How to Write Popular Fiction
There is nothing which so easily kicks up emotion as a terminally ill child.
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Unable to think clearly in the heat (and unable to afford air conditioning) I have retreated to the local municipal library. Despite this regular relief, the Spanish heat seems to have done some semi-permanent damage to my brain. The typical 18th and 19th century fare I usually read is impenetrable to me, and I have taken refuge in the library’s slim selection of popular modern fiction. Right now I am reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, a book whose cover informs me has sold millions of copies.
Is there any merit to reading popular fiction? For one it is very easy to get through. The prose style is easily-masticable, and provides very little mental friction for the reader. The writing in many popular books consists almost entirely of short, simple sentences and one can read through a five-hundred page novel in just a couple of days. Compared with the winding, subordinate clauses of authors like Austen or Dickens it is very easy going. One can understand why many readers of popular fiction say that they “devour books” because works like these can slip down the gullet with remarkably little resistance.
For the aspiring writer one benefit of reading popular fiction is that they make the writing process very transparent. Anyone familiar with more demanding works can not fail to see the devices being cynically employed by the more modern popular novelist. Here are several tips for writing popular fiction I have found while reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow as well as a few other popular works I have read over the years:
Give children cancer and other diseases.
Key in any modern novel is sentimentality, and there is nothing which so easily kicks up emotion as a terminally ill child. Dickens knew this, and all modern hacks know this. Include at least one cancer-ridden child in your novel, though they might only be on the periphery. Other genres of sick or injured children are permitted; these may include those with a physical disability or scar from an accident in which their parents died. As an author you will need to kill off at least one of these children by the end of the book.
Make your protagonists suffer. Specifically: cut off their limbs.
Principal characters, if they are not terminally ill, should have at least a physical disability. This will serve as a defining trait throughout your book and a hackneyed metaphor for the character’s limitations. It is even better if this illness results in the amputation of one of their limbs. This creates a definite if obvious sense of loss, of progression. The protagonist of A Little Life , for example, does little more in the course of the novel beyond getting sexually abused and having his various, disease-ridden limbs lopped off. It sold over one-million copies and has been described as "the long-awaited gay novel".
Pepper your book with literary references to flatter the reader.
Begin with the title, of course. Both The Fault in Our Stars and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow are lines of Shakespeare which are referenced explicitly in the text. (It is important to let your reader know explicitly the title is Shakespearean.) Liberally pepper obvious references to classic poets and Greek mythology throughout the rest of the book, always being sure to explain them to your reader as you go. This will not only make them estimate your intelligence highly, it will make them feel more intelligent themselves.
Use an obvious extended metaphor.
In Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow this is “life as a video game”. Characters frequently conceptualise life in these terms, and the pathos arises from when life does not conform to this thought model. The murdered character, Marx, for example, is unable to “re-spawn” after getting shot to death. I have never read The Fault in our Stars but I imagine that the metaphor of a metastasising cancer is used throughout.
Use one motif at the beginning and end of your novel.
This is a little more technical. At the beginning of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow the young protagonist is unable to see the image behind an autostereogram; twenty years and five hundred pages later he is. This signals to the reader, without much work, that the character has matured. It is also a way of slapping the reader on the back for having read all those pages all by himself.
Keep your prose simple. Repeat important information.
This also applies to writing popular online articles. Your work should be streamlined by its simplicity. It should consist of short sentences made up of short, familiar words which the reader does not have to spend time fussing over, and which they can gobble down with an absolute minimum of effort. Information should be returned to over and over again. Apart from padding out your work, it means that even the most inattentive reader can follow along. If your reader is drunk he should be able to read you without it making much of a difference.
Whenever a title or author I'm not familiar with is mentioned, I've taken to googling to confirm whether it is real or only exists in the Guppyverse. Despite finding what should be clear evidence of A Little Life and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow online, I am still not convinced. These books are not real and did not sell millions of copies and I will not be swayed on this.
“If you look at a best-seller list, you’ll find an incredible number of books that wouldn’t exist if they didn’t start from a point outside of the world of books. These are books that have had films based on them, novels written by television personalities, stories set down on paper by people famous for one thing or another; they tell stories already told somewhere else, or explain things that have already happened at another time or in another form. Naturally, this phenomenon irritates us and gives us the widespread feeling that the garbage is taking over. But it’s also true that in it we hear the rustling, in its most vulgar form, of a principle that is not at all vulgar: the idea that a book’s value lies in its offering itself as a small piece of a much broader mosaic — as a link in a chain that started somewhere else and will probably finish somewhere else. Here’s a hypothesis that may teach us something: the barbarians use the book to complete sequences of meaning that were generated elsewhere.” - Alessandro Baricco, The Barbarians: An Essay on the Mutilation of Culture.