions. At the beginning of the script, Hellman states—in italics!—that she’s made “no attempt to write Southern dialect. It is to be understood that the accents are Southern.” [37] Even if you’re not a screenwriter or playwright, reading your dialogue out loud will prompt any number of valuable improvements. You’ll hear words that fall flat, and clunky sentences that need to be shortened or rephrased.

Groucho Marx said that when amateurs direct a screen comedy, they’ll strap a dummy of an old lady into a wheelchair and send it careening downhill—but a real pro will use a real old lady. Now you know why many light-hearted humor books don’t succeed: They lacking real-life victims and so can’t satisfy their readers’ repressed hostilities. Early in his Steve Martin’s stand-up career, used to warn his audiences, “Humor isn’t pretty.” It can be nasty, ruthless, downright cruel—provided that it’s dead-on accurate. Consider Dorothy Parker’s “If all the women who went to the Yale Prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be at all surprised” or her lesser known quip, “Love is a song that can never go wrong, and I am Marie of Romania!” Just as any murder mystery requires a corpse, humor needs a victim. When a “well bred” joke lacks a deserving target, its humor loses most of its impact. Thanks to the Third Law of Reader Reaction, the joke is funniest when its target’s poorly grounded and has accumulated a major charge of envy and resentments. Therefore, the Keystone Kops. (In the 1974 musical Mack & Mabel, Robert Preston—playing silent-film director Mack Sennett to Bernadette Peters’s Mabel Normand—sang, “When a cop falls down, my heart leaps up!”)

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Therefore, the long-suffering Margaret Dumont, Groucho’s matronly, upper-crust victim in Duck Soup (1933), A Night at The Opera (1935), and A Day at the Races (1937). Playwright George S. Kaufman, screenwriter for several of the Marx Brothers’ films, warned that “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.” How come? Because satirists seldom bother to ground themselves. Instead, they adopt a superior, smarty- pants Persona, poking fun at their targets from on high. That, of course, defeats Strategy #4. A cautionary example is Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), in which Larry Lipton—played by Woody Allen—uses everybody else’s dialogue as straight lines. His being constantly front-and-center blunts the fun. Diane Keaton, cast as Larry’s wife, never betrays the irritation that his compulsive wisecracks would provoke in real life. Satire can sell if its target is familiar enough and prominent enough to attract plenty of Third-Law lightning. Barbara Johnson’s MacBird (1969) suggested that LBJ became President the same way Macbeth contrived to be King of Scotland. Her off-Broadway play ran for more than a year. Joe Klein’s Primary Colors (1996) surfed the waves of indignation that Bill and Hillary left in their wake, but also went on to satisfy the curiosity of readers wondering what these two could be like in private, without the media watching. Even when a joke is sick or racist, not objectively “funny,” you can place in the mouth of some disreputable bad guy, giving your reader an early heads-up about that character’s true personality.

Since Boris Karloff first played Frankenstein in 1931, the creature has been resuscitated for countless sequels and remakes, asking audiences to suspend their credibility again and

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again. And as you know, such long-held repression builds up a charge. Therefore, Mel Brook’s Young Frankenstein (1974), skewering all the absurdities that audiences have been forced to endure. But later in 1975, Brooks took on Sherwood Forest with a TV series, “When Things Were Rotten,” with Dick Van Patten as Friar Tuck. ABC soon cancelled the show. Later, still eager to go another round with the Merry Men, Brooks released a movie, Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993). Billboard ads proclaimed, “The Legend had it Coming!” But did it? Too many of Brooks’s sight gags—using a jackhammer on a chastity belt, or the wart that kept moving around Cloris Leachman’s face—seemed pasted on, not poking through holes in the story’s well-worn fabric. Note that in Gary Larson’s “Far Side” panels (several collections of which became best-sellers), Frankenstein gags outnumber Robin Hood jokes by least five to one. Brooks might have packed ’em in with a sequel entitled Old Frankenstein or maybe Low Voltage, in which Peter Boyle’s creature grows senile and Gene Wilder must find a nursing home that will take him in. Make that a home with real old ladies!

Why Humor Always Has the Last Word

Dick Cavett once advised swimmers, “If attacked by a shark, try to get into the middle of a large city.” Joyce Wadler observed that “A tragic illness is one in which the patient does not lose any weight.”[38] Any good quip has a sting in its tail. The very last word casts new light on every word that’s gone before, as in “I used to wake up with a terrible headache, but now she sleeps in a separate bed.”

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More lengthy stand-up gags unravel like a 15-second mystery, typically starting with a set-up to arouse curiosity: “My sister isn’t assertive enough . . . [Why not? What makes you think so?] For weeks now, she’s been bothered by this heavy breather who always calls her in the middle of the night [beat] . . . collect!” A big part of the laughter comes from the joy of seeing a blurred picture snap into focus. That final satisfaction explains the appeal of 1,200-piece jigsaw puzzles and lets die-hard mystery buffs gladly overlook improbable plot twists. But if the puzzle’s predictable—if any reader can foresee how you’re going to solve it—then both the mystery and the joke will fall flat. By maintaining the Slope of Curiosity, you steadily expand your reader’s understanding. Think of it as surprise on the installment plan. But from its very first page, any book should be tending toward its ultimate goal. In non-fiction that destination is spelled out in the book’s title and subtitle. With a novel, anyone who’s seen a review or read the flap copy knows what the story’s about. Trusting in your reader’s foreknowledge, it’s safe to leave your plot in neural for a few pages while you develop your setting and character. But no longer than a few pages, lest your reader’s momentum glide to a stop. All these ploys and techniques will lead to your final payoff—to that satisfaction that only closure can provide, which is the necessary goal of Strategy #7.

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Notes and References

[1] Stephen King, It (first published 1986). Signet, 1987, p. 616. [2] Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852). Norwalk, CT: The Easton Press, 1979, Chapter Seventeen, p. 125. [3] Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900). The Easton Press, 1977, p. 220. [4] Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., Women Who Run With the Wolves (1991). Ballantine Books, 1992, p. 344. [5] Michael Crichton, Rising Sun (1992). Knopf, 1992, p. 182. [6] R.L. Stine, Return of the Mummy (1994). Scholastic, 1994, p. 71. [7] Tony Kushner, “The Art of the Difficult,” Civilization, August/September 1997, p. 66. [8] Carl A. Hammerschlag, M.D., The Theft of the Spirit. Simon & Schuster, 1993. [9] See Poets & Writers for September/October 1997, p. 50. “Some agents try to improve their [chances] by doctoring a book,” she says, “then selling it for as much money as that doctored book can bring, which can be a huge amount. If you do that, though, you take away the individual voice of the author, and that’s what I value.” Later in this same agent’s interview, she recalls a client who fired her. “Why?” she asked him. “I’m good at selling a book for what it’s worth.” His reply: “For once, I’d like to sell a book for more than it’s worth!” [10] R.L. Stine, Say Cheese and Die (1992). Scholastic, 1992, p. 1. [11] Return of the Mummy. See [6], above, p. 1.

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[12] Normandi Ellis, Dreams of Isis: A Woman’s Spiritual Sojourn. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1995, p. 14. [13] Hollywood uses Roman numerals to disguise the year a movie was first released, as in “© MCMXLIV [1944] by Tantamount Pictures.” This way, older films seem ageless—or at least, not too dated. [14] Edmund Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac (1898). I can’t find a French-language copy to offer a page reference, but this is my translation of “Il manque de l’esprit, puisqu’il est beau garçon”—expressing the sour-grapes resentment (via the Third Law) of drop-dead handsome men. [15] Wes Nickerson, “Paradigm Shift: User-Friendly Economics,” in InnerGuide, July/August 1996, p. 11. [16] F. Lee Bailey and Harvey Aronson, The Defense Never Rests (1971). Signet, 1972, pages 117-118. [17] Juan Marasco, translator, The Dhammapada: The Path of Perfection (300 BCE). Penguin Books, 1973, p. 35. [18] Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (1350): The John Ciardi Translation. Norton, 1977, Inferno, Canto XIII, lines 40-43. [19] Ibid. Purgatorio, Canto XXIII, lines 16-21. [20] Stephen King, Desperation. Viking, 1996, p. 4. [21] —— —— , Skeleton Crew (1985). Signet, 1986, pages 30-31, 129, and 160. [22] L’Abbé Prévost, Story of a Modern Greek Woman (1740), reprinted in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France, edited by Michel Feher. Zone Books, 1997, p. 553. [23] Denis Diderot, Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage (1796), reprinted in The Libertine Reader, p. 82. [24] Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968). Pocket Books, 1971, p. 9.

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[25] After Elisabeth Kübler-Ross gained fame with On Death and Dying (1969), she introduced or endorsed enough New-Agey books to fill a U-Haul. Most went out of print. [26] J.P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man (1965). See the back cover of the Atlantic Monthly Press’s 1988 Trade paperback edition. [27] Stephen King, It (1986). Signet, 1987. These phrases appear on pages 14, 54, 55, 149, 237, 250, and 351. [28] Quoted by William Goldman in Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983). Warner, 1984, pages 117-118. [29] John Cheever, The Wapshot Scandal (1964). Harper & Row, 1964, p. 129. [30] John Lahr, “Fortress Mamet,” The New Yorker, November 17, 1997, p. 73. [31] Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park (1990). Ballantine, 1991, p. 4. [32] Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer (1995). Knopf, 1995, p. 220. [33] Matthew 10:16. [34] When I lived in Philadelphia, serving as Welcomat’s art critic, one “Eavesdrawing” panel showed me chatting with a couple at a Friday-night gallery opening. “Do you collect?” I asked. Replied the man, “We try not to!” [35] Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1881). Atlanta: Cherokee Publishing, 1981, p. 79. [36] Ibid., p.160. [37] Lillian Hellman, The Little Foxes (1939). Dramatists Play Service, 1983. [38] Joyce Wadler, “Double Exposure,” New York magazine, September 15, 1997, p. 32.

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256 STRATEGY # 7 Progress, Wisdom, Evolution

There is no beginning. And some beginnings are endings anyway. —DEEPAK CHOPRA, The Return of Merlin [1]

AN AUTHOR I’LL CALL GUS WROTE A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER COLUMN on how to coax the most out of your Mac or PC, without consulting a 952-page manual or asking a ten- year-old for advice. Hoping that Gus would welcome a chance to strut his expertise, we signed him up for What Tech Support Won’t Tell You, a book of cyber do’s and don’ts plus first-hand accounts of inventive geeks and hackers. Gus handed in his manuscript well in advance of before his contract deadline, which practically no author ever does. His first chapter struck me as meaty and useful, featuring Gifted Underdogs who’d had their Windows slam shut. To explain why, he ushered us into Seattle cubicles where software code is actually written. His solutions to balky programs, pop-ups and malware were ingenious, often downright elegant. He came across as a genuinely likable guy, fully satisfying Strategy #4. But as soon as Gus began Chapter Two, his style reverted to an introductory, entry-level tone, as if he was starting all over again on page one. Because he really was! Thumbing ahead, I saw that Gus had paginated each of his chapters from scratch, starting with page 1 each time. Why couldn’t he step back to provide a deeper, more leisurely view of his subject? Maybe a sneak peek behind the Silicon Curtain? Interviews with disgruntled geeks who create

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computer viruses? Why each new version of Windows had offered a blizzard of new options that nobody wanted and “retired” the useful ones they did? But no—Gus was in too much of a self-imposed hurry. You see, in order to keep his syndicated column from running on too long, he had taught himself to write in bursts of no more than 500 words. Soon after he’d built up a head of steam, he was forced to slow down again and brake to a stop. While writing his manuscript, he’d kept to the same habit, treating each chapter as another extra-long installment and numbered his pages the same way he did if he was attaching several files at once in the same e-mail. The resulting series of wind-sprints, with premature stops and fresh starts, gave his book a jerky rhythm. Overall, it lacked any sense of what screenwriters call a story arc. While renumbering his pages in sequence, I waited for that triumphant clash of cymbals, that bang-bang-BOOM! that signals the finale to a fireworks show. But it never arrived. Gus’s manuscript just stopped, with no conclusive wind- up. And his book quickly went out of print, never earning back his modest advance.

Hooked by your wiles and skills, readers have sat tight, mesmerized, devoting precious hours to reading your pages. In return, they deserve a few extra-special payoffs—okay, shameless bribes—so they will tell others about the enjoyable trip you have given them. So always keep asking yourself what your loyal readers want next? What will it take to keep them loyal?

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Slush Pile Lesson #24: Are We There Yet?

I once rejected a novel on the grounds of its final sentence: “Somehow, he knew that the events of that dusty summer day would repeat themselves.” To quote John Cheever again:

Some of us go around the world three times, divorce, remarry, divorce again, part with our children, make and waste a fortune, and coming back to our beginnings we find the same faces at the same windows, buy our cigarettes and newspapers from the same old man, say good morning to the same elevator operator, good night to the same desk clerk . . . . [2]

All too often, life returns us to Square One. But a good book lets our imaginations escape and keep on going. Time’s 1978 cover story on Mario Puzo compared a best-seller to a summer vacation—a visit to a fresh, exotic location where readers can enjoy themselves in ways they never dared at home. Without reviewing Strategy #2, that analogy is worth pursuing. Think of your readers as your guests. If they don’t enjoy their 300-page stay, they won’t recommend your book to others in search of a weekend getaway. Joyce Carol Oates observes that no matter how “’plot- ridden, fantastical or absurd, populated by whatever pseudo- characters, genre fiction is always resolved.” To her mind, that’s why commercial fiction is addictive [while] literary fiction, unfortunately, is not.” [3] Louis Menand observes that in love stories,

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The repertoire of dénouements is fairly limited: marriage, splitsville, murder, and mutual annihilation. But audiences keep coming back for more.” [4]

Too many “serious” writers like Ann Beattie let their stories fizzle out with a whimper because that’s how events turn out in real life. But readers don’t crave enjoy verisimilitude unless, as already pointed out, it accurate describes some far-off locale. Books that can’t conclude with a solid satisfying bang have trouble avoiding the remainder tables. No, customers aren’t always right. But they do know what they like, and if they are to pay your bills, readers of romances, mysteries, and sci-fi have a right to expect that you’ll tie up loose ends. Firmly and neatly. As you learned back in Strategy #6, sheer action usually can’t resolve conflicts and satisfy your audience emotionally. “Something is wrong with Hollywood,” sighs film critic Richard Corliss, “if the answer to every story problem is a crash.” [5] Nor will simply relaxing tensions in your final pages guarantee good sales. Every best-seller offers something subtler, but far more enduring: vicarious experience that leads to valuable wisdom—if not for the characters, then definitely for the reader. Such knowledge is typically hard-won, its flavor bittersweet. At the end of Jane Eyre (1847), Thornfield Hall has been half-ruined by a fire that left Mr. Rochester blinded and minus one hand. But Bertha Rochester, his insane wife who set the blaze, is finally dead. He and Jane are now married, parents of a little boy, and his vision is slowly improving. In Mutiny on the Bounty (1932), Fletcher Christian and crew reach Pitcairn Island—which boasts no Club Med or Hard

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Rock Café. They’ll never see England again. But now free of Bligh’s tyranny, they can build a new free life. Many “inspirational” best-sellers wade into dark, even harrowing subject matter. The four Gospels feature, madmen, lepers, Herod’s massacre of all boys under two in the vicinity o Bethlehem, ending with a triple crucifixion. A Christmas Carol (1843) reveals the after-death penance of Jacob Marley: “I wear the chains I forged in life.” Later, the mute specter of Christmas Future predicts the deaths of Tiny Tim and Scrooge himself. Despite its jaunty title, I’m OK—You’re OK (1969) includes case histories of child abuse, financial ruin, mental retardation, schizophrenia, teenage pregnancy, and other personal disasters. But each one ends with promises of healing and redemption. Best-sellers offer valuable lessons gleaned from very hard knocks. Whatever the downside, characters see their journeys as worthwhile, overall. No matter what their physical and spiritual trials, they seldom express regrets for what’s befallen them. They’ve ended up sadder but wiser. Striving in the face of adversity (grace under pressure, Hemingway called it) hasn’t won them whatever goal or MacGuffin they sought at first, but something better, though intangible—a serene wisdom that any reader can admire, if not personally long for. For Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment (1866),

what were all the agonies of the past? Everything, even his crime [a double murder], his sentence and imprisonment, seemed to him now . . . an external strange fact with which he had no concern. [6]

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In Peter Straub’s Shadowland (1980), Tom Flanagan doesn’t let his emotional trauma and scarred hands impede his career as a stage magician. After their final triumph in Stephen King’s It (1985), an unexplained amnesia overtakes the main characters, making them forget the challenge they faced, as well as one another. In an old address book, even their names begin to fade away. In best-sellers, a silver lining plates even the darkest clouds—but that lining must be pure, untarnished. Homilies and bromides, like Thornton Wilder’s “The world is full of nice people,” [7] won’t do. At first glimpse, this calm surrender often appears eccentric because since it’s reflected through some individual with distinct peculiarities. The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), John Cheever’s most accomplished and successful novel, ends with an excerpt from the deceased Leander’s diary. At first glance, its imagery seems jumbled, its assertions simplistic. But just as the flavor of a fine Bordeaux recalls the hillside where its grapes ripened, so do Leander’s words distill some fruits from his long life:

Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. Courage tastes like blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the Lord. [8]

Non-fiction authors are freed from the chore of making every character comprehensible, and so can focus on their own inner transformations. “My own thinking about divorce has changed in the twenty years I’ve been a therapist,” admits Mary Pipher in Reviving Ophelia (1994).

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Working with adolescent girls has changed me. I’m more humble and more patient, less sure of success than I am with adults. [9]

Crawling Into Focus

Friedrich Nietzsche bragged, “Whatever does not kill me, makes me stronger.” Then again, he died of syphilis! Film producer Lynda Obst much expresses the same idea in a more level-headed way:

Pressure can crush you or turn you into the diamond version of yourself: hard and brilliant. [10]

She’s talking about Hollywood, but that same dynamic makes or breaks every intriguing character. If those individuals you’ve chosen to chronicle are strong enough to survive (and if you’ve employed Strategy #3, they will be), then let them become distilled, growing ever clearer and more vividly themselves. In her footnote to screenwriters specifically, Obst offers a hint that any writer can use:

Whatever condition you choose for your central character, it should contain within it the seeds of his evolution. This is your critical “character arc”—all characters improve their lot, unless they are antagonists, in which case they get theirs in a big scene called the “payoff.” [12]

Ignore her advice and you’ll wind up with the pilot for a TV sitcom where momentum, psychology, and genuine risk all get shelved to preserve the shaky comic premise. (After the

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Connors won a $105 million lottery, the final season of “Rosanne” went swiftly downhill.) On televised episodes, dramatic changes are accomplished by proxy, with guest stars creating temporary upsets. Unless a show’s ratings start to slide, the featured characters never change—and why should they? (Dwindling audience share forced “Ellen” out of the closet.) In contrast, shows that follow a story line like “thirtysomething,” “ER,” “Beverly Hills 90210,” and “Glee” allow characters to learn and mature, expanding their grasp of the world around them. Characters who never develop are often children to start with—as in long-running comic strips like “Dennis the Menace” and “Peanuts,” which is still being syndicated long after Charles Schultz’s death. And these kiddies never grow up! “The Simpsons” lasted on TV for decades, but Maggie never outgrew her diapers and pacifier.

Spinning Less into More

As any gardener will tell you, pruning back a tree stimulates growth on the remaining limbs. Similarly, characters develop most admirably when their free will becomes restricted. At the end of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov is imprisoned and is left with few options but to redeem himself and accept the love of Sonia, his companion-in-shackles. Throughout most of The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), Sherman McCoy remains vain and indecisive. When detectives come to inspect his car for evidence of a hit-and-run, he dithers long enough to cast suspicion on himself. Arrested and jailed in Criminal Court, he’s “paralyzed by fear and confusion.” [12] For his own safety, a policeman separates him from the other prisoners:

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“I’d rather walk you outta there than sweep you outta there.”[13]

Bonfire’s Epilogue zeroes in on McCoy a year later. He’s now trimmer, leaner, and streetwise. “I’m a career defendant,” he tells a reporter. “I now dress for jail.” Appearing in court, he displays

a slightly swollen left jaw and abrasions on the knuckles of both hands. Questioned . . . he said, “Don’t worry, Judge. It’s something I’ll take care of myself,” [and] declined offers of medical treatment. [14]

The Third Law makes startling improvements more plausible, partly because the reader is rooting for them to take place even when a flawed character doesn’t wholly deserve them. (As Blaise Pascal observed, “The heart has reasons that Reason never knew.”) To pull off this kind of psychological reversal, you don’t need to begin with characters whose ethics need improving. They can be naïve (like Huck Finn or Amber St. Clare), indecisive (Hamlet), weak-willed (like Sebastian Dangerfield), proud and stubborn (Scarlett O’Hara), even vain and cowardly (Sherman McCoy). In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), narrator Hank Morgan depicts Alisande la Carteloise—“Sandy,” he calls her—as a compulsive chatterbox:

She was quite a biddable creature and good-hearted, but she had a flow of talk that was steady as a mill, and made your head sore. . . Her clack was going all day, and . . . she never had to slack up for words. . . . And

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yet the result was just nothing but wind. She never had any ideas, any more than a fog has.

The only time Sandy falls silent is when Morgan asks about her age. “If she had had a cork,” he adds, “she would have been a comfort. But you can’t cork that kind; they would die.” [15] After a three-year interval, during which Morgan has moved on to larger issues that will determine the fate of Camelot (and Western civilization as well), Twain slips us a delightful surprise: Hank Alisande are married!

Ah, Sandy, what a right heart she had, how simple and genuine and good she was! She was a flawless wife and mother. . . I didn’t know I was drawing a prize . . . Within the twelvemonth, I became her worshipper, and ours was the dearest and perfectest comradeship that ever was. [16]

Why do we trust his change of heart? Because Twain has foreshadowed it. Before Hank delivered his harshest slander (“she never had any ideas, any more than a fog has”), he did admit that Sandy was “quite a biddable creature and good- hearted.” If you remember that the Third Law is on your side, this kind of 180-degree reversal is easy to pull off. In Wuthering Heights, Cathy’s early reaction to Heathcliff as a child is to spit at him, earning a sound blow from her father “to teach her cleaner manners.” [17] Shakespeare pulls similar switcheroos with Katharina and Petruchio in Taming of the Shrew (1596) and Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing (1600). In Look Back in Anger (1956), Jimmy Porter and Helena Charles bicker and insult each other until they embrace passionately, bringing down the curtain on Act II.

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In Star Wars (1977), when Han Solo and Princess Leia meet on the Death Star, they start trading sneers and insults. They need two sequels—The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983)—before they can recognize each other’s good points. Clichéd screenplays have the attractive heroine spurn the hero’s interest, only to melt into his arms in the final reel, without bothering to explain her initial antipathy. This sends the dangerous message that women don’t know their own minds and will come around sooner or later, if only their men keep the pressure up.

By highlighting the better side of any otherwise irksome character, you’ll keep the reader alert for further improvements and reluctant to turn away. Here are two descriptions of the same fictional woman—identical, except the order of sentences is reversed:

Thanks to the knowing sparkle in her eyes and the humor in her smile, handsome men kept knocking at her door. Lula Mae was hot-tempered blunt-spoken— and she loathed people with big-city pretensions. . . . Lula Mae was hot-tempered, blunt-spoken—and she loathed people with big-city pretensions. Thanks to the canny sparkle in her eyes and the knowing humor in her smile, handsome men kept knocking at her door.

Which version coaxes you to read on and learn more about her?

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Three Strikes and Still at Bat

If you keep score, you’ll discover that best-selling bad guys always commit multiple offenses before meeting their comeuppance. Over the course of Paradise Lost (1667), Satan grows slowly less reasonable, more compulsively destructive. In many a murder mystery, stresses of the ongoing investigation erode the killer’s composure until he turns desperate and rabid. Ian Fleming’s 007 is evenly matched against villains who have awarded themselves a license to kill. In the novel Goldfinger (1959), the eponymous villain gives Jill Masterson a lethal gilding in revenge for her disloyalty. Strike one. Then he attempts to kill Bond. Strike two. Next, he tries to steal the contents of Fort Knox. (In the movie version, he plots to nuke the gold, making it radioactive and impossible to trade—a simpler, more plausible caper.) That may not count as strike three. But aboard the plane, he makes it clear that he has no intentions to reform by trying to strangle Bond. Instead, 007 strangles him—in self-defense. In the novel, it’s Oddjob who gets sucked out the plane window, “as if the . . . body was toothpaste.” [18] Why do authors hold off so long before imposing sentence? Because whether or not they’ll admit it, readers want to like strong, assertive accomplished characters, and classic villains are exactly that. A part of us values redemption over revenge, which explains why the blackguards of old melodramas are pretty boring. Characters presented as totally evil (Nazis, zombies) are presented as safely expendable— anonymous cannon fodder, kept at an emotional distance where the reader can’t detect any distinguishing characteristics or possible virtues.

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Watching a villain-in-training hesitate and slowly turn over a new leaf is far more satisfying and psychologically intriguing than seeing him meet a bitter end. Any reader would rather say “Good for you!” than “Good riddance.” Hence the popularity (and paradoxically, the authority) of St. Paul, that Roman citizen who once persecuted Christians as Saul of Tarsus. Hence the never-ending appeal of Ebenezer Scrooge. Both The Shining (1977) and Return of the Jedi (1983) feature physically abusive fathers who wind up saving their sons’ lives. In Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon (1981) we feel guilty relief when serial killer Francis Dolarhyde hooks up with a blind girlfriend. Can she re-awaken his humane instincts before he kills again? Two and a half millennia ago, Buddha declared that every sentient being—thieves and murderers, cobras and fleas—can attain enlightenment. Roughly 1,000 years later, several Greek myths feature an Enemy Girlfriend who undergoes a change of heart. Two obvious examples:

Jason sails to a foreign, exotic island called Colchis. His mission: to steal the Golden Fleece from its rightful owner, King Aites. But the Fleece is guarded by a dragon who never sleeps. Jason may have to sail home empty-handed. But Medea—King Aites’s daughter—falls in love with Jason. She puts the dragon under a spell, letting Jason steal the Fleece. When Jason makes good his escape, he takes Medea with him. . . .

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Theseus sails to a foreign, exotic island called Crete. His mission: to penetrate King Minos’s labyrinth and slay the man-eating Minotaur who dwells within. Because of the labyrinth’s twists and turns, Theseus might never find his way out. But Ariadne—King Minos’s daughter—falls in love with Theseus. She gives him a ball of string that let him retrace his steps. When Theseus makes good his escape, he takes Ariadne with him.

Again and again, an Enemy Girlfriend springs 007 out of a jam. And having made his escape, Bond brings her with hm.

While best-selling heroes and heroines are typically long-suffering, a stubborn villain’s comeuppance is always quick. The Third Law of Reader Reaction demands it, because any lingering demise (like Messala’s in the 1959 Ben-Hur) might give the reader enough time to feel sympathy. Besides, with the narrative now drawing to a close, there isn’t much time left to unravel a new tangle of mixed emotions. To protect the good guys against Third Law recoil, they are seldom directly responsible for any villain’s bad end. This is especially obvious in films. Bad guys often succumb to a gust of gravity, as in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959), and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1997). Or they fall victim to the very same trap they’ve set for their intended victim, as in Star Gate (1994) and in any cartoon short featuring Tom and Jerry or Wile E. Coyote. Or else they’re dispatched in an accident with some inanimate prop, as in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), The Terminator (1984), and The Little Mermaid (1989).

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To avoid triggering any backlash from the Third Law, best-sellers authors often behave generously and cut their vanquished villain some final slack. Once the battle’s won, a spirit of general amnesty obtains. At the end of Cujo (1981), Stephen King gives his rabid St. Bernard (now dead and safely cremated) an unexpected pat on the head:

It would perhaps not be amiss to point out that he had always tried to be a good dog. He had tried to do all the things his MAN and his WOMAN and most of all his BOY, had asked or expected of him. He would have died for them, if that had been required. He had never wanted to kill anybody. He had been struck by . . . a degenerative nerve disease . . . Free will was not a factor. [19]

Toward the end of Dick Francis’s Longshot (1990), narrator John Kendall feels only compassion for the killer who impaled him with an arrow and left him for dead. (This novel’s final line will startle you, and I don’t want to deprive you of its impact.) Redemption can extend to settings too. In Deliverance (1970), the white river where Ed fought for his life, recently flowing with terror and mayhem, is dammed up and becomes the placid artificial Lake Cahula:

One big marina is already built on the south end of the Lake . . . the area is beginning to catch on, especially with the new generation, the one just getting out of high school. [20]

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Some spiders devour their own webs. Many best-selling authors tell you that their show’s over by dismantling the set, wrecking everything they’ve taken such pains so hard to build. The Pequod goes down with all hands except Ishmael. Near the end of It, Stephen King sends a freak storm to drown and demolish the town of Derry, Maine. His hotel in The Shining (1977) goes up in flames. Jurassic Park (1990) is bombed back to the Stone Age, and its dinosaurs go extinct for a second time. But before you take such a fatal step, make sure your editor won’t ask for a sequel. Otherwise, a no-prisoners finale can sentence you to the hard labor of dreaming up new characters. After plunging Sherlock Holmes into the Reichenbach Falls in “The Final Problem,” Conan Doyle had to bring him back alive. After poisoning 007 in the last page of From Russia With Love (1957), Ian Fleming had to rush him an antidote in the opening chapter of Dr. No (1958). Crichton’s The Lost World (1995) resurrected Dr. Malcolm, who was emphatically killed off in Jurassic Park five years before. Leave your bridges unburned, your doors open to further possibilities.

Fresh Starts and New Beginnings

Wagner’s Ring (1853-1870) and Disney’s Lion King (1994) both end with purification by fire, followed by renewal by water. In many best-sellers, similar events are implied—or spelled out, as in Crime and Punishment:

. . . those sick, pale faces were bright with the dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life . . . . He did not know that his new life would not be given

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to him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering. But that is the beginning of a new story—the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. [21]

It’s a cliché to draw a line through THE END and type in THE BEGINNING, but that’s exactly the impression you want to give. In line with the Paranoia Formula, any change for the better should affect as many characters as possible. A Tale of Two Cities (1859) closes with Sydney Carton’s famous last thoughts on his way to the guillotine: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” But seldom quoted are the immediately preceding lines, offering Carton’s panorama of a glorious future:

I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and . . . I see the evil of this time . . . gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out . . . I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous, and happy . . . [22]

Many enduring yarns, from Oedipus at Colonus (circa 401 BCE) to The Hobbit (1937), end with the equivalent of a thaw. Winter’s chill grip is relaxing. Warmth and light can return. Characters enjoy expansive relief, a cautious optimism, and gratitude for ordinary benefits and their every breath.

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Irving Wallace’s The Word (1972) offers a 500-page ping-pong game of true-or-false? A fifth Gospel is unearthed an archeological dig outside Rome, ultimately revealed as a forgery. But a cover-up prevails. The novel ends with protagonist Steven Randall happy with Angela, his blissfully ignorant wife, and daughter, Judy:

He knew that he had finally found for himself the answer to Pilate’s classic question . . . What is truth? . . . he mouthed the answer to himself: Truth is love. And to love, one must believe: in self, in others, in the underlying purpose of all living things and in the plan behind existence itself. That is truth, he told himself . . . for the first time feeling at peace, unafraid, and not alone. [23]

Cynics might decry this as rationalizing, but it’s strongly compassionate and altruistic. As long as pilgrims are directed in the right direction, do the road signs matter that much?

Pulling Back for Wider Views

. . . is what Gus failed to do in his manuscript about computers. Strategy #7 urges protagonists (and by proxy, the reader) to adopt a higher, more panoramic perspective. In the words of film critic Marty Meltz, “we want to leave with greater awareness than when we went in.” [24] To achieve this, directors often resort to an abrupt shift of scale. In its final scene, Abel Gance’s silent, delightful Napoleon (1927) suddenly expands to three screens. The effect is thrilling— embryonic Cinemascope! The final shot of When Worlds Collide (1951) shows refugees from Earth disembarking from their one-way rocket

274 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER onto a brave new world. Never mind that the vista before them is a painted backdrop modeled after rural California. In the closing moments of 2001 (1968) astronaut Keir Dullea is transformed into a fetus the size of planet Earth. Perhaps following Stanley Kubrick’s lead, some books strain for a final expansion by ending on a wildly mystical note. On the last page of Tales of Power (1974), Carlos Castaneda blithely leaps off a cliff, secure that his newfound sorcerer’s powers will preserve him:

Then a strange urge, a force, made me run with him [Pablito] to the edge of the mesa. I felt his arm holding me as we jumped, and then I was alone. [25]

Period, finished! This enigmatic ending seems plausible only because the preceding chapters have been rife with similar paranormal goings-on. Another best-seller, Richard Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981), ends more sedately with several main characters (Sigmund Freud among them) at ease in the Hereafter. But such an afterdeath epiphany is tricky to pull off. Readers must be able to feel its innate veracity and not accept it on faith—as every reader of Heaven is Real (2010) is coaxed to do. Consider Thomas Wolfe’s eerie, beautiful ending to You Can’t Go Home Again 1934):

Something has spoken to me in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year . . . Saying: “To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life . . . to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth— . . . where the conscience of the earth is tending, a wind is rising, and the rivers flow. [26]

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One of the sales points or implicit promises in any non- fiction book is that it affords the reader a wider view of some aspect of knowledge. Such an expanded understanding isn’t always easy to grasp or even explain (as when Quantum mechanics replaced Newton’s laws) or reassuring (as when kids learn the truth about Santa Claus). But it’s self-evident, convincing. Consciously at least, nobody wants to revert to a previous state of ignorance. Earlier, you groomed your protagonists and cherry- picked plot twists or case histories to motivate readers to share in their experiences. Now you must lay solid groundwork for whatever reality-expansion you hope to bring off, or the reader may feel reluctant to follow you up that last flight of stairs.

Funnels Narrow Down, Cornucopias Open Out

Except for whodunits and police procedurals where only one answer is sought, enduring fiction tends to be tactful and tolerant, not insisting on one narrow interpretation. This permissiveness appears toward the end of in many ghost stories like “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), where alternate explanations for the apparition get trotted out. Did it really happen? The reader is invited to follow different paths without committing to any one. Given a choice, the reader can feel satisfied on more than one emotional level. We can empathize emotionally, even if we don’t agree logically. Witness narrator Nick’s celebrated close of The Great Gatsby (1925):

. . . his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it . . . Gatsby believed in . . . the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we

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will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . And one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. [27]

We? Not everyone is a prisoner of Zelda (sorry, romantic nostalgia!), pining over dashed opportunities and lost loves [29]. But Fitzgerald embraces us readers so eloquently, with such fervid compassion, that we can’t really opt out. One big caution, though: Being equivocal is not the same as being vague or ambivalent. John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) offers alternate endings (A) and (B)—a clunky, too-literal way of accomplishing what Emily Brontë pulled off more deftly in Wuthering Heights. In Chapter III, Heathcliff calls into the snowswept darkness, hoping a ghost will hear him:

“Cathy, do come. Oh, do—once more! Oh, my heart’s darling, hear me this time!” [29]

Given this foreshadowing, it seems more plausible that after he dies, his unrequited spirit may still wander the heath. In the final chapter, on “a dark evening threatening thunder,” narrator Lockwood meets a small shepherd boy “crying terribly” and asks him what’s wrong. The lad blubbers,

“There’s Heathcliff and a woman, yonder under the knob of the hill, and I dare not pass them.” [30]

Oddly, the boy’s three sheep won’t budge either! Without committing himself, Lockwood suggests that the boy “take the road lower down.”

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You don’t believe in ghosts? No problem! Brontë has set a place at the table for you as well. Only a few sentences later, housekeeper Nelly Dean declares “The dead are at peace.” Next comes some optional rationalizing that readers need not accept—before yet another reversal that lays the issue to its subjective rest. Abruptly, thunder no longer threatens. The heights aren’t wuthering tonight, so Lockwood strolls over to the churchyard, locates Cathy and Heathcliff’s headstones (with his “still bare” of lichen and moss), then delivers the masterfully soothing finale:

I lingered . . . under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth. [31]

Such soaring eloquence often provides closure. In their final paragraphs, many best-sellers expand into poetry. If their AudioBook versions had a soundtrack, you’d hear orchestral music swelling in the background. Consider this gentle boast that ends the Gospel of John (circa 90 CE):

Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written. [32]

Or this compassionate encouragement, from Mars/Venus (1992) that could be lifted straight from Deepak Chopra:

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Give yourself permission to keep making mistakes . . . You are a pioneer. You are traveling in new territory. Expect to be lost sometimes. Expect your partner to be lost. Use this as a map to lead you through uncharted lands again and again. [33]

Or this glimpse of a brighter future, from Reviving Ophelia (1994):

Let’s work for a culture in which the incisive intellect, the willing hands, and the happy heart are beloved. Then our daughters will have a place where all their talents will be appreciated, and they can flourish. [34]

More than a valedictorian tone, a sudden change in perspective signals the windup. Sense and Sensibility (1811) closes with a dash of snide humor, the more arresting because Jane Austen hasn’t used that tone of voice before:

among the merits and happiness of Elinor and Marianne, let it not be ranked as the least . . . that, though sisters and living almost in sight of each other, they could live without disagreement between themselves or producing coolness between their husbands. [35]

The erotic banter at the end of most 007 novels serves much the same function.

Keep It Simple and Pretty and Bright

The excerpts quoted above may seem simplistic, even sketchy and offhand. Transposed to the opening pages of their

279 TAM MOSSMAN respective books, they’d sound grandiose and glib. But here, at this penultimate location, their euphoria can’t compromise their impact. The well-nigh giddy mood in these final pages arises partly from their authors’ relief at reaching the end of the books, confident they may have something to show for all their work. Your own farewell can be eloquent and informal at the same time. If your readers are pleased with the job you’ve done, they’ll be content with the printed equivalent of a high-five. J.P. Donleavy’s toodle-oo reads like graffiti: “God’s Mercy/On the Wild/Ginger Man.” Will Durant, co-author of The History of Civilization, ends Volume Three with THANK YOU, PATIENT READER. Robert J. Ringer, author of Winning by Intimidation (1973) says if you ever bump into him in person, you’ll recognize him by his frog tattoo. [35]

If you’ve wielded all Seven Strategies, then your reader has been whispering “Wow!” since the first page. If not, it’s now too late to apologize or justify. Don’t mess with the reader’s nostalgic delight at nearing the end of your journey together. But in order to remain a Kind and Trusty Guide, you should perform one last task before releasing your book to the world. It’s simple and easy, the equivalent of one last glance in the mirror before leaving for a dinner party. You’ll find it in the very last chapter.

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Notes and References

[1] Deepak Chopra, The Return of Merlin (1995). Ballantine, 1996, p. 150. [2] John Cheever, The Wapshot Scandal (1964). Harper & Row, 1964, p. 55. [3] Joyce Carol Oates, “The King of Weird,” in The New York Review of Books, October 31, 1996, pages 50-51. [4] Louis Menand, “Love Stories,” in The New Yorker, August 25th & September 1, 1997, p. 9. [5] Richard Corliss, “One Dumb Summer,” Time, June 30, 1997, p. 66. [6] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866). Translated by Constance Garnett. Bantam, 1987, p. 462. [7] Thornton Wilder, The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, quoted in a drama review in Time, April 23, 1974. [8] John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle (1957). Harper, 1957, p. 225. [9] Mary Pipher, Ph.D., Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Lives of Adolescent Girls (1994). Ballantine, 1995, pages 133 and 259. [10] Lynda Obst, Hello, He Lied—And Other Truths from the Hollywood Trenches (1996). Boston: Little, Brown, 1996, p. 7. [11] Ibid., p. 34. [12] Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). Farrar, Strauss, 1987, pages 472-473. [13] Ibid., p. 475. [14] Ibid., p. 658. [15] Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Chapter XII, “Slow Torture.” [16] Ibid., Chapter XLI, “The Interdict.”

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[17] Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847). Knopf, 1991, p. 41. [18] Ian Fleming, Goldfinger (1959). Berkeley, 1982, p. 255. [19] Stephen King, Cujo (1981). Viking, 1981, p. 318. [20] James Dickey, Deliverance (1970). Armchair Detective Library, 1991, p. 236. [21] Crime and Punishment, see [6] above, p. 471. [22] Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Signet, 1980, pages 366-367. [23] Irving Wallace, The Word (1972). Simon & Schuster, 1972, p. 568. [24] Marty Meltz, “There’s No Kicking around Nixon,” Maine Sunday Telegram, January 14, 1996, p. E-1. [25] Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power (1974). Pocket, 1976, p. 295. Simply by reporting the incident, Carlos implies that he landed in one piece. [26] Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again (1934). Perennial, 1989, p. 576. [27] F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925). Scribner’s, 1995, p. 182. Not one of Gatsby’s three film versions was a box-office hit. The title role demands an oxymoron: a bootlegger naïve enough to hope he can win back his old superficial girlfriend. None of the actors who’ve played Gatsby managed to bridge the gulf between tough-guy worldliness and schoolboy innocence. Judging from his Gatsbyesque role in Casino (1995), Robert de Nero could have pulled it off. . . . And in an eerie way, Fitzgerald’s life followed the plot of Jane Eyre. Consider the parallels:

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After Mr. Rochester’s wife Bertha goes insane and must be locked up, he falls in love with the governess, Miss Eyre. Later, while still incarcerated, Bertha Rochester dies in a fire. After FSF’s wife Zelda went schizophrenic and was institutionalized, he fell in love with the columnist Sheila Graham. Later, still incarcerated, Zelda Fitzgerald died in a fire. [28] Glimpsed on a T-shirt: BETTER TO HAVE LOVED AND LOST THAN HAVE TO PAY ALIMONY AND CHILD SUPPORT. [29] Wuthering Heights. See [17] above, p. 31. [30] The lad uses a “quaint” Yorkshire dialect which I’ve tided up for your easy comprehension. Brontë (with her keen ear for class distinctions) implies that this provincial bumpkin can’t speak correct English, so how can we trust him? That adds to her scene’s overall ambivalence. [31] Ibid., pages 384-385. [32] John 21: 25. [33] John Gray, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (1992). HarperCollins, 1992, p. 286. [34] Reviving Ophelia, see [9] above, p. 293. [35] Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811). Signet, 1980, p. 306. [36] Robert J. Ringer, Winning Through Intimidation (1973). Fawcett Crest, 1976, p. 303.

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283

STRATEGY # 7.625 The One to Keep in Mind

A writer’s first duty should be to his readers.

—TIME magazine columnist Joshua Quittner [1]

LIKE COUNTLESS OTHER AUTHORS, I’ve missed my contract deadlines. The proposal must have seemed enticing to the editor who gave me a contract, but my subconscious mind begged to differ. Yet in my case anyway, I now view writer’s block as a blessing that’s saved me months of wrong-headed toil over contrived characters and too-ambitious structure. Why does a manuscript die of boredom? Typically because your Creative Unconscious, source of your finest work, knows when “rational” spreadsheet wisdom is steering you in the wrong direction. It’s wise enough to disagree with such fixed ideas. It goes on down strike till you give in and let it choose a new path that’s more rewarding. In my own work, I’ve used each of the foregoing Strats to solve isolated problems, avoiding bottlenecks that would slow everything down. But just as diets work best together along with brisk fun exercise, so the Strats prompt and reinforce one another. And as any carpenter knows, each precise fit ensures the accuracy of the next cut. If your first pages are off to a good start, you’re more likely to stay on course. Yes, using all seven helps a book reach its widest possible readership. But you can’t wield them all seven on the same page. Plan Strats #1, #2, #3, and #7 well in advance, so they’ll be prominent in your book proposal and be evident in your sample chapters.

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But sooner or later, you’ll arrive at a creative crossroads: One Strategy will conflict with another one. How much of a character’s back story should you hint at right away, or postpone for later? Are you posing too many rhetorical questions? At this point, you need a tie-breaker or touchstone— some foolproof axiom that illumines your best possible course. Happily, such a one already exists, in the workspace of a successful writer/cartoonist I’ll call Clarice. Framed on the wall near her computer is a square of needlepoint embroidered with this vital reminder:

THE READER PAYS MY SALARY!

This isn’t a real strategy, more of a mindset. It’s an autopilot to help you stay on course, a reminder of why people buy books in the first place. When unsure of which course approach to take, simply ask which one’s in your reader’s best interests. Then writing will become compelling and fun. Better yet, your writing will automatically avoid the traits that doom most failed submissions. You know, sarcastic, self-righteous, smart-alecky . . . all those adjectives that begin with S. As now you know, readers don’t like them. So why include them? You’ll soon understand why successful novelists are glad to spend long hours at the keyboard, enjoying prolonged creative frenzy. “Once I truly begin to write,” says Anne Rice, creator of the Vampire Chronicles,

I work obsessively, in 12-hour days, punctuated by days of long sleep and vivid dreaming. Starting time and ending time are no longer important . . . I turn on the computer and write, write, write. [2]

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Rice finished some of her novels in as little as six weeks. Most of us are forbidden from achieving that breakneck pace by the Literary Superego. The major contributor to writer’s block, it frowns over our shoulder, judging our every word. Tell your inner critic to go play in traffic while you type away happily, syntax be damned. Later the next day or even next week when the dust has settled, what’s best will no longer be obscured by what’s not, and you—not some imagined schoolmaster—can evaluate your output clearly. You know the old joke about the way to carve a marble elephant? Easy! Chisel away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. Similarly, when planning a book, start by stripping away whatever it shouldn’t try to accomplish.

Slush Pile Lesson #25: Sermons Are for Sunday

New parents are advised to lock up sharp objects that could puncture a toddler who’s driven to explore. You can boost your book’s chances for survival by avoiding those common blunders that can only narrow your readership. I’ve flagged the worst of them in earlier Slush Pile Lessons, but of course there are many, many others. One—still common among newspaper columnists—derives from an itch to emulate Charles Dickens, Harriett Beecher Stowe, and Upton Sinclair, whose novels prompted social and political change. But that’s not what any mainstream publisher wants you to achieve! Consider this snippet from the opening chapter of Dean Koontz’s Intensity (1986):

Clad in only a pair of white cotton briefs, his lean pale body was badly battered . . . His eyelids had been sewn tightly shut with green thread. With yellow thread, two buttons above his upper lip were secured to a pair of

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buttons just under his lower lip. [3]

Pretty lurid, right? Surprisingly, during his publicity tour for Intensity, Koontz said, “I believe that fiction needs to be morally uplifting. Its highest purpose is to show us the right way to live.” [4] Which is balderdash—old nonsense, actually, which has been misguiding writers for a long time! As Camille Paglia points out,

Two hundred years ago, Romanticism definitively rejected the didactic Neoclassical view that art must elevate and that the artist must set a moral example. [5]

Those neoclassicists drew inspiration from Plato, who would have banished actors and storytellers from his ideal Republic, lest their make-believe corrupt young children and weak- minded adults. True, moral uplift has infused best-sellers like When Bad Things Happen to Good People (1981), and Chicken Soup for the Soul and The Book of Virtues (both 1993). But these titles are all non-fiction. Inject any editor—even Koontz’s—with truth serum, and he’ll admit that any novel’s highest purpose is to sell out as many printings as it can, to earn a good mass- market advance, and to snag a movie deal!

Never Chase a Fad

To finish a good manuscript and polish it can take at least six months. Assuming yours is already under contract and you needn’t shop it around, a dead-tree publisher needs an absolute minimum of four months to have it copyedited, designed, printed, and shipped.

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If you begin a book in the hopes of surfing a crest of enthusiasm, your effort will hit the bookstores nearly a year later—at best! By that time, your target readers will have sated themselves with also-rans and moved on to the latest trend. In genre fiction, of course, copycatting runs no risk at all. Each new mystery, romance, fantasy, horror, or sci-fi novel is greeted by dependably devoted readers. But even in these niche markets, sudden shifts in taste leave authors high and dry. For example, the success of Sweet Savage Love (1974) spawned any number of bodice-busters that also sold well. Still other publishers joined the bandwagon. Several paperback houses launched new imprints devoted exclusively to the genre. Before long, more than 45 new romance titles were hitting the racks every month—more than even an Evelyn Wood graduate could handle. The prototypical hero in the Sweet Savage mold was the boy named Trouble, all grown up—an arrogant alpha male, brusque and dangerous, contemptuous of women. Meeting the heroine for the first time, he often took her by force. Many novels dutifully followed suit, featuring rogues and rapists. But meanwhile, the operative formula was undergoing a slow change. By the time the National Lampoon got around to satirizing this trend, the Ideal Male whom readers preferred was already growing kinder and gentler. Romance publishers lost money—but not much, given their smaller advances and paperbacks’ cheaper printing costs. The blow fell heaviest on writers hoping to break into the market by obediently following their agents’ advice. A good many manuscripts were “accepted,” but never published. (If sales managers or marketing directors doubt that your manuscript can sell, they can simply refuse to publish it, rather than risk any more money on its printing and promotion. You

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can generally keep you advance, but must pay it back only if some other publisher wants to take over the book.)

Just as a Category-5 hurricane spawns brief twisters, every big best-seller spins off short-lived parodies. Not everyone knows that Joseph Andrews (1742) it was Henry Fielding’s second swipe at of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). Fielding’s first, more obvious takeoff was Shamela, appearing in 1741. Similarly, recent send-ups bear titles aimed squarely at the targets. Portnoy’s Complaint (1967) was followed by Mrs. Portnoy’s Retort (1968); The Rules (1996) by Breaking the Rules, that same year. The Cellophane Prophecy (1995) ridiculed James Redfield’s 1993 mega-seller. One dictionary definition of parody is “a poor or feeble imitation.” And aside from Joseph Andrews, no parody has ever sold better than its intended target—because it focuses on the original’s shortcomings, not on whatever strengths (okay, Strategies!) that made it so popular. Unfortunately, the same often holds true for authors trying to match their first success with sequels of their own. On the Muse’s second time out, she can’t always muster the same verve and energy. John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) is bracing and inventive, but The Wapshot Scandal (1964) is largely leftovers. Robert Glover followed Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding (1961) with Here Comes Kitten (1964), in which his WASP narrator seems pompous and dithering. And Erich Segal continued Love Story (1970) with the lackluster Oliver’s Story (1977). Unless your original characters advance and expand (as in Faust: Part II, 1832) or—like Fleming’s 007 or Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan who keep doing the same-old-same-old on

290 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER fresh terrain—a sequel can only remind readers of your first success. If your first spy novel or murder mystery featured an appealing protagonist with room to develop, any follow-up is much easier. Your main characters are “old friends,” already lodged in your reader’s imagination. You need give only brief reminders of their idiosyncrasies. They needn’t go hunting for a new challenge, as long as new clients and unfamiliar conflicts all crowd the first chapter. To keep any series at its best, let your protagonist be like James Patterson’s Alex Cross, growing older and wiser from one book to the next, facing with ever-new personal hassles and not only professional ones.

Not-So-Great Dictators

Allen Churchill once enjoyed a best-seller with The Improper Bohemians (1959). After that, he went downhill. When he finally delivered his aimless manuscript for The Literary Decade, his chronicle of the publishing industry during the 1920s, it was full of careless errors like giving the name of Zelda Sayre, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiancée, as “Zelda Sears.” The manuscript needed a detailed analysis of what was wrong. But because Churchill had a 600-pound ego with a nasty temper on top, we called for backup—a professor of American Literature at Columbia University. From his reader’s report:

Truman Capote said of a Jack Kerouac book, “That isn’t writing, it’s typewriting.” After reading [Churchill’s] effort, I must say that this isn’t even typewriting. It’s dictation!

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Way back then, Dictaphones were still status symbols. Executives could record letters and memos and have a secretary type them up. But all too often, the transcriptions turned out baffling: “This book on West African history could lead our Fall list, given the successive routes [the success of Roots].” Or hilarious: “Before we meet the authors on Friday, let’s get our genders straight [our agenda straight].” Here are excerpts from two novels by Henry James, both still in print. See if you can tell which passage was dictated. This one?

She hardly knew what had happened. Ostensibly, she had only had a difference with her lover, as other girls had had before, and not only was the thing not a rupture, but she was under no obligation to regard it even as a menace. Nevertheless, she felt a wound, even if he had not dealt it. It seemed to her that a mask had suddenly fallen from his face. [6]

Or this one?

There is no other participant, of course, than each of the real, the deeply involved and immersed and more or less bleeding participants; but I nevertheless affect myself as having held my system fast and fondly, with one hand at least, by the manner in which the whole thing remains subject to the register, ever so closely kept, of the consciousness of but two of the characters. [7]

The first excerpt comes from his Washington Square (1881). The second is a single sentence of his so-called “late” style, from The Golden Bowl (1904). By this late stage in his

292 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER logorrhea, James no longer sat down to write but would pace around the carpet instead, dictating, while a harried typist took down his words. Can’t you hear his oceanic vagueness, his obsessive fussiness, his neurotic blurts and hesitations? Sure, dictation is a fine way to preserve thoughts on the run—in a taxicab en route to a business lunch. But if an off-the- cuff idea is any good at all, a rewrite will surely improve it. To dictate longer passages that are coherent and compelling, you must hold entire paragraphs in clear focus, matching syntax against the sentence just past. It can be done, but takes considerable practice. Words on your computer screen give you better, faster feedback. (Use a font no larger than 16 points, and your monitor can display at least three paragraphs at once.)

Would You Share that with the Class?

In Foucault’s Pendulum (1989), Umberto Eco leads off with a long epigraph in Hebrew, offering no translation or any clue to its source. In one interview, Eco refused to even hint at what the passage might mean! Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) is Edward Albee’s best play, but stalls during one moment of dead air. Nick has just come in from a party thrown by the head of the college. He asks George, his host, for bourbon. “That what you were drinking over at Parnassus?” George asks, Nick says he doesn’t understand. George shrugs. “It’s just a private joke.” [8] To understand it, you need to know that Albee attended the Choate School back when the headmaster Seymour St. John, lived a gloomy gray Victorian hovel. Students nicknamed it Patmos, after the island where the original St. John wrote the Book of Revelation. [9]

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Cracking jokes your readers can’t understand and speaking over their heads are major wise-ass violations of Strategy #4.

Looking Daggers at Asterisks

As our high-school English teacher warned us, “Footnotes are like answering the telephone on your wedding night.” As their name implies, footnotes usually appear conveniently at the bottom of the page. But whenever footnotes run long enough to spill over onto the bottom of the next page, it’s like watching a split-screen movie. And does your reader need to consult them right now? At the opposite extreme, some authors sweep all their notes and references to the end of the book. That imposes a long commute which isn’t always worth it. And once having thumbed your way back there, you need to remember which chapter you were reading. This is a lot harder than it sounds, since most publishers usually omit chapter titles from their end notes. In Zelda (1970), Nancy Milford omitted superscript footnotes altogether. With no asterisks or footnotes to slow you down, this makes for smooth reading. But to find the source for any given fact, you must jot down the page and paragraph where it’s found, then turn to the back of the book scan through key phrases like “ . . . visited her hometown . . .” A real challenge for proofreaders and scholars alike! Why couldn’t she put her references at the end of each chapter, as I’ve done in this book? This way, you can find them quickly—or ignore them, your choice. Remember that almost every “prose” footnote is an aside or afterthought. With minimal tweaking (or stuffed between parentheses), it can be fitted up into the body of your

294 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER text. If any information seems to be a mogul on the Slope of Curiosity, then it belongs somewhere else entirely.

Deadlines Always Short, but Sales—Ideally—Long

In a TV commercial, Orson Welles once intoned, “We will sell no wine before its time.” Authors—and editors too—chronically underestimate how long it takes to deliver a book, if it’s to be crafted well enough to outsell any competing titles and thanks to re-orders, remain on bookstore shelves where buyers can find it. Once you’ve finalized your outline and begun the actual writing, then time is money. You need to be generous to your reader, but thrifty with hours spent at the keyboard. But it’s not really a trade-off. The question isn’t how much longer the manuscript will take you, but can you improve it even more? Alex Haley kept working on Roots (1976) for several years past his contractual deadline. Belatedly, Doubleday admitted it was worth the wait. To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, successful authors are different from you and me: They can afford to say no. After Simon & Schuster signed Dolly Parton to write her autobiography, she claimed “they started pushing and pulling” and paid them back her generous advance. In an interview, actor Michael Caine confessed,

I’m writing a novel—a thriller, actually . . . I haven’t made a publishing deal yet and don’t want one. If they give you the money, they expect the book, and I’m doing this one at my own pace. [10]

Remaining ever mindful of the One-who-pays-the-bills always leads you to more productive, effective work habits.

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Let Dust Settle before You Sweep

Edward Albee once bragged that he never revised his first drafts. Not a smart move! Despite Albee’s three Pulitzer Prizes for drama (awarded to only the handful of new shows that open on Broadway in any given year), he’s committed a series of flops like Malcolm (1967) and Lolita (1980) that closed within days, costing their investors untold thousands of dollars. In Hollywood, even a film with no big-name actor or any special effects can still cost tens of millions. Studios must think twice before green-lighting any project—and will gladly pay tens of thousands to have a screenplay revised and reworked endlessly, by many different writers. But just as too many cooks spoil the broth, no best-seller was ever written by a committee, except the Bible. In ancient Rome, when every copy of every book had to be copied by hand, creating literature was a hobby for aristocrats, no way to earn a living. Quintilian (circa 35 CE to 95 CE) advised that after finishing any work, you should store it away in a drawer. In nine years’ time, take it out and re-read it. If it still seems worthwhile, only then should you hire a scribe to make copies you can share with friends. Nowadays, you need your book on sale as soon as possible, earning back your advance. But before you hurry to make final revisions, take a little time for distancing. As Leonardo da Vinci once advised

Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work, your judgment will be surer . . . and any lack of harmony or proportion is more readily seen.” [11]

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After completing any chapter, let it “cool off” as long as you can—at least until after you’re finished with the next two or three. Then give that first one a cold, objective look. Not happy with what you see? Smile—you’re in best- selling company! Dorothy Parker admitted, “I hate writing, but I love having written.” John Irving bemoans that his first drafts are always a mess. Horror novelist Anne Rice admits that among her worst terrors is reading what she’s just typed so very quickly:

I go through a horrid despair some time or other before the final page, during which everything seems meaningless, from the dawn of history to the very hour in which I’m writing. [12]

If this deft, prolific author wasn’t wholly satisfied with her first drafts, why should you be? Columnist Bill Husted’s is advice is apt and valid:

If you have a [book] that needs revising, think of it as a computer system—made up of several parts—and do some hard figuring on what needs replacing. Often, when you replace just one part . . . you expose the need to replace another part. Each time you fix the weak link, you create another weak link. [13]

Frustrating, yes, but all to the good! Every needed revision makes your next tweak that much easier—and more effective. Balzac and Proust were notorious for crossing out and revising and rewriting, even after a printer had set their books in type! Many authors feel a wild urge to revise their work in

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galleys or page proofs, for a neurological reason: When font size and margins change from the familiar, suddenly they can perceive all kinds of glitches and awkwardness that escaped then before. Happily, your computer lets you accomplish the same thing before you send off your manuscript, and while you still have plenty of time to spare.

I write my first drafts with no hyphenations, using so- called ragged right margin, or what Windows calls Left Alignment. Then to check how my prose will look when printed up, I re-format it by switching to Justified, so that the page margins are even on both sides, exactly as you see here. For me, at least, the differences are astounding! Partly because line lengths are totally different, I no longer see the text as “Mine,” as too valuable to change. I can treat it the same way I would chapters turned in by some client I’ve never met. As a result, I wound up rewriting literally every sentence in this book. (Major chore, yes. But if I’d never admitted it, how would you ever know?) It cost me a more than a week of 9-hur days, but has resulted in countless improvements. Another way to judge my own stuff objectively is to pretend that I (like the eventual reader) don’t know what’s coming next. This way, each paragraph gets no slack. It must justify itself, sink or swim, while still pulling its own weight. It’s like glancing around my office when a client is about to drop by. Suddenly the permissive, rose-colored scales drop from my eyes, letting me see what any stranger will—what still needs tidying up.

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Why You Must Do it Yourself

As is well known, Scribner’s Maxwell Perkins condensed down Thomas Wolfe’s million-word manuscripts into Look Homeward Angel (1929) and Of Time and the River (1935). Today, many naïve authors expect editors to provide a similar service, as if their signed contract entitles them to a literary personal trainer. But acquisition editors are paid only to acquire—to sin up new projects, not polish them. And their suggestions for “improvements” can be dangerously stupid. Following his success with the supernatural in The Amityville Horror (1977), Jay Anson shopped around a proposal for The Tarshish Convoy, a non-fiction thriller with 90% of the action taking place out in the Mediterranean. After studying the outline, the head of one of New York’s largest publishing companies suggested, “Why not put a ghost on one of the boats?” In reality, few editors bother fine-tune manuscripts they sign up. Fewer still every learn how, because being hunter- gatherer doesn’t require it. And hunter-gatherers keep on the move. One new editor, fresh at Prentice-Hall from another publishing company, spent long hours shooting paperclips over the wall of my cubicle. He didn’t last long. Soon he got hired away to become the Editor-in-Chief at yet another house! Like him, many editors hurry to get acquainted with the better literary agents across the country, then parley their fattened address book for a better salary at some start-up publisher, or at an older house that’s transfusing new blood After I’d just been promoted at P-H, four an author told me, “Four years? You’ve been there long enough!”

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Never trust a copy editor to be your safety net! Two weeks after I released an Arizona author’s manuscript to Production, she called me, irate, to complain that her copy editor—fresh out of college, BTW—had changed “Tucson” (the author’s hometown!) to “Tuscon.” More recently, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reviewed a new book from an old-line New England publisher and complained of “as many as three grammatical errors in one sentence.” [14] By taking extra time now to polish and refine your manuscript, you give editors fewer reasons to reject it. Make each page so clear and direct, so unarguably right, that copy editors won’t feel tempted to improve on it with their corkscrews and sledgehammers.

The Perfect Word, Perfect Only Once

One psychologist kept repeating “adult children of alcoholics,” sentence after sentence, throughout his 256-page book. Faced with a tin-eared manuscript like that, any good copy editor should have suggested an acronym like ACoA, or consulted an online thesaurus and chosen synonyms for that wearying phrase. The reason why repetition gets so annoying lies in our human neurology. Amphibians can’t perceive their prey unless it moves. Place a freshly killed grasshopper in front of a hungry bullfrog and it will starve to death with nourishment literally under its nose. In similar fashion, our brains soon ignore repeated stimuli in a process called dampening. To reach his office in Los Angeles’s Natural History Museum, taxidermist Tim Bovard had to step over a stuffed Komodo dragon, taxidermied

300 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER tortoise, and ersatz alligator. “I walk right past them,” he shrugged, “because I see them every day.” [15] Dampening explains why that $18 million Matisse that you won at Christie’s stops giving you pleasure: You’ve left it hanging in the same familiar spot, long enough for your gaze to slide past it. Dampening is why you’re wakeful for the first night or two in a new Manhattan apartment, but can sleep soundly once you’ve grow accustomed to the usual garbage trucks and fire sirens. Dampening also afflicts the spoken word. Prove it by choosing an emotionally charged noun like cannibal or leprosy. Repeat it out loud, over and over. After a minute or two, you’ll hear it changing into a series of three nonsense syllables. Now listen to the dim-witted Mrs. Smith in the opening scene of Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (1950):

The oil from the grocer at the corner is better quality than the oil from the grocer across the street. It is even better than the oil from the grocer at the bottom of the street. . . . However, the oil from the grocer at the corner is still the best. [16]

However, deliberate repetitions are a potent rhetorical device. During WWII, Winston Churchill broadcast galvanizing speeches to his beleaguered countrymen, repeating key words to hammer home his implacable determination:

You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be...... We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence

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and strength in the air, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender. [17]

Mind you, both Ionesco and Churchill expected an audience to hear these words, not read them. On the printed page, stripped of any pauses and vocal inflections, Mrs. Smith comes across as a bore, not as the figure of ridicule that Ionesco intends her to be. And Churchill verges on nagging. Nowadays, your computer’s Search function makes it easy to catch unwanted repetitions. If you catch the same “suspect” cropping up more than twice per paragraph, scan for it throughout your text. Replace it with as many synonyms as your thesaurus can suggest.

“Words, Words, Words . . .”

When Polonius, trying to make small talk, asks Hamlet what he’s reading, that’s the prince’s snotty reply. [18] Scholars point out that words outrun ideas in Shakespeare’s early plays, but that later on, his thoughts outstrip his pen. Samuel Johnson recognized the playwright’s

fullness of idea, which might sometimes load words with more sentiment than they could conveniently convey, and . . . rapidity of imagination [that] might hurry him to a second thought before he had fully explained the first. [19]

A perfect example is King Lear’s “Never, never, never, never, never!” where every word suggests a possible sentence of its own. [20]

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Any good editor should be able to replace verbal cellulite with muscle and sinew. Recently, a client e-mailed me a 648-page manuscript for editing. When I sent it back, it was boiled down to a slim 422 pages, with every scene intact. The author was happy because all those condensations left him room to punch up his key scenes with new dialogue. In Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Middle- Class Gentleman, 1670), the title character declares,

I am greatly honored in having the good fortune to be favored with your condescension in deigning to accord me the favor of your presence. [21]

Or in short, “Pleased to meet you!”

In non-fiction, you’re not expected to plunge the reader so deeply into mood or atmosphere, or to examine characters very closely. Thus you have more reasons to be brief. Recently, I opened a brochure on why it’s wiser to invest in silver rather than gold. (Those dummies who built Fort Knox—boy, were they wrong!) I was soon got bogged down in tone-deaf sentences like this:

Figure 1.4 will help illustrate the extent to which a dichotomy can develop between assumptions based on the mining industry’s year-end projections and the ensuing volatility caused by the covering of short positions in silver futures.

That anonymous author must have spent too much time reading Henry James. Couldn’t he trim down this caption, using fewer, more specific words? For example, “As Figure 1.4 shows, mining companies’ annual reports can’t predict how

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silver options will actually gyrate during the coming year.” Can literary liposuction help your manuscript slim down, at least in spots? Herewith, two ways it can: (1) More contractions, less sweat. French is spoken mainly in the Province of Québec, but Canadian law mandates bilingual signs in every province and territory, from Vancouver to Newfoundland. English street signs like STOP and NO SMOKING are typically briefer and blunter than the French ARRÊT and DÉFENSE DE FUMER. English possessives condense the verbiage even more, such that la plume de ma tante becomes “my aunt’s pen.” Even after contractions became commonplace in our everyday speech, the old “formal” style persisted in print. An 18th-century student would personalize his ledger by writing “John Q. Hancock, his book.” If you’d like to sound terse and colloquial, use every contraction you can, as in “Their country’s Prime Minister hadn’t been invited, so he wasn’t there.” Should you prefer to sound officious and snooty, then let your clauses expand, as in “The Prime Minister of their country had not been invited and so was not present.” (2) Hellman vs. McCarthy. As a guest on the “The Dick Cavett Show,” Mary McCarthy, author of The Group (1963), accused Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento (1973) of being too loose with the facts: “Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.” Hellman sued McCarthy for slander, but died before the case could come to trial. This dust-up provides an easy reminder of how to tighten up any sentence: Get rid of those two little words wherever you can—as I’ve tried to do have wherever possible, throughout this book. [22]

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Rejections—How Hard Should You Take Them?

It depends on how they’re worded. Pre-fab replies like “Not right for our list,” or “We’re not looking for this kind of material at this time” are not criticisms, more likely hints that your literary agent submitted your work to appropriate editors. But as you saw back in Strategy #1, scores of manuscripts have survived multiple rejections and gone on to become lucrative best-sellers. A New Yorker cartoon depicts a publishing mogul making introductions at a cocktail party: “The editor who turned down the first Harry Potter book, say hello to the publisher who took a pass on Stephen King.” [23] Everybody in the industry is an Ahab with a tale about a whale that got away. Six publishers turned down The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Beatrix Potter published it herself in 1902. In 1997, Christie’s auctioned a copy of this “before-the-first” edition for $79,500. In 1944, T.S. Eliot—by then, a Grand Old Editor at Faber & Faber—believed that only children read talking-animal stories and so rejected George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945). Watership Down (1972), with most of its dialogue spoken by rabbits and weighing in at more than 300 pages, became an international best-seller. Author Richard Adams teaches us Rabbitese word by word, so that late in the novel, he doesn’t have to translate Bigwig’s defiant insult: “Silflay hraka, u embleer rah.” [24] My very first job was at New American Library, reporting on submissions for possible paperback re-issue. I was given Arthur C. Clarke’s novelization of 2001 and found a good bottom-line reason for a thumbs-down: “If Kubrick’s movie gets lousy reviews, who will buy the tie-in?” In 1991, Nick Hornby began writing Fever Pitch, which one journalist later called “the definitive memoir of obsessive

305 TAM MOSSMAN soccer fandom.” After several editors rejected his manuscript— on the grounds that its target audience was “illiterate, moronic hooligans”—it was finally published in 1992. Despite its “fragmented narrative,” it rode the UK’s best-seller list for six months and was adapted into a major motion picture! [25] And these stunning upsets just keep coming. Sixteen editors passed on Mark Fuhrman’s Murder in Brentwood, despite its obvious short-term appeal for anyone interested in the investigation behind O.J.’s arrest. Published in 1997, it promptly soared to #1 on the NYT’s best-seller list.

As you already know, if any deserving manuscript is slow to land a contract, it’s often because the author has been knocking on the wrong doors. DelRey never publishes art books with full-color illustrations, nor does Abrams publish intergalactic fantasy. But too often, the fault lies squarely with Trade editors who—following in T.S. Eliot’s lead—are tone-deaf to what readers actually want. Even today, houses expect at least 50% of new titles will never earn back their advances and fall out of print in less than two years! That’s a standing indictment of editors’ poor judgment. “Sure-fire” titles keep winding up in remainder bins. “Experts” are routinely startled when best-sellers roar out of left field, powered by nothing but buyer enthusiasm. The lesson to authors should be clear: It’s never wise to pander to the tastes of any literary agent, nor editor, nor reviewer at The New York Review of Books. The more you strive to please anyone except your reader, the slimmer your chances at long-term sales. Readers help keep editors and agents in business! They pay their own good money for books, and their choices support the whole literary food chain. They make novels into best-

306 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER sellers, coaxing Hollywood execs to make lavish gambles of their own. Readers are the proverbial customers who are always right. Even when wrong, still they spend money. And that’s why every major (that is, profitable-conscious) industry invests in consumer research. Logically, then, editors should confer regularly with their own sales force and pick the brains of buyers from the major bookstore chains as to what trends they perceive. But they never do. Shouldn’t acquisition editors ask for feedback from book clubs, librarians, and the actual real-life buyers who browse discounted best-sellers at local supermarkets? They don’t do that either! Until quite recently, publishers virtually ignored readers and shut them out of the decision-making loop. Editors chose books the same way producers choose screenplays—on past evidence, comparing new submissions against the track records of previous successes. But even Hollywood executives are bright enough to hold test screenings, and then re-shoot scenes that audiences don’t care for. Formerly, editors consulted Books in Print. N they log on to Amazon.com to list “the competition”—books still in print that their proposed title would compete with. Sales managers, who love to play devil’s advocates, could argue that evidence either way: If a new book was too different from the norm, its target readers might ignore it. If too similar, they might see it as a rip-off. To make things worse, there might be wild cards in the deck. Editors rarely knew in advance what books other houses were planning to publish—or not in time, anyway. Often they got scooped by books on the exact same subject, targeted at the same readers and shipped to bookstores first.

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Why order a first printing that couldn’t sell out? The publishers often chose to kill these also-rans and strike them from catalogs and order forms. As a consolation prize for not getting published, the authors got to keep their advances. Nowadays, such closed-door decision-making is falling victim to 21st-century progress. Authors can thank the Internet in general, and Amazon.com specifically.

Power to the Buyer—At Last!

In the days before computers, readers had no way to learn that a new title even existed unless they caught some print advertising or a newspaper review, or perhaps overheard the author on some radio talk show. That’s why publishers’ Advertising and Publicity divisions enjoyed big budgets, wielding outsize influence over whether books ever got noticed. Publishers also listed their upcoming list in the seasonal announcement issues of in Publishers Weekly’s supplements and listed their backlist titles in the hardbound Books in Print. But ironically, a good many of those titles listed in BIP didn’t exist either! In some cases, titles had been scheduled, but at the last minute, authors turned in manuscripts “unacceptable in form and content”—or not at all. In addition, BIP listed several books by literary agents on how to get published—books those agents never intended to write! They’d announced these titles as decoys, simply to get some free publicity and also to warn off any other agents who might be planning similar books of their own. Nowadays, even the tiniest publisher can “pre- announce” its forthcoming titles on Amazon.com. Doing so coaxes advance orders from customers, not booksellers, giving the editor a dependable idea of that offering’s true appeal—and thus, what size its first printing should be.

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Some books you’ll see on Amazon’s Top Ten list won’t be on sale for several months. The most notorious example was Adam Mansach’s Go to Fuck to Sleep (2011), which made no pretense of its target readership: “A bedtime book for parents who live in the real world” (and who, after all, buy 99% of all children’s books). Its full-color front cover depicts a boy snoozing among a number of sleeping tigers. Above them, a bright full moon discreetly masks the operative UC in the title. In the pre-pub version shown on Amazon.com, only the U was fig-leafed. Originally slated for publication in autumn 2011, it got so much free publicity and so many pre-orders and that its small, independent publisher swiftly moved its pub date back to June. To further erode the power of “official” print media, Amazon.com invites readers to review books and rate them with one to five stars. In effect, this creates an ongoing book- discussion group with literally thousands of members. And if a book’s not worth discussing, it doesn’t get discussed! You’ll notice that more than a few have no stars at all. These usually academic wheezers, limp fiction that went OOP years ago, and embarrassing train wrecks about which it’s kindest to say nothing—like Kitty Dukakis’s Now You Know (1969). Now by logging on to Amazon.com, editors can research the competition. They can find books on the same topic, see if they’re still in print, and whether they delivered what readers want or expect—and why. These reader reviews, even at the most ill-tempered and misspelled, supply a vital correction for what I call the Silence of the Reviewers. It’s an open secret that book critics skip over highly popular titles because they’re popular, on the grounds that success needs no further attention. Check out the best-sellers

309 TAM MOSSMAN listed in any Sunday’s TBR. and you’ll find that Times reviewers have ignored almost every one. The media prefers to over-praise marginal books that most browsers will pass up: memoirs of dysfunctional childhoods, dispatches from Third-World quagmires, and social issues that “informed” readers should be aware of. How about fiction? If novels earn the glowing approval of a national magazine, how bad can they be? Same answer: Consult the street-level reviews on Amazon.com. Last I checked, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010) had earned 269 one-star reactions—the lowest possible rank. “Don’t believe the hype!” one reader warns. “Characters speak in an uninterrupted steam of clichés.” Justin Cronin’s The Passage (2010) has gathered 137 stars—one at a time: “How is it possible for a novel to be . . . so beautifully paced, full of interesting people and situations, and then, boom, become turgid and awkward and stuffed [with] tedious characters?” And David Foster Wallace’s posthumous The Pale King (2011), about IRS auditors, is “just plain dull in a random sort of way.” Yet Time magazine showered breathless praise on each one and even put Franzen on their cover—looking fashionably unhappy. It’s worth recalling that back in 2001, Oprah Winfrey chose his novel The Corrections for her book club. Franzen graciously replied by saying that some of her other picks were “schmaltzy.” Winfrey countered by de-endorsing Corrections.

I find most of Amazon.com’s lesser-starred reviews to be fair and reliably useful. They warn me away from poor color reproductions, illegible diamond-point captions, and superficial insights. But in the words of Jean-Pierre LaGrange, “He who loathes mine enemy may prove a trusted friend.” Every so

310 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER often, I’ll buy a book simply because it’s offended somebody for some delightful reason.

Meanwhile, the growing popularity of Kindle and other hand-held reading devices is changing publishing’s ground rules in ways that grant authors some real advantages: • E-books earn higher royalties. You can receive over 50% of your book’s selling price, versus the 10% royalty (often less) that each dead-tree copy would net in a retail sale. • E-books are non-returnable. As bookstores often report, customers will buy a book, keep the receipt, read the pages carefully to leave no smudges or creases, then return the book to the cashier for full credit. But every e-book downloaded is sold and paid for! • E-books can’t be loaned, traded, or resold. Go on Amazon.com, and you’ll find “Used—Like New” copies condition at huge discounts off their original list price. You can remove their dust jackets to keep them crisp and, as soon as you finish reading, put them on sale again as “Like New.” But any copy re-sold on Amazon earns its author no royalties. • E-books require no minimum press run. They can stay on sale forever. Publishers get taxed on unsold copies sitting in their warehouses, which motivates them to remainder or pulp that inventory title as soon as orders begin to slow down. True, Kindle and other hand-held devices have their limitations, especially in reproducing illustrations and typography. But you can expect constant improvements as they compete in the Darwinian marketplace. (Remember back when floppy disks were actually floppy? Remember Beta cassettes— and more recently, VHS?) In brief, literary gatekeepers’ influence is fast eroding, along with their ability to push books that few care to read.

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It’s often remarked that poems are never completed, only abandoned. Dedicated writers eventually discover that’s equally true of their manuscripts. But you—kind and trusty guide that you are!—have been working on yours months. One day soon, you’ll realize that it’s done. You might repeat Chaucer’s envoi, “Go, little book,” before e-mailing the final draft to your publisher. When it’s accepted, your agent will send you the final third of your advance, less her 15% commission. Squander a few bucks at a decent restaurant, on theatre tickets, or a weekend getaway. Such apparent indulgences are really bribes, helping to convince your Creative Unconscious that writing is actually worth the effort And wouldn’t it like to do this again, sometime soon? Months pass. One day, a carton of complimentary author’s copies arrives on your doorstep. Soon you may notice a few in local bookstores. Then you may read a review that’s clearly glib, inaccurate, or downright hostile. How should you react? First, remember that most reviewers are themselves published authors. They are competing with you, often on the same shelf where your new copies take up space. Reviewers have every reason to act mean-spirited, if only to hawk their own work at your expense. And they know hat a take-no- prisoners review is much more fun to read!

As the French proverb has it, Bon chat, bon rat. Good rat-catchers make for smarter rats. So the better your success, the bigger target you’ll offer to media snipers. Call it the Harry Potter Syndrome: If you weren’t such a promising wizard, those Death Eaters would leave you alone.

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Yes, you’ve been demeaned and besmirched. That’s not fair! But the offending publication will most likely ignore your protests. And if they do print your Letter to the Editor—most likely in abridged form—they’ll also invite your opponent back into the ring. The New York Review of Books once published an author’s level-headed complaint about a reviewer who didn’t like the book (his right, after all), but who also made “derogatory remarks” about her personally. Given an opportunity to reply, her critic gleefully flung some further insults, dismissing her as

full of anger and very quick on the draw. But she is shooting wildly . . . generally angry at all the historians who have questioned her romantic interpretation . . . Infuriated, she vents her anger by accusing me . . . I believe she has let her fury get in the way of carefully reading what I wrote. [25]

Remember, your reviewer always has the last word, along with higher ground and superior firepower. As a friend once advised me, “Never argue with a jerk. Onlookers won’t be able to tell which one of you is the jerk.” Ignore any catcalls, take your bows, and get ready for your next chance at a home run.

Prepare to Meet Thy Reader

You should every speaking invitation you can—to publicize your book, but also for a priceless chance to learn who likes your book and why. Your fans are a self-selected demographic. Simply by being motivated enough to show up, they’re telling you they

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really liked your book, or at least its chosen topic. Meeting them in person lets you discover which sections they liked best, along with their yearnings and dislikes about writing in general. What would they like to see you tackle next? That simple question puts you several light-years ahead of most acquisitions editors and literary agents—who, as you know, rarely emerge from their offices to ask real live customers what books they’d like to buy. Straw-polling your actual fan base makes it vastly easier to conceive your next project with some valid assurance that people will want it when the time comes. At the end of your talk, invite your audience to ask questions. Allow at least 15 minutes. But you can expect a few seconds of shy silence before the dam bursts. Rather than choose among all those competing hands, I step down from the podium, microphone in hand like a game- show host, and invite the curious to gather round, up front. This may seem generous, but it’s really a ploy to let interested attendees feel special—part of an inner circle. Better yet, it excludes argumentative types and flakoids (“Do you think Walt Whitman had his moon in Libra?”). Be equipped with a small notepad. Jot down every question you’re asked, and let everyone see you do it. They’ll be flattered that you think their questions are worth recording, and pay more respectful attention. Also ask questions of them: “What didn’t you like about my heroine? Next time I go to New Orleans, which post-Katrina night spots would you like to read about?” After you get home, those scribbled queries will form a useful profile of your readers’ curiosity. What questions did they ask most often? Those are ones your next book should answer! But for now, be generous and keep on fielding queries. When the stand-ups dwindle to two or three, or if another

314 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER speaker needs the room, invite any stragglers to join you in the coffee shop. Going that extra mile will rope in the lonelier types who read a lot—those hard-core buyers whose brains are most worth picking. And one will probably feel honored to pick up the check.

Your Coming Attraction

During rehearsals for a stage play, Method actors used to ask their director, “What’s my motivation?” Here’s yours, in screenplay format.

FADE IN

EXTERIOR — AERIAL SHOT — BACK LOT of a major HOLLYWOOD STUDIO — DAY From overhead, WE SEE a gunfight interrupted by a storefront explosion. CAMERA then PANS to an EXECUTIVE OFFICE BUILDING and ZOOMS IN on the FRONT DOOR, as a shiny black LIMOUSINE glides into view.

CLOSE-UP on LIMOUSINE — DAY BRITISH CHAUFFEUR—uniformed, white hair under brimmed cap, in his 60s—holds open the LIMOUSINE’s rear door. A weary PRODUCER slides into the back seat and dumps a stack of bound galley proofs on the seat beside him. HE is empowered to offer up to $2.5 MILLION for screen rights to a filmable book.

EXT. — AERIAL SHOT — ENTRANCE RAMP – DAY

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LIMO pulls onto the Pacific Coast Highway, heading south, whisking PRODUCER home to Malibu.

INT. — CLOSE-UP, BACK SEAT OF LIMO — DAY

PRODUCER Been a long day, Clarence! And this whole stack of fall- list releases to read and reject before our dinner party.

INT. — REVERSE ANGLE — HIS POV —WHAT HE SEES: BACK of his CHAUFFEUR’S HEAD

CHAUFFEUR Yaws is one tough loyfe, Sah. Cawn’t sigh I henvy you.

INT. — BACK on PRODUCER HE pours a MARTINI from the wet bar, takes a swig. Sprawls back on the leather seat. Frown at the pile on the seat beside him, lifts up the bound galleys of your new book, places it on the tray table. Polishes his designer bifocals. Glances at your FIRST PAGE. DISSOLVE TO

EXT.— PRODUCER’S DRIVEWAY

PACIFIC OCEAN is barely visible between two tightly- packed beachfront bungalows. LIMOUSINE pulls into frame.

INT. – BACK SEAT of LIMOUSINE

PRODUCER is still reading your bound galleys as his CHAUFFEUR opens the door.

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CHAUFFEUR ’Ere we are, Sah! Be it hever so ’umble, air’s no ploys loik ’ewm. (To himself) Sodding Dorothy! Wot ’id she know? PRODUCER Hunh? ’Scuse me, Clarence! Gotta make a call.

HE picks up his CELL PHONE, dials your AGENT.

SLOW FADE TO BLACK, then FINAL TITLE:

THE END THE BEGINNING!

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Notes and References

[1] Joshua Quittner, “Wealth Valley,” Time, October 25, 1999, p. 132. [2] “A Conversation with Anne Rice,” appendix to the Trade paper edition of The Vampire Armand (first published 1998). Ballantine, 1999, p. 391. [3] Dean Koontz, Intensity (1996). Knopf, 1996, p. 51. [4] Quoted by Betty Webb in “The Battle,” Scottsdale Progress, January 16, 1996, p. 21. [5] Camille Paglia, “Looking at Art,” in ARTnews, January 1996, p. 93. [6] Henry James, Washington Square. Serialized in both The Cornhill Magazine (U.K.) and in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (U.S.A.) in 1880; published in book form in 1881. Chapter 30. Penguin, 1984, p. 185. [7] —— ——, The Golden Bowl (1904). World Publishing, 1972, “Author’s Preface,” p. viii. Even on his deathbed, after two strokes and a pulmonary embolism, James kept on dictating, and his secretary took it down: “. . . more than one kind presence, several could help, and many would—but it all better too much left than too much done. . . This sore throaty condition is the first I ever invoked for the purpose.” Quoted by Leon Edel in Henry James: A Life (1985). Harper & Row, 1985, pages 709-712. [8] Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). Signet, 1983, p. 30. [9] Its authorship is by no means certain. Hunter S. Thompson refers to “whatever king-Hell loon wrote the Book of Revelation.” [10] James Brady, “In Step with Michael Caine,” Parade, May 11, 1997, p. 16. In a later interview with BBC radio, Caine said he’d planned “a thriller about terrorism, the

318 7.625 STRATEGIES IN EVERY BEST-SELLER sort of thing I read all the time. . . I had this plot where terrorist fly a plane into a London skyscraper.” He abandoned the idea after the 9/11 attacks occurred “in real life. I was stunned by that, so I stopped writing.” ThirdAge.com, October 1, 2010. [11] Quoted by Michael Mink in Investor’s Business Daily, November 27, 2002, p. A3. Even so, a little time off can go a long way. Leonardo took three years to finish “The Last Supper” and completed only a dozen or so paintings over his 67-year lifetime. [12] Anne Rice. See [2], above. [13] The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 22, 2002, p. Q10. [14] Matt Schudel, “Books: Reviews and Opinion,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 15, 1997, p. L-11. [15] Quoted by Joseph D’Agnese in “Closets of Curiosities,” Discover, October 1999, p. 89. Dampening might explain why drivers suffer more accidents when close to home, on too-familiar turf. [16] The Bald Soprano (1950), in Four Plays by Eugene Ionesco (1982), translated by Donald M. Allen. Evergreen (Grove Weidenfeld), 1982, page 9. [17] Quoted by Piers Brendon in Winston Churchill: A Biography (1984). Harper & Row, pages 143 and 145. [18] Hamlet (1603), Act 2, Scene II, lines 195-196. [19] Quoted by W. Jackson Bate in Samuel Johnson: A Life (1977)—a readable, compassionate survey of Johnson’s hardscrabble life and penetrating mind. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint Press, 1998, p. 397. [20] King Lear (1605). Act Five, Scene 3, line 310. [21] Molière (stage and pen name of Jean Baptiste Poquelin), The Middle-Class Gentleman (1670), in The Miser and Other Plays (1953), translated with an Introduction by John Wood. Penguin, 1997, p. 44.

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[22] For a full account of this televised imbroglio, see Dick Cavett’s “Lillian, Mary, and Me” in The New Yorker, December 16, 2002, p. 34. When Cavett pointed out that McCarthy had made the exact same remark in an earlier printed interview, his lawyer riposted, “Who reads?” But McCarthy couldn’t have used the one-year statute of limitations on libel as her defense. Even if Hellman didn’t notice that remark the first time around, the moment McCarthy’s repeated the offending remark, the Libel Clock started up anew. That’s why, throughout this book, I’ve disguised or eliminated the identities of anyone alive who’s ever been disparaged in print. Otherwise, these individuals could re-set their legal stopwatches to run another year and have their attorneys fix their crosshairs on me. [23] Cartoon by Jack Ziegler, The New Yorker, July 24, 2000, p. 27. [24] Eat rabbit-droppings, you stinking lord! Richard Adams, Watership Down (1972). Avon, 1975, p. 454. [25] David Kamp, “London Swings! Again!” Vanity Fair, March 1997, pages 206-228. [26] “Letters: The Sally Hemings Case,” in The New York Review of Books, June 12, 1997, pages 61-62.

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