Have
you ever put down a book after reading it and asked yourself, “How did this
ever get published? And where was the
editor?” Have you ever said, “I write so
much better than this. My dog writes
better than this.” Have you ever
wondered how these books, and these authors get published, while you’re sitting
there with a technical masterpiece that no one shows the slightest interest in? If that’s the case, you may want to look over
your masterpiece one more time with an eye not
on the writing, but on the story.
Most readers,
adult or children, do not read books because they can’t get enough of wonderful
metaphors. Those who do are probably
picking up literary novels, not commercial best-sellers.
Most
people read for story. They want to be
able to fall into the life of someone doing something exciting, or different,
something they would probably love to do themselves, but never will. People who read romance are in it for the
romance. People who read historicals
want to be brought to another place and time.
People who read horror want to be scared. And people who read adventures want the
adventure. Your job as a writer is to give
them what they want, in whatever genre you choose to write in.
So what
is your story about? Is it something new
and exciting, or is it the same old stuff writers have been writing about for
ages? If it is the same old stuff, have you given it an original and exciting
twist, something that makes it stand out from the rest? Does it contain tension and suspense? Is there conflict, a reason to keep turning
the pages? Do you make your reader feel
what the main character feels?
Look at
the success of the Eragon and Twilight series.
Neither is particularly well written, but each writer told a story that
worked for millions of readers.
Millions, not thousands.
Eragon
was a hero’s story, a boy goes on a quest.
It’s been done a million times.
Why was Paolini’s such a big success?
Because everybody dreams of being a hero, everyone wants to win, and he
gave them that opportunity in the pages of his books. And there is something about dragons that
appeals to so many. But the biggie, I
think, is because he followed a formula that so many best sellers seem to have
- the chase, the escape, then rest, think, regroup. The chase, the escape, more rest, rethinking,
and regrouping.
Paolini’s
characters do this continuously throughout the story until the climax. It’s Tolkien’s formula in Lord of the Rings. It’s the formula used in so many suspense
thrillers. The tension and suspense
never let up, and the conflict continually grows bigger and bigger.
Was it
a conscious decision of Paolini’s, or had he simply learned it through osmosis
while reading others? I don’t know. But it’s there, and it works. For millions.
Constant action, constant movement, and always a new problem. The reader has to turn the page because
they’re involved in the story, and they don’t care if Paolini used lay instead
of lie, or if his infinitives are split.
Meyer
also used an old story that’s been done a million times – boy meets girl – a
typical romance. But she gave it a great
twist. The boy her heroine falls in love
with is a vampire. And she didn’t stop
there. She didn’t make her vampire a
typical vampire. She reinvented the
vampire to suit her story.
So, how
many teenage girls are there who don’t love a romance? And how many romance readers, teen and adult,
are there in this great big world of ours?
Enough to keep Harlequin in business for years and years and years. And how many of them are going – A romance
with a vampire? That’s different. I
gotta check that out.
Then
there are the horror readers. A vampire
falling in love with a human? And a love
triangle between a human, vampire and werewolf?
I gotta see what that’s all about.
And let’s
not forget the paranormal readers, who like to delve into the lives or vampires
and werewolves and anything else unexplainable.
Meyer gave readers something they hadn’t seen before, something that
appealed to a broad range of people - people who bought the book on just the promise of a story, and once they
started reading, they didn’t care about her overuse of adverbs and bad dialogue
tags.
Now
this isn’t to say you should just write your story and forget about the quality
of the writing. I believe Paolini and
Meyers were writing to the best of their abilities at the time they wrote their
books. It seems evident when reading the
sequels, where the writing gets progressively better. The point is it really is all about the story. If
no one is interested in what you have to say, the fact that you say it in a
lovely way doesn’t matter. Put a very
well-written, okay story on an editor’s desk, along with a badly written but
fantastic story, and I think an editor will choose the better story every time,
regardless of the writing, because the writing can always be made better, and
it can be done easily. It takes far more
work to make a dull story exciting.
So
what’s the lesson here? Well, there are
several.
Even if
you’re a beginning writer, if you have a great story to tell, you can get
published.
If
you’ve been writing for a number of years, and your writing skills are pretty
good, but you still can’t seem to sell anything, perhaps you should reconsider
what you’re writing about.
And when
you do write that great story that everyone wants to read, take the time to
rewrite it as well as you can because, if a great story, badly written, can
sell a million copies, imagine how many copies a great story, wonderfully
written, will sell.
